National Gallery of Art

Washington DC’s National Gallery of Art has to be considered one of the world’s great art museum. In The Art Newspaper’s survey it ranked 8^th in terms of the most visited art museum in the world in 2012. In 1937 industrialist and art collector Andrew W. Mellon gave some 150 works of art valued at $40 million and $10 million in cash to create a national art museum to the U.S government. The collection now has more than 130,000 works of Western art from the middle ages up to the present.

National Gallery of Art, West Building

The museum is composed of two buildings connected by an underground concourse and an outdoor sculpture garden. The original (West) building was opened to the public in 1941. The East Building, designed by I.M. Pei and opened in 1978, is considered one of the great works of modern architecture in the U.S. I will write about it and the sculpture garden in other posts to this blog.

The collection is particularly rich in Italian, Dutch and French impressionist paintings and American, British, Flemish, Spanish, and German paintings are well represented. In 2012 there was a new permanent installation of 18^th and early 19^th century American furniture in the West Building. The website here, shows 45 works as the highlights of the museum’s collection and there are also three Less than an Hour? guides for the paintings in each building and the sculpture collection. The audio guide with the Director’s Tour, which is free, has commentary on over 130 pieces. There is also a Your Art mobile app for iPhone and iPod Touch available for free in the iTunes App Store. 

On my recent visit I decided to make my own top ten list. This is obviously subjective, but it is a nice representative list of Western art history all-stars. The works are listed in chronological order. All are paintings except for the Degas which is a sculpture.

The Annunciation, Jan van Eyck, c.1434/1436

Ginevra de’Benci, Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1474/1478

The Alba Madonna, Raphael, c. 1510

Venus with a Mirror, Titian, c. 1555

Self-Portrait, Rembrandt van Rijn, 1659

The Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, Edgar Degas, 1871-1881 (bronze sculpture)

Boy in a Red Waistcoat, Paul Cezanne, 1888-1890

Self-Portrait, Vincent van Gogh, 1889

Family of Saltimbanques, Pablo Picasso, 1905

Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist), Jackson Pollock, American, 1950

You’ll note that this list includes the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci on permanent display anywhere in North or South America.

The most important 18^th century American work in the collection is Copley’s Watson and the Shark. Another significant American work currently on display is the full-sized plaster cast of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth, considered by some to be the most important American sculptural work of the 19^th century. It commemorates the African-American soldiers of that regiment that served in the Civil War and their white commanding officer who was killed in the Battle of Fort Wagner in South Carolina.

There are several options for food and shopping and the cafeteria and one of the gift shops are in the Concourse which runs underground between the East and West buildings. Across from the cafeteria is a cascading waterfall in front of a large plate glass window and which then leads an artistic installation called the Multiverse, a complex light sculpture by the artist Leo Villareal that runs 200 feet along the length of the two moving sidewalks that connect the buildings. Visitors should note that the East Building will be closed for renovations for three years starting in December of 2013, although the atrium will remain open much of the modern art collection will not be on view. Some of the paintings from the modern art collection have been moved to several of the ground floor galleries at the west end of the West Building.

Links: Official website of the National Gallery of Art