HARRY COOPER: I'm Harry Cooper,
head of the Modern Art
Department here at the National
Gallery.
You may have seen the credit
line, Gift of the Collectors
Committee,
on a lot of works
in the east building.
And so what does that mean?
That's a group of art collectors
who come here every year
by invitation.
They pay their dues, $20,000
a year at this point.
And the money gets pooled
together.
And I and my fellow curators
in modern art
bring them several works of art,
physically into the building.
And they look at them privately,
not in the public galleries.
And we give presentations
about them,
and we talk and schmooze,
and have lunch and dinner.
And at the end of it,
they vote on which works they
want to buy with their dues
and donate to the museum.
A few other museums have
this process or a variation
of this process.
And it's very
important for modern art here.
Why?
Because contrary to popular
opinion, we don't just have
a lot of money sitting around
to buy art with.
In fact, you may know
that all works of art that come
into the gallery
are gifts of one kind
or another.
That is, we do not use
any federal money, any taxpayer
money, to buy art.
So everything you see here
is a gift, either a direct gift
of a work of art
or a gift of funds with which
to buy works of art.
And those funds have come
and gone over the years.
But when it was time to open
the east building,
or in the many years--
about 10 years of planning
and construction,
it was realized that we needed
some modern art to put
in this building.
And so a committee was formed
in 1975 of collectors--
wealthy, generous collectors.
And the first thing they did--
their real mission
was to arrange
for the great commissions that
opened the building.
So the Calder mobile, the Moore
sculpture outside, the Caro
sculpture, inside,
the Motherwell painting, and so
on.
And so, when the building opened
in 1978, they had been working
on that for a few years.
And it was so successful
that there was a decision
to continue having
the collectors committee,
to have it meet annually,
and to keep building
the collection.
And that has continued--
continues right up to this day.
So that's a little bit
of background on the process.
And so this will be very simple.
I just thought I would go back
10 years to 2008,
my first collectors committee
meeting.
And I'm not going to show you
all the works that were
considered each meeting
because I'm not supposed to do
that.
But I can show you the work
or works that were acquired.
And I will give you a sort
of mini version of the kind
of presentation
that I would give
to the committee,
or James Meyer or Molly Donovan,
the two wonderful curators
in my department,
and the presentation that they
might give to the committee.
Now, the committee also buys
works on paper with set aside
funds.
They don't vote on that.
Our curators of photographs
and prints and drawings
can buy at their discretion.
That's another aspect
of the committee,
but I won't get into that.
So this was the first work
that the committee bought once I
got here.
And all of these have been up
at one time or another,
so hopefully they will look
familiar to you.
This is Alex Katz's Swamp Maple
from 1968.
So what do we look for?
Well, something we don't have,
for one thing,
something great that we don't
have.
Maybe at the end of this talk
after the hour
I will try to reflect with you
on what it means
and what kinds of priorities
were in play, but in this case,
I loved Alex Katz's work.
The gallery didn't have
a single painting by Alex Katz,
and most important,
a great painting was available.
So there is Alex.
And he is best known
as a portrait painter,
of course, and there's
a classic portrait of his wife
and son.
This is a painting that was very
important to him
and that he kept in his dining
area
as you can see up
in his Lincolnville main home
and studio
where it just barely fit.
And he lived with that everyday
for many years
and finally decided that it was
time to part with it.
And so Pace Gallery let me know
that it was available,
and I took a look at it.
And I thought it was
spectacular.
Maybe not this spectacular,
but that's not
a fair comparison.
Why I'm showing this is
that there have been,
I think, relatively few
portraits of trees
in the history of art.
And that's what the Alex Katz
painting is.
He's a portrait painter,
and he did a portrait of a tree,
a tree that he liked very much,
in the tradition
of this Cezanne portrait
of the so-called Great
Pine in the late 19th century,
also in the tradition
of this wonderful painting
by Fairfield Porter,
a close colleague of Katz's
from the 1960s.
Usually, trees are not
in the center.
They are on the edges.
They are
the so-called repoussoir.
They serve to establish
foreground space, set the scene,
frame the scene,
so that we can enter
into the painting.
That is exactly what doesn't
happen with Swamp Maple.
It is blocking our entrance
into this scene.
We have to go around it
to one side or the other.
So that's breaking one rule
right there.
Any other rules that this is
breaking in terms of painting
trees, drawing trees, those
of you who have studied this?
Well, let's look back while you
think about that.
What is one difference
between those two and this one?
Foliage, background, page, sky?
STUDENT: Cropping?
HARRY COOPER: Cropping,
I'm going to go with cropping,
especially--
those are all good.
But especially on the bottom,
we don't see the bottom
of the tree.
Trees, figures, they're always
supposed to be rooted.
They're supposed to be standing
planted on something.
This one is not.
It gives it a very flat kind
of decorative quality,
and it turns the whole thing
into a kind of decoration.
Another thing that appealed
to me about this was the bark.
If you look closely there,
you'll
see a lovely delicate cracking
pattern, crackler in the bark.
And I thought that was great.
And when I talked to Alex
about it, he said, that happened
after I painted it.
[LAUGHTER]
Drying cracks, but he liked it,
so he didn't fix it.
It was
perfect for this particular kind
of maple tree.
I also like Katz because he
doesn't really fit anywhere.
Is he a pop painter?
Not exactly.
Is he an abstract painter?
Definitely not, but someone
who's very
aware of abstract painting,
here just comparing him
to Ellsworth Kelly.
This, I think,
speaks for itself.
For all his interest
in those particular leaves,
he's also
interested in a simple geometry
in the scene.
This comparison may be a little
more tendentious, partly
because I've turned this Pollock
on its side.
But I just like the way
that these branches and leaves
reach towards the edges
of the painting.
There's something very
gestural, physical, or maybe
even human about that,
those feelers that are reaching
out very much the way Pollock
in throwing and pouring paint
reached out
to the edges of the canvas.
So he's in that generation,
but he's doing something very
different.
Now, one of the nice things that
often happens when we acquire
a work is that more works come.
And so in this case,
the Alex Katz Foundation
followed our purchase
with a gift
of this wonderful early
painting, seen looking out
of his New York studio,
a little bit of Edward Hopper
action there through the window.
At that point,
I began to feel that we needed
a real Alex Katz portrait,
and I saw this one
in his studio,
a very small painting about two
feet square,
one of his first portraits
of Ada.
Well, he had painted her before,
but this is the first one where
she is cropped, speaking
of cropping.
And this really inaugurated
his classic portrait style which
involved close ups and cropping
of the figure.
It's a beautiful comparison
to our Green Marilyn
by Andy Warhol.
It does nice things
in the collection, and it's just
a breath of fresh air, I think.
And so Alex then felt we should
have a contemporary portrait.
And I fell in love
with this double portrait
of his two grandsons.
So that was his gift
to the museum,
so very happy sequence of events
there.
OK, next year, this
is the painting we acquired
in 2009 by Norman Lewis entitled
Alabama, 1967.
And again, I think it's
a painting-- well, it involves
some cropping.
That's for sure.
And it involves
simple abstract shapes
and possibly
a figurative element,
but that sort of creeps up
on you.
There he is in his early career,
really one of the very few
African-American members
of the Abstract Expressionist
circle who was at the Cedar Bar
and at the club
and really made a career
in the face of great odds
at that time.
He was certainly influenced
by Franz Kline, so comparison
here, sort of gestural, strong
black and white painting,
but something else is going on
in the Lewis painting.
And the title is a clue,
perhaps.
American Totem, something
about America,
something totemic, something
symbolic,
begins to look like a figure
perhaps.
And if we then look back
at our painting, this maybe
comes out most
powerfully as a neighborhood
hooded figure, subtitle Alabama,
the year 1967.
Things begin to come together,
and we might remember that just
a few years earlier the Klan had
killed four girls in Birmingham,
Alabama.
The Klan had sort of had
a rebirth, and it wasn't really
the same organization.
But it didn't matter.
They were doing the same kinds
of things.
John Coltrane then dedicated
his great composition Alabama
to that event in 1963.
Lewis himself was really
breaking out of that Abstract
Expressionist mold,
which was really about not
having obvious content,
because he felt the urgent need
for a kind of content that would
live within his abstraction,
here, for example, or here.
And he became very interested
in processions of figures,
not always
with a sinister aspect--
parades, festivals,
European folklore traditions.
And this is a painting that will
be in our collection, promised
from the Meyerhoff Collection,
showing a very different artist,
Philip Guston,
a few years later,
also addressing the theme
of the Klan.
And in this case, something very
nice happened, which
is that the art dealer from whom
we bought the Lewis painting
then
followed our purchase
with several gifts of works
on paper by Norman Lewis.
This very early one, which you
already see
is interested in processions
of figures, he was really very
experimental with materials,
so you can see here and here
too.
So, so far, maybe the theme
is that I like painting.
And as I go through these,
I see that I have
privileged painting,
but I'm trying to be
aware of that.
So in 2010, this was one
of the works--
well, not acquired
by the committee actually.
They didn't go for this.
But often after meetings, I
am able to, if I have the nerve,
follow up with people and say,
didn't you like
that other painting?
Wouldn't you want to help us get
that one too?
And in this case,
Vicki and Roger Sant, who were
great patrons and Vicki
on our board for many years,
said, yes, you should have
that painting by Joaquin Torres
Garcia from 1929.
So this is going back
a long ways.
And typically, the collectors
committee buys work, more
contemporary work.
And that is partly just
a practical matter that works
from the first half
of the 20th century that are
of National Gallery quality
can be very hard to get, very
expensive, way
beyond the budget.
This was not.
And it's our first painting
by this artist, born in Uruguay,
moved to Spain,
spent time in Paris,
then went back to Uruguay
and was very
important in bringing modernism
to all of Latin America,
a lovely delicate painting.
There he is in his Paris studio
at about this time.
And I'm showing you the Jacques
Lipchitz sculpture
because they were good friends.
And Lipchitz bought
this painting from Torres Garcia
right out of his studio, kept it
his whole life.
His family kept it
his whole life, and then it came
on the market, which means
it was in wonderful condition,
had not traveled a lot,
had not changed hands.
And that's always something
we look for.
It's on a very delicate canvas,
very, very thin.
If you hold it up to the light,
you can see right through it.
And the paint is brushed
on in these very delicate,
almost Rothko-like layers
of veils of color.
So typically, I would give
a little summary of a career.
I'll just do that very briefly
looking at a couple of earlier
works.
He loved urbanism, life
of the street, signs, as you can
see, whether in Barcelona
or in New York.
I think of Stuart Davis
here in many ways.
They share a lot of interests.
He made wonderful toys
and even went into business
selling these modular toys,
which have just a great sense
of play about them.
You can make your own figures
and mix and match them.
And then in Paris, he discovered
an artist that many people don't
regard as so playful,
but I think on the contrary was
very playful, if you like
playing with red, yellow,
and blue rectangles,
black lines.
And that is Mondrian.
And he fell under the spell
of Mondrian and the De Stijl
group, as you can see, really
adopting those principles
but holding on to his interest
in observed reality,
all of that particular stuff
that Mondrian didn't like,
houses and people and streets.
So that's really the background
for this painting.
You can see there is a Mondrian
grid there, and you see all
the horizontal and verticals.
It's not a regular grid.
It's sort of
rhythmic and syncopated, nothing
mathematical about it.
And you can also see
that the basic coloration is
either
reddish or yellowish or bluish,
so the three primary colors
muted, filtered through Torres
Garcia's own personality.
And the other thing, of course,
the heretical thing is that he's
filled the grid with symbols
that were important to him.
He was a symbolist,
and he developed
this whole iconic language.
So he took this to Uruguay,
and he took
this Utopian language
of abstraction
and infused it with symbols
of his culture
and of ancient South American
culture and wrote manifestos
and really tried to make
this grand fusion for the New
World of Old World principles,
and even to the extent
of making huge monuments,
outdoor public sculpture
like this one.
So that is hanging up
in the galleries right now.
This painting is not hanging
at the moment.
It was a wonderful acquisition
that was really presented
by James Meyer,
but I'm going to borrow some
of his presentation here--
Kerry James Marshall's painting
Great America from 1994, which
as you can see, is not stretched
and framed in any usual way.
But it goes onto the wall
with these grommets.
You can see a few of them there.
And there is a look at him.
So Great America was a theme
park, an amusement park,
actually a chain of amusement
parks, in California.
He grew up in California,
went to Otis Art Institute,
a famous art school
there, studied with Charles
White, a great teacher.
We think that this might be
behind the painting
to some extent.
It's a water park, so that makes
some sense.
But there's certainly a darker
message and content.
He's a great draftsman, for one
thing, as we can see here.
He was attracted to skulls early
on, a classic motif
for young artists to study.
And he then applied that
to this painting, which was one
of his breakthrough paintings,
A Portrait of the Artist
as a Shadow of His Former Self,
in 1980.
And he was inspired, he said,
by the opening lines of Ralph
Ellison's Invisible Man.
But it's about the fact that--
"I am a ghost, not a spook
in the sense of Hollywood
movies, not an ectoplasm,
a flesh and blood being,
possibly with a mind of my own.
But I
am invisible because people do
not see me."
So Marshall has really dedicated
his career to putting
black figures,
African-American people,
into paintings, and therefore,
into museums, representing
whole aspects of American life
that have not been
well-represented.
That's part of it.
Another part of his work
has a lot to do with water,
and it's not just the water
park, not the amusement park,
of course,
but the Middle Passage of slaves
from Africa to the Americas.
We happened to inherit
this painting from the Corcoran,
and it goes very well,
of course, with the painting we
had previously gotten,
the Great America painting,
through the collectors
committee.
And the nice thing that happened
in this case was that the artist
gave us a whole series
of drawings relating
to the painting
once we had the painting
in the collection.
They're wonderful drawings.
And you can see where,
in a very classical, very
Renaissance way,
he studies figures, studies
the composition,
rougher studies, more finished
studies,
so that's a great resource
to have.
Since we got that painting,
his reputation has just
blossomed.
It's always nice to get
something before the prices go
through the roof, "
and that's what we did.
So Crystal Bridges Museum
acquired this painting,
Our Town, one
of his great housing project
series,
very much about his experience
in Chicago
and housing projects
around Chicago.
And then you may recently have
heard that this painting was
bought by Sean Combs, the rap
producer, for $21 million,
so setting a record for any work
by an African-American artist
living.
Basquiat has surpassed that.
OK, just trying to keep moving
here--
it's kind of a roller coaster
ride, because, well, we need
a lot of things,
and I like a lot
of different things.
So this is a painting by Simon
Hantai, born in Hungary,
moved to France,
and spent his career
in and around Paris--
Etude from 1969, big painting.
A lot of these are big.
The East Building does well
with big paintings.
We can accommodate them.
Here he is.
So he started out very
much as a surrealist
in the orbit of Andre Breton
and others in Paris,
in post-war Paris,
exploring biomorphic forms,
sexuality, the unconscious,
nightmares.
But even here, you can see he's
very interested in texture
and doing very interesting
things with texture,
especially in the background
here and maybe up here.
He then spent years two years
on this painting, which doesn't
maybe look like that much,
but the texture
in the background
here is tiny transcriptions
of Western philosophy--
Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Plato,
everything.
That is the text
of the painting.
That was not something one could
really keep doing
and remain sane, I think.
So he was very
aware of American painting
and all the experiments that
were going on in New York,
Pollock painting on the floor
and pouring paint and so on.
And so he developed
his own process, which you can
see here, which involved taking
loose canvas,
crumpling it up into sort
of rough balls of material,
tying it together, painting over
it, and then unwrapping it
and stretching it,
without being able to predict
what it would look like,
because the inner parts would be
unpainted or would have drips
on.
The outer parts would be
painted.
And that is what they looked
like.
And they do bear
an uncanny relationship
to other kinds of art
and Matisse's cut outs.
So he was very much in control
of this process, just as Pollock
was very much in control
of his process.
And this was his first series.
I actually presented one
of these to the collectors
committee one year.
They didn't get it,
so I persisted, and I waited
a couple years
and then presented the Etude,
which they did like.
So I might come back and try
to get one of these
as well, because I think they're
quite beautiful and lyrical.
But here's the one we got
on the right.
And I go and look
at the paintings in the gallery
wherever they're being offered.
So I had some choice,
because in fact,
no American museum had ever
bought a painting by Hantai.
We were the first.
He was really very little known.
The MoMA had a painting
because someone gave it to them.
The Hirshhorn, Joe Hirshhorn
had bought something,
but before there was
the Hirshhorn Museum.
So there was a green one too,
but that looked a lot
like foliage, and I didn't want
that, because it's really
about abstraction and rhythm,
I think.
So here, you can see they moved
that blue one back so I could
just look at the red one,
and it looked great.
And you might think I'm obsessed
with Jackson Pollock,
and that's true.
But it's really the artists who
were obsessed with Pollock.
I think this particular Pollock
has a lot to do with what Hantai
was trying to do, because this
is a case where Pollock cut out
sections of the painting
after he painted it to create
voids, create spaces, just
the way Hantai is creating
these areas,
these areas that were
invisible to him, blind spots,
if you will, in the painting,
that are just as important
as the painted parts.
OK, so there's a sculpture,
if you want to call it
a sculpture.
A lot of this art,
I think if Andrew Mellon saw it,
he wouldn't necessarily
recognize it as art.
One of the things we're supposed
to keep in mind
is that any acquisitions
to the National Gallery
should be at the level
of quality of the founding
gifts.
So that's very hard to interpret
and maybe impossible to realize,
given the level of some
of the founding gifts,
everything
that you see in the West
Building.
So I try to put that out
of my mind.
It really doesn't help.
I think it's just a very
interesting process, because I
and we, my colleagues,
we just have to think about what
makes something great, what
makes something worthwhile,
and remembering that nothing we
get will ever go away.
The National Gallery by custom
does not deaccession any works
of art.
So Richard Artschwager,
another one
of these eccentric artists
that I like that
doesn't fit into any category--
this is right up the stairs,
right outside on the left.
People mistake it for a table.
They put stuff on it.
They touch it.
Please don't do that.
[LAUGHTER]
At this point, we should all
recognize this is as art,
I think, here.
A few different views
of this double piano with--
I like to call it Double Piano
with Mustache.
He did like mustaches.
He didn't have a mustache,
but here he is posing
between a work of art,
a single work of art, his door
bracket.
So it's a bracket,
or it's a mustache,
or it's a piano leg.
And the most striking thing
about his sculpture is this use
of wood grain.
But it's not in wood.
It is Formica, and he was one
of the first artists
to use Formica.
He had a furniture business
with his family,
and he was a fine furniture
maker in New York.
And he said he got sick of all
that wood, all that real wood,
all that wood grain.
And Formica sort of became
popular, and he loved it,
because it was a picture
of wood.
It wasn't real wood.
There was a level of distance
which you could say is maybe
typical of a lot of modern art.
I think we're getting
into postmodern art
here, in fact, where there's
a mediation and a series
of representations
of representations,
often having to do, in his case,
with wood.
So here is his Portrait Zero,
wood screws and rope.
It's a Cubist composition,
right?
It's not too far
from our great Braque collage.
And when you think about it,
Braque was also not using
real wood.
He was using wood grain paper,
cheap stuff that you could stick
on to your cupboards,
to make them look like wood.
That's exactly what that is
there.
So is Braque an old master now,
and Artschwager a sort
of crazy newcomer?
Or are they all part
of a tradition?
I would say, obviously,
the second.
But we can argue about that.
So other artists also looking
to new materials, Donald Judd
has a piece of purple Plexiglas
there, right there, making
that step, simple form.
So is Artschwager a minimalist?
Not really-- some of the forms
are in common.
Is he a pop artist?
In some cases, yes, he's using
photographic reproductions,
commercial stuff and imagery.
Another comparison-- all
of his furniture
is non-utilitarian.
That's why you can't really
do anything with it.
And it's art.
You don't use it, but it looks
like you could use this dresser
with a mirror,
comparing it here to equally
non-utilitarian.
Another collectors committee
acquisition,
the wonderful sculpture by Anne
Truitt, which is up in the tower
right now.
Now, there are a number
of studies for this, Double
Piano, this is a wonderful one
where he cut out magazine images
and pasted them on to create
the two pianos together.
And sometimes, piano duets,
the pianos are fitted together
like that, and the pianists look
at each other and play together.
Some of his sketches, so these
are from early 1960s.
The actual sculpture was made
just at the end of his life
for a show in New York.
So the sculpture,
a lot of post-war art
has a double date.
It has the date that it was
first conceived, sketched,
and then it has the date
in which it was actually made.
But we want to preserve
the first date, because that's
arguably just as
important as the business
of fabrication, which
is sometimes not even done
by the artists.
So they're
these wonderful sketches.
And this, in fact, is reminding
me that the dealer from whom we
bought the sculpture
promised to give us
these sketches.
So I have to go and make sure we
get these.
He liked frames too.
These are sculptures
of non-paintings.
I don't know what you would call
them.
And this is a three dimensional
maquette he made
for the fabricators
to build the piece.
And we happen to have
this great exclamation point
sculpture in the gallery
from the Broida Collection.
And we also have work
from the Vogel Collection
too by Artschwager.
The piano is sort
of the main work of sculpture
that we have.
Oh, we also have a couple
of these crates that came
from the Corcoran.
He liked to make crates
without anything in them, crates
that you would use to transport
art, but in this case,
they are the art.
And they're clever and strange.
And this work you know well.
You've looked at yourself in it.
You have not touched it
at that place that is so
tempting to touch it where
the woman is pointing,
although we keep we keep rubbing
off somebody's fingerprints.
But I'm sure they're not yours.
So Pistoletto who came here
to speak, a number
of these artists,
the ones who are alive,
we try to get them to come right
here to this auditorium
and talk about their work
after we make an acquisition
in that series of [INAUDIBLE]
lectures.
So again, you'll see conceived
1962, fabricated 1982, 20 years
apart.
It's just one
of the common and strange things
about working
with contemporary art.
There is the artist showing us
his bald spot in this work.
He does a lot of different kinds
of work, but his most famous
work is this so-called mirror
work in which he uses
reflective steel plates
and puts imagery right on them.
And that, of course, it makes
an image, but it also
incorporates you
into the picture,
because you see yourself.
He's Italian.
He was very
influenced
by the whole tradition
of iconic religious art
where there is
a direct relationship
between the artist
and the viewer and an idea
that the art actually has
magical properties.
Just looking at it
or touching it--
yes, touching it-- can convey
something spiritual.
He was also
interested in Giacometti,
that really intense gaze coming
out of Giacometti's portraits.
So all that
is behind this mirror work
that he does.
And here, I'm borrowing
from James Meyer's comparisons.
He is the one who presented this
to the committee.
But he drew
on photographic sources,
in this case, a photograph
of a protest in Italy.
And you can see that he's taken
this boy.
This is one of his most famous
images, this boy is.
Here, this figure is here,
but some of these figures,
he has changed the scale
and then painted them
onto tissue paper and carefully
laid the tissue paper
onto the steel.
So there
is a photographic source that's
manipulated and then turned
into a very delicate kind
of painting
and put on the mirrored surface.
Another example where he has
done that-- so he's very much
a film maker,
I mean working with films
literally, those tissues,
laying up images,
making narratives,
obscure narratives,
often inspired
by great Italian painting.
As you can see, these three
are three of his colleagues
the Arte Povera movement,
"poor art,"
this important Italian movement
involving use
of non-art materials,
for the most part.
And just to make the point
about film, the figure, sort
of anti-heroic figure,
set against the landscape
and the wide screen.
A lot of Pistoletto's works
are very wide like the one we
have.
They kind of embrace you.
He also worked
in many other materials.
He loved rags and glass,
creating these installations.
Public performances-- here he
is.
This was a recreation in 2010
of a 1967 performance
that involved rolling this ball
through the city.
Cecily Brown-- back to painting,
back to, I guess, my comfort
zone in particular--
she is a mid-career painter.
We didn't have anything
in the collection,
and this painting, again, as
with Alex Katz, a painting she
had kept, lived with, and then
decided she could release
into the market.
And so we grabbed it.
Here she is in her New York
studio.
She's British but now working
in New York.
When you go to her studio,
it's a great experience,
because she is one
of the rare contemporary artists
who is thoroughly steeped
in the history of art
and in all kinds
of traditional sources
and methods.
Here we have the hand mannequin,
source material here, drawing
materials, lots of drawing
in her practice.
Her mother on the left
was a painter, really tough,
abstract British painter,
and her father was David
Sylvester, a great art critic
and art historian.
She didn't know that he was
her father, because it was
an affair, and they weren't
married.
But she grew up loving art.
And then I think late
in high school, he let her know
that he was her father.
And they started going
to museums together,
and her interest only grew
in the history of art.
So the painting is The Swing,
which of course has
a great long tradition,
especially going back
into the 18th century.
These are pictures of dalliance,
of titillation, of romance.
They were the erotica
of the day,
including our painting
on the left.
So, yeah, the swing hanging
from dense foliage and trees
with a woman in it,
but she relies on all kinds
of sources for her work.
In this case, you can see Goya,
Degas, both Degas and Goya
informing this painting.
Or here, her version
of the Flaying or Punishment
of Marsyas, the great Titian
painting, it's kind of Where's
Waldo?
OK, but there's Waldo.
And you really have to look
at these, and you start to make
out all kinds of things.
And she has a wonderful touch,
a very exciting touch.
She's not at all
averse to other kinds
of sources, for example,
the cover of the Jimi Hendrix
Electric Ladyland album, which
had a lot of figures
for her to paint,
a lot of female figures.
And de Kooning is perhaps
her great sort of lodestar, not
Pollock but de Kooning,
that gestural touch,
that complicated, fragmented
composition.
A couple of details,
she points out, if you get
her talking, there are a lot
of hidden images
in the paintings.
So her paintings are haunted,
in a way, by hidden images that
come up in the process
of painting.
So a head there perhaps,
and I'm not sure what this one
is, but it's certainly very
deliberate.
This was our great acquisition
in 2016, which is up
in the upper level
West section, Lick and Lather
by Janine Antoni.
It can be displayed
in many ways.
It can be displayed
in a single circle with two
halves.
Right now, it's displayed
in a single file
along a back wall.
Here we had it for the committee
in the West Building
in two rows, two facing rows.
She has been here.
You might have heard her speak
a couple of years ago.
An artist who is not quite
a performance artist,
but performance is certainly
a big part of what she does here
using her hair as a paint brush.
Art is certainly very
much about the body.
Yes, Pollock-- I'm sorry.
I know I'm obsessed--
using his body, using the brush
as a stick.
He didn't have any hair,
so he couldn't do what she was
doing.
And you probably know
this story, but what she did
with Lick and Lather
was she made a life cast
of her head and shoulders
and then from that mold
made seven casts in chocolate
and seven casts in soap.
And then she proceeded to lick
and bite the chocolate and bathe
in the bathtub with the soap,
creating this kind
of differential erosion
in the two materials.
It is something she had
practiced already,
so one of her breakout pieces
is called Gnaw from 1992.
A big cube of chocolate
and a big cube of lard, and she
attacked both of them
in various ways.
And from that, she created
the piece on the right
using the lard to make
the lipstick
and using the chocolate to make
the box for the chocolates.
So there's a lot of play
here certainly about identity,
about gender,
about traditional roles,
what you do on Valentine's Day,
what is chocolate, what are all
the meanings of chocolate
and lipstick and kissing
and so on.
This is a great wonderful brain
teaser of a piece in which she
recruited her parents as models.
And so this is her dad,
and this is her mom made up
as her dad.
This is her mom,
and this is her dad made up
as her mom.
This is her dad made up
as her mom, and this is her mom
made up as her dad.
[LAUGHTER]
And there's the piece.
So the piece is about unmaking
herself, I guess.
I could see it very much
in the West Building as well as
the East Building,
because in addition to being
very contemporary
and being about process
and identity, it's also about
great classical tradition
of busts, monumental busts,
portrait busts, life casts,
and so on and so forth.
OK, in 2017, we acquired
this painting by Jack Whitten,
who unfortunately died just
after we acquired it.
But I did get to meet him
and talk with him
about his work.
So born in 1939,
so he was really a senior figure
who had worked in abstraction
for many years
without really being noticed.
That was partly because he was
black, and black artists who did
that weren't really noticed,
because they weren't dealing
with issues
of the day as some people
thought they should.
There he is, really
a lively spirit, not sure what
that cleaver is doing there.
But there's a sense
that anything can happen
in his studio, and anything does
happen.
So the painting we got
is called Sphinx Alley.
This is another one
in that series.
And it references the Alley
of the Sphinxes in Egypt.
And I think it's these two
vertical elements that create
that suggestion.
But he's very much interested
in Egypt, Middle East, Greece,
Crete, where he summered
for many, many years.
There's a show of his sculpture
on right
now still at the Baltimore
Museum of Art that I recommend.
So he was born
into a poor family Alabama, made
it up to New York,
fell in with the Cedar Bar
crowd, de Kooning, Kline.
And so he said--
"by 1970, things had started
changing.
This is when I made a vow
that I'm going to stop doing
those gestural paintings.
I had to find a way to get
around Bill de Kooning."
And this was certainly one way
to do it.
It's sort of the Jasper Johns
solution of taking a form that
is already in the world
and painting it in a fairly
mechanical not personal way.
So he developed a system called
a processor which he thought
of in terms of photography.
The painting on the floor,
creating a tray,
you can see the edge of the tray
here.
It's going to hold lots
of layers of paint
and then scraping
through those layers
with various kinds of combs
such as these, some of which
were actually Afro combs, combs
for Afros, but some of which
are tools that he's making
to create these kinds
of textures
where the painting does develop
as he's making it
and revealing various layers
of the paint, the paint
having settled
all at different depths
according to its density.
And he was an engineer.
He studied engineering
at Tuskegee Institute,
so there's a whole lot
of interesting process here.
And one of the great things
about it
is he was doing Richters
about 20 years before Richter
was doing Richter was doing
this kind of scraping
and squeegeeing
across the surface.
So a very important painter
for us to have,
one who is very
interested in black history,
a tribute to Thelonious Monk
here,
brilliant corners, great Monk
composition, and he
sort of literalizes it and makes
the corners
brilliant with color.
This is a painting that he did
after 9/11, The Great Pyramid.
So there's the interest in Egypt
coming back.
And this is at the Baltimore
Museum right now.
They did very well to get a hold
of that.
And that's the painting that we
have upstairs in a bit
of a close up.
This is the one you haven't seen
yet that we just got
at the last meeting
by Theaster Gates called Ground
Rules, black line.
You might have seen something
like it at our show
that Sarah Newman did,
who's now at the Smithsonian
American Art Museum
working with Theaster.
This is a similar work, one
of his gym floors.
He makes them by scavenging gym
floors from Southside Chicago
school gymnasiums.
Obviously, it's
a troubled neighborhood.
Schools, churches buildings
close down,
and he gets these materials.
He got this slate here
from a church.
The gym floors appeal to me
in particular because they are
a kind of abstraction and fit
into a whole tradition
at the same time
that they break up
that tradition.
He's had a lot of attention,
more and more attention,
recently, this New York Times
Magazine article--
somebody who is not just working
for museums at all but really
working in communities,
repurposing whole buildings,
buying up libraries of books,
creating centers of activity
and culture, for example,
taking this abandoned bank
building, buying it and turning
it into a library
for, among other things,
the Johnson archive.
That is the archive of Jet
Magazine, so saving aspects
of black culture
that would otherwise really just
be thrown out.
In fact, it was going to be
thrown out before he salvaged
this-- so really crossing
a lot of wires in our culture
in really interesting ways.
Going back to Marcel Duchamp,
his hero--
in fact, I overheard him, when
asked by one of our security
guards what artists he likes.
And he said, have you heard
of this dude named Duchamp?
And so I think he sort of Gene
Davis too and a whole tradition
of abstraction, stripes,
certainly-- this is one
of the gym floors
that he rearranged but left
on the floor
in the Pareto Foundation.
And here is the gym floor
we had.
And one of the great things
about it is that there is so
much to talk about,
and he talks.
He's not afraid to talk
about the content at all.
And he talks about--
well, with the black line
in particular, so for him,
in addition to being
an abstraction
and in addition to reminding us
of a neighborhood that
is in trouble, it also is a kind
of metaphor for what happens
when there are no rules, when
all those lines
on the basketball court which
should be in a certain order
get mixed up and broken up.
And I think this line--
it's called the black line,
and the line that cuts across
but sort of stutters and jitters
and gets broken up
is just a powerful image
on a number of levels.
So I said I couldn't tell you
about the works that were not
chosen, but I can tell you
about other works that were
chosen, because each year there
might be more than one.
So whether during the meeting
or after the meeting,
I'll just go through these
quickly--
Terry Winters, Fred Sandback,
John McCracken, Anne Truitt
we saw already, Barry Le Va.
This work is about to be
installed in a couple of months
here--
not easy to install.
You have to do it just
like that.
The Hans Haacke, which people
love taking their photographs
through, the Allan McCollum
work, pretty close
to Artschwager in a lot of ways,
and this has been up.
It takes a lot to put this one
up.
The Mario Merz, which also
requires each time we put it up
to go and get
some fresh branches,
but we recycle the branches.
And this Barbara Kruger digital
print on vinyl, so really
a photographic work
in her classic style,
and this Roni Horn sculpture,
which is up on the mezzanine,
and this Felix Gonzalez-Torres
stack, which is up
on the upper level.
So all of these collectors
committee gifts continue
to circulate
through the galleries.
Yes, they go into storage,
but they come back out.
It's really what helps us keep
the collection growing
and moving.
So I think looking back on that,
I'm not sure that I've had
a program necessarily
or an agenda.
But certainly as time went on, I
think I realized more and more
that we have to start
representing some groups
of artists that are not
well-represented--
artists of color, women,
and European artists
too, because the way
the collection is built,
from World War II,
on it's very much art
by white North American males.
The Europeans are very
much in the first half
of the 20th century,
so people like Merz, Pistoletto,
Cecily Brown and so on.
Because it's not a National
Gallery in the sense
that we're not international.
We have to be international as
well as reflecting the diversity
of the nation.
And that just has absolutely
no friction whatsoever
with the mission of getting
the best art, the most important
art.
In fact, quite the contrary,
because there's all
this important art by artists
that just have been overlooked
for many years.
So I guess that was some of what
I've had in mind,
but it's very ad hoc,
and it's very much what's
available in a given
year for less than a million
dollars
that is going to be good enough
for the committee.
