MARK LEITHAUSER: Good afternoon,
everyone.
Thank you for being here
on a beautiful Sunday.
I'm sure we'd all rather be
outside,
so I'll try to entertain you
as much as possible.
I'm Mark Leithauser.
I'm the Senior Curator and Chief
of Design.
I realized as I was sitting up
there, looking at the new East
Building, which will be
40 years old next June 1,
that I proceeded the building,
so I've been here 43 years.
And one little anecdote.
When I first came
to the gallery, the very first
morning I was here,
it was much smaller.
There was no East Building.
It was being worked on, 1974.
I was being taken
through the West Building
by a wonderful docent named
William Williams.
Some of you may remember him,
great guy.
And this was before hours.
A fellow walked in front of us
from one gallery to the other
and he said, that's our Chief
Registrar.
He's been here 30 years.
And I turned to Bill, whom I
hardly knew, and said,
that's the most depressing thing
I've ever heard.
[LAUGHTER]
I couldn't conceive of 30 years
in one place.
Anyhow, I'm going to talk
about exhibitions
in both buildings.
We are also responsible,
to some degree,
for the Sculpture Garden,
but it doesn't involve
a tremendous amount of our time.
The design studio has,
like a friendly octopus,
it has a number of tentacles
around the building
at different levels
and different areas,
a graphic arts area,
a large electrical shop,
a large carpenter shop.
We also have those facilities
out in Landover
and I'm going to show you
an image of one of those.
But of the heart of the office
is right here in the northeast
corner, right up here,
in the West Building.
And it's more or less
central to the exhibitions
that you know
are in both buildings.
So without further ado,
I'll proceed.
So what I want to say
about the design department
is that behind these very quiet
doors that you'll see
in the West Building,
this one in fact
is a current exhibition, America
Collects.
It's 18th century
French painting.
It's a great show if you haven't
seen it.
But behind these doors
are these wonderful,
I think, kind of Aladdin rooms,
at times.
And this is the entrance
to the design studio.
You'll see a kind
of a gargoyle thing up there.
When an exhibition first
is in its earliest stages,
we use photostats, Xeroxes,
and those are pinned up.
And this is called the Grotto
by everybody in the building.
So when your exhibition goes
to the Grotto, and there are
about four of them
in there at the moment,
but it is dominated
at the moment
by a large exhibition
on the animal in Japanese art,
which will be here in 2019.
And that's pinned up here.
So we pin them up.
And the reason we pin them
up is so that we can change
them.
The loan forms come
and the object can't come
for conservation reasons
or whatever.
And we can move them around,
ideas, take them away, and so
on.
When they go to the next phase,
they begin to turn
into maquettes
and little three-dimensional
models.
And it becomes more serious
and that goes upstairs.
So here we have bits and pieces
of exhibitions.
This is Bryant Johnson
and Travis Ferguson
both in our office.
So the stair to the design
studio, you can see Charles
Wilson Peale's great image here
of his son.
This painting, of course,
is in the Philadelphia Museum
of Art.
And we're playing off our stairs
here.
This is a Rousseau staircase.
It used to scare
my granddaughters but they're
on to it.
A typical day in the design
studio is more or less exactly
like this.
And you'll see different people
in the design studio.
I see some carpenters,
production people, architects,
and so on.
So that's what's upstairs.
Every Wednesday at 10:30,
we have a meeting of all
the department heads
in the division of design
and they come up for about
a half an hour
and all of the weekly agenda
items are addressed.
Looking around,
I see architects,
graphic designers, carpenters,
painters, an intern or two,
production people,
an accountant, most importantly.
[LAUGHTER]
And this is our state-of-the-art
carpentry and paint shop
in Landover, Maryland.
And when we first built this,
some of the carpenters
were loath to go out
to Landover.
But after about one half
an hour, they said,
this is the greatest thing
on earth.
We've got a lot of room.
The equipment is brand new.
It is state-of-the-art.
They could park.
It was just very easy.
So they've never wanted to come
back downtown.
Now the graphics are courtesy
of Rob Shelley in my office
who is our photographer.
And he documents all
the exhibitions.
They are all documented
for all art historians
out there.
Every exhibition, well,
since I've been here
has been documented
and they are in our archives
and accessible to everyone.
So you can't blame me
for this type.
It gets kookier as we move on.
But Rob's a great photographer.
So I want to show you some
of the challenges that come
our way, which we welcome.
This large birthday present was
too big to come
in the normal secured channel
of the West Building, which
is right at Constitution Avenue.
If you're in that 6th street
and Constitution Avenue
semicircle, there's a ramp that
goes down.
There's a guard at the top.
And that ramp is where we can
secure works of art.
This was too big it could not
pass through.
So we waited for a good day,
removed some very heavy windows,
and in it went.
That's what was in the package,
18th century Baroque Portuguese
coach.
Anyone who has walked
across the plaza on a hot day,
or any woman in high heels
does not like the Belgian block
patterns of granite
that we have out there.
I know.
My wife has told me many times.
This is the block.
We used the same pattern that's
on the plaza,
so if you saw this exhibition,
it would be a little familiar.
It's the same pattern that's
in Rome.
This was the same coach.
We found a small watercolor
of this coach in Lisbon
and we blew it up.
So it kind of put the coach
in context.
And this is one
of the comparisons that was
on the back of the horses.
Now, the East Building was built
to have a certain amount
of flexibility.
And one of the things that it
could do that the West Building
really couldn't do very easily
was we could raise up sections
or the entire ceiling upstairs
in two of the towers, Tower One
and Tower Two.
This is Tower One.
So for the exhibition that was
coming up,
we pushed this ceiling, which
is at 22 feet.
That's what you see when you're
in the gallery.
Pushed it here to about 40.
And when an object like this
came to the Gallery,
we had the ability to push it up
and bring the object.
It's great, isn't it?
It's a great image.
So the Olmecs, you know that we
don't know the language.
They are a mystery.
It was
the first great civilization
in the Yucatan area.
Nothing organic, no language,
so it's a mystery.
And these great huge basalt
heads are what exist.
We don't even know how they were
oriented, whether they were
on organic steps or something
built around them.
It's all gone,
all buried in the jungle.
So it's subjective.
This makes it look a lot
smaller,
but that head is in this box
and we didn't know how much this
weighed.
Nobody had ever weighed it.
It was down in Xalapa, Mexico.
So we put it on the back
of this truck.
Cab would be down here.
And down where-- there's a lot
of oil drilling in that area,
they weighed the truck.
You know when you're driving up
95 and you see those weigh
stations, they're kind
of a mystery.
That's what they did down there.
Turned out to be about nine
tons.
So it was a very serious bit
of weight.
So we rented a truck that had
these extraordinary braking
system, which allowed the truck
to go down the ramp
and not break free and go
through the wall.
And that's how we did it.
Much of what we do
is subjective.
I tell my Corcoran students--
now GW students-- there's
no right way to design
an exhibition.
There are many, many variables.
You work with whomever
the best curators are that you
can find anywhere.
And you work as a very close
team.
And I think that makes the best
exhibition.
So why did we do it this way?
Well, we got his chin up
off the ground
so he had a presence
like the Great and Powerful Oz.
You know, a big big thing.
But this is not just
a subjective.
Underneath are steel beams which
displace the load of the nine
tons
onto the beams that are
in the floor here
so that the piece, in fact,
did not
go
through the reinforced concrete
floor.
And then this was the largest
object ever to be displayed
in the East Building.
Not the heaviest, not the most
fragile, but simply the biggest.
It came in at a time
when we had the great Albrecht
Durer exhibition as well,
you'll see.
Early in the morning.
This is one
of my favorite images at all,
and I only wish we had
some great cymbals or music
or something when this piece
goes up,
three choreographed forklift
trucks.
It's not particularly heavy.
It's about 300 pounds, which
isn't really all that heavy.
These things can lift
considerably more.
But up it goes.
This is before hours.
And this is the kind
of behind-the-scenes
deconstruction slash
construction
that happens that we hope you
don't have to see.
This will become an area where
we built the new Tower
Galleries.
So we had this much room.
It was done for a number
of reasons
that I won't go
into at the moment.
But it was available space.
So Rusty Powell saw the option
of getting in there
and building the two galleries,
which now have the Calder
directly above us and Rothko,
Barnett Newman.
So this piece came in the ark
handlers here had rigged up--
many of our art handlers,
by the way are sailors, weekend
sailors.
And they rigged up a block
and tackle system
so that although this weighed
about 300 pounds, maybe
a little more
with the structural pieces
at the top,
nobody pulled more than about
16 pounds when it went up.
So there it is.
Natalia Goncharova was
the designer.
We also showed three-minute film
clips of this
is the prima ballerina dancing
in front of it as the Firebird.
This is domes of Moscow.
This is Donna Kirk in my office,
one of the architects.
And as you can see,
we pushed the ceiling up.
In this case, this is 32 feet,
I think.
So it's up around 40 feet.
He's getting-- see,
he's pushing.
So building opens '78.
In 1979, we had an exhibition
on Rodin and it put Rodin
into the context
of his competitors
in Paris in the 1870s.
And imagine trying to be
a sculptor in Paris
in the late 19th century.
You had a lot of competition.
So this is an 1870s photograph
of the old Palais de
Champs-Elysee.
It's gone now.
It was razed.
But the interesting thing here
is that everything is white.
And it's white
because they're looking--
the artists cannot afford
to cast them in bronze.
They're looking for commissions
so they've cast them in plaster.
And all the plants here were
considered exotic plants.
You'll see cacti and succulent
and all the century plants
and palm trees and whatever.
So we used this as a reference.
We showed the photograph
of Bartholdi's Lafayette.
Bartholdi, of course,
did the Statue of Liberty.
And then we managed to borrow
from the New York Parks,
the Lafayette
from Union Square in New York,
cleaned it up a bit,
and put it in the context.
And then, as you can see,
we recreated the room
in a certain way,
much, much smaller.
And the ceiling is the Pei
ceiling.
It's that ubiquitous triangle
that's above your head.
It's everywhere in the building.
It's in the elevators.
It's even up in the refectory
where we eat lunch.
And if you are the last one
on the table, you get the point.
So everybody is on time.
A photograph of David Smith's
installation of the Voltri
sculptures.
This was one of his very
favorite installations.
The Voltri are
my favorite sculptures by Smith.
It's in a restored Roman
amphitheater in Spoleto.
And when we were opening
the East Building--
this was still coming up.
We hadn't been in here.
The idea of displaying
the Voltri in a gallery it
just didn't seem right.
But we really were at a bit
of a loss.
So we created kind
of an indoor amphitheater
with daylight
in a big one of the Tower
Galleries at the time.
And it was only supposed to be
up for 90 days,
but it proved to be so
successful, it stayed up
for seven years.
But it's the fate of my job,
for better or worse.
We tear things down.
So there it goes.
You can see the old footprint
of it on the wall, here.
And it made way in 1985 for,
still to date, the most
complicated and expensive
exhibition that the Gallery has
ever done, the Treasure Houses
of Britain.
This is Blenheim, by the way,
Winston Churchill's house.
So Treasure Houses of Britain,
more or less,
had to do with-- it covered
a time span of 500 years.
It went from, more or less,
a moated castle like Bodiam
Castle all the way to Lutyens
in the 20th century, who also
designed part
of the British embassy up here.
So this is Addingham.
And for one of the galleries
called the Waterloo Gallery,
a gallery
post-Napoleonic defeat,
this is the kind of room we were
trying to recreate.
But now, remember, we're
in the East Building
and we're talking triangles
and Pei's design.
So let's see how
flexible the building could be.
So in that shell, we simply
started building a room
that-- a series of three rooms
that more or less
looked like the West Building.
And that's how it was done.
And one of the jobs that we
have--
we have more or less two, two
and 1/2 people that do it
in the office when it's needed--
is faux painting.
And things like this
are-- this is not
a porphyry column
or a porphyry base or travertine
or marble.
These are all painted.
The inspiration for one
of the other rooms,
a room of sculpture,
came from this photograph, 1906
photograph of a house called
Ince Blundell.
The house stands
but the collection has been
moved to Birmingham.
But I think this shows, even all
these years later,
the beauty
of the behind-the-scenes
carpentry work that's done
at the National Gallery.
It always has been.
It was done when the West
Building was built.
The craftsmanship in that
building is extraordinary.
And it continues today,
whether it's
a temporary exhibition
or a permanent work
like the new staircases
in the East Building.
The finished room.
And then Hardwick Hall.
This was a house that was owned
by Elizabeth I's rival
before she became queen,
Elizabeth Shrewsbury.
And the most expensive
architectural element that you
could purchase at this time
was glass.
So Bess Shrewsbury wanted
to show she had money.
And there was a children's
rhyme, Hardwick Hall, more glass
than wall.
She even put her initials, just
to make sure you know who she
was, E, Elizabeth Shewsbury.
See here?
And way over here, Elizabeth
Shrewsbury.
So glass.
Thinking of Hardwick hall
and the glass and looking past,
this is the Countess of Arundel.
Looking past her, it's the room
behind her
that we're interested in,
the ceiling, the side lighting,
the heavy pediment
over the door.
We couldn't think of anywhere
else in the building
to build this.
We'd never built in this area.
This is the mezzanine today that
overlooks Pennsylvania Avenue.
Now, the only glitch we ran into
is, more or less
at the eleventh hour,
the National Trust in England
stipulated that if we were
borrowing some of the more
delicate objects,
we had to mimic the temperature
and humidity conditions
in England.
[LAUGHTER]
So after our engineers thought
we were crazy and we put all
this behind the walls like that.
And then down, we're going
to just go down here
for a minute.
And here, we were cast
an interesting door frame.
This frieze exists today
in the design studio.
And then we were lucky enough
twice since I've been here
to borrow Samuel Hoogstraten's
trompe l'oeil painting,
View Down a Corridor.
So at the end of this room,
which was 100 feet long,
we gave the optical impression,
I hope, we intended to,
that you had to go down
another corridor as well.
Now, moving up a bit, just about
five or six years ago,
an exhibition on Pompeii
and Herculaneum.
And here
is an early 19th century
lithograph.
You can still see Vesuvius
romantically smoking.
This is in Pompeii.
This is the House of the Faun.
The famous sculpture The Faun
sat on this pedestal.
Pedestal exists today
with a reproduction on it.
But even then, they knew they
had something quite unique
and they covered it with a tarp.
And in 1834 or '36, they moved
the great mosaic of Alexander
defeating Darius-- a Roman copy
of Hellenistic Greek mosaic--
they moved it to the Naples
Museum and embedded it
in the wall.
So we have tried in the past
to borrow this twice
and we knew they weren't going
to lend it.
So we've done photo murals
and we've done various things.
But with new technology
and a very talented and naive
young employee who said she
would be happy to tackle this
using a painting that had been
done in the 1830s
before it was excavated,
she digitally replaced all
the missing tesserae.
We knew the colors.
We knew there were six
different colors for it.
There are over a million
and a half tesserae.
On here.
So poor Abby would go out
into the Mall after a few hours
and just run or do whatever.
[LAUGHTER]
But she did it.
And it allowed us to put
the whole thing back the way
it originally was because this--
and the Naples Museum
has all been separated.
You saw this on a wall.
These are scenes of the Nile.
They're in different parts
of the museum.
Alexander had just conquered
Egypt, so that's why they were
doing this.
These are copies
of the same columns that were
in the room.
And you could walk across it
for the first time.
Why do we have this slide?
Well, when my now
30-something year old daughter
was in kindergarten
with a class, they came and I
gave these kids a tour
of the office
and an Aztec exhibition.
And we had a model.
And at the end of it,
I thought, OK, I didn't scare
them.
You know, we didn't get
into blood sacrifices
or anything.
They seem happy.
And at the end, my daughter
said, Daddy, you play
with dollhouses.
And of course I was shattered.
You know, everybody else's dad
was a lawyer or a something,
an accountant.
But I realized, that is
what I do now, as you can see.
So we're back up in the design
office.
Here you see Hardwick Hall's
windows, which we salvaged
and they're in the office.
It sort of separates
the front office
from the back part
of the office.
And this is a model
for Diaghilev.
These models are very, very
serious things.
So that is a, I think,
a great image.
And this is our crack silkscreen
team, Barbara Keyes and Lisa
and Chip, I think,
is up there, or Jeff
or somebody.
I can't tell who that is
at the moment.
But this is how they do it.
And that's the entrance.
And you can see how closely
the model is to the finished
design.
And again, playing
with dollhouses, this is Andrea,
one of our architects,
working on a Diaghilev
exhibition as well.
[LAUGHTER]
The models for the actual stage
costumes for almost all
of these ballets
are gone because people wore
them out.
And Nijinsky and all
these people would rip the knees
out and they'd throw them away,
as they did with the stage
curtains.
They're very rare that they
survive.
Picasso's stage managers in New
York and Paris are long gone.
So if you ever see them
in an exhibition,
MoMA has had them, the Tate
has had them.
I've heard we've had them.
France, they've been
at the d'Orsay.
So that's John making one.
And here we are up above us.
He's working on the room
with Andrea.
And the finished effect.
So we gave these
to a local ballet school
in Washington.
And that was a two-minute film
clip that showed--
the one actual surviving costume
was the Chinese conjurer
and that was in the room.
And then again, a model.
A model of Petrushka
for Diaghilev.
Now, this was interesting
because the stage curtains,
again, as I said, almost all
of them are gone.
We had two in the show.
Natalia Goncharova, which I
showed you and Picasso's.
The last work in the show
is Picasso.
But this was a great kind
of Halloween imagery
of a mysterious night
during the ballet Petrushka
in St. Petersburg, Russia.
And this represents
a little gouache, a little water
color gouache.
It's only about that big.
So this is what we were going
to do.
And this would be
the three-minute film.
But it turned out to actually
be quicker and easier to have
one of our talented people
on the staff, Jeff Wilson,
paint it.
He's a painter.
So he just took it upon himself
to do it.
So that was an actual painting
with these strange, surreal
animals flying around.
The only surprise, which we
didn't really tell anybody,
outside of the staff,
was that this section, which had
been done by Benois, the artist,
was St. Petersburg.
And when I asked Jeff if he
could do the rest of it,
he said, yeah, sure, sure, fine.
So he went online
and he found the imagery
and he put it all together.
It was great.
The night of the opening,
the Russian ambassador was here
and he said, that's great.
That's St. Petersburg
on the left
and Moscow on the right.
[LAUGHTER]
We were, like-- nobody knew.
It's all gone now.
[LAUGHTER]
OK, we play with dollhouses.
You get the point.
This is a selection of George
and Linda Kaufman's
great 18th and early
19th century American furniture,
which is on view in the Central
Gallery
in the West Building, all fit
on somebody's desk.
You can see it in its cardboard
form.
It takes a lot of thinking
and planning to get
to this stage.
That's what you'll see if you're
going in there today, hopefully.
So this is one
of our faux painters.
This is Glenn Perry.
Howard Hodgkins.
It's pretty cool.
And today, there it is.
Now, occasionally, in our job
we do build things that stay,
which is rare,
because mostly what we do
is design temporary exhibitions
that come and go every six
months, more or less.
Anybody know what this is?
It's got to be somebody.
Yeah, right up front.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: The White
House.
MARK LEITHAUSER: The White
House.
The White House.
This is the White House in 1950.
So when somebody's telling you
that you're walking
on the same floors
that Abraham Lincoln walked on,
not exactly.
[LAUGHTER]
So when the White House was
really kind of falling apart
in the '50s, they didn't know
what to do with all
the furniture and somebody said,
hey, you know, the new National
Gallery down the street
has a gymnasium, which we did.
We had a gymnasium, and we still
have a shooting gallery.
So there are
these strange things that
go back.
[LAUGHTER]
So when I came here,
there was a gym.
And it was a storage area
since the 1950s and it had heaps
of carpeting and old baffles
and chairs and every poster,
just everything.
Just a fire hazard
in the middle.
It had two basketball hoops.
It was on a regulation maple
floor.
Beautiful, had the foul lines
and everything on the floor
of the gym.
So the design studio that you
saw a moment ago was right here,
kind of hanging up in this area.
We put a skylight in.
But from more or less exactly
this vantage point, this is what
we built. And we did this about,
gosh 20 or 25 years ago.
So you've seen exhibitions
in there like the first Vermeer
show, Cezanne, Art of Power,
the 18th century French, that's
in there today.
We use these galleries--
Hubert Robert-- we use these all
the time.
And here, this was literally
a broom and mop closet
on the main floor of the West
Building, just off the National
Mall.
And the walls basically are
the structural supports
for the inner dome, which
is the coffered dome that looks
like the Pantheon
and the outer dome, which
is the marble.
And there's an area
in between that you can walk
around.
And there are store rooms way up
there, 81 feet above ground
level.
It's called the 81 foot level.
But this is Floyd Everly who
is our master carpenter
in our office, surveying that.
We decided that what we needed
in this beautifully designed
West Building were more intimate
spaces for small Dutch pictures
like Vermeer.
And that's what we built.
That's where you will see
the Vermeers today.
This is a little plug
for this fall.
But you probably all know we are
having an exhibition of Vermeer
and his contemporaries, more
or less, his competitors.
I think October 21,
it opens, West Building
great show.
10 Vermeers in that show alone.
Now, I know this is
a boring image,
but I'd like to sear this
into your mind.
This was the old lobby that led
to the director's, Carter
Brown's, office on the right.
And all the way down, everyone
was in the West Building,
every curator, the treasurer,
the publications area,
conservation, all the curators.
And this is from the exact spot.
We said, yes, we could build
more galleries or more or less
devote it to sculpture.
And this from this perspective
is what we think we can build,
judging from the plans.
So that's the reality.
If you've ever done home
demolition, do you know how bad
it is.
And it's filled with lead
and it was filled with tons
of asbestos, all of which
had to be taken out.
So we had closets and water
closets, the whole bit.
There were columns where they
weren't supposed to be.
There were no columns
or we thought there would be
columns.
But that's what we built
and that's what there today.
And so we're very proud,
occasionally, to build things
that stay, at least for a while.
And in that vein, more or less,
I think that the installation
of the Calders upstairs
should last for, I hope,
quite some time.
These are some of the kind
of plans that we work
with in the office when we're
trying to come up with an idea.
And then when we get a little
further along, we build a model.
This is Carol.
Carol used to be our sort
of perfect-sized maquette.
We'd move her around because we
knew how big she was.
Very patient woman.
There it goes.
And that's what you see
if you've been up there today.
This is more or less directly
above us.
I'm going to run you
through now.
These are a final series
of images and I think it best
sums up what we do
in the office.
Because we're going to be
concentrating on one area.
This is Tower One, Tower Two,
Tower Three.
Tower Three is a little smaller,
three exterior sky lights, six,
six, and they're connected
by the bridge.
North bridge on Pennsylvania
Avenue and the west bridge
through there.
So this is the public area,
for those of you that don't know
the East Building well.
And this is the private section
of the building.
We had a camera in this room
right from the get go
and this camera will always stay
in the same place.
It doesn't move.
And we took these images,
and this is just a selection
of what has transpired in there
in 39 years.
So let's zip through.
So that's the building before it
opened.
That's Rodin.
Treasure Houses of Britain,
so we got up to 1985.
This is the Palladian section.
Jock Whitney.
So this is a little bit more
like elegant New York apartment.
There's a scrim ceiling
so there's soft daylight coming
in.
It feels a little more domestic.
Georgia O'Keeffe.
Daimyo art from Japan, Momoyama
art.
Frederick Church and the kind
of working off Olana.
And we built
this huge Victorian frame.
Much more complicated
and this was done to raise money
for the Sanitary Commission
during the Civil War.
And it was destroyed,
but we sort of reworked it.
Because it enhanced
the perspective, the sense
that you were on a precipice.
Gifts to the Nation
so these paintings are hanging.
There's Van Gogh's White Roses,
Haseltine, Winslow Homer,
a Toulouse-Lautrec.
And then
another colossal exhibition,
the Circa 1492, three sections,
Europe, from which Columbus
sailed, Cathay, where he thought
he was going, and the new world,
so bang, he comes
right into the Aztec, one
of the great expressionistic
basalt works of art,
Rattlesnake.
The first time that the Barnes
collection left Merion,
Pennsylvania came here.
Prints from the Gemini Workshop.
Claes Oldenburg.
So it was fun working
with Claes, a living artist,
and his late wife, Coosja van
Bruggen. So we laid all this out
together.
It's a BLT, by the way.
[LAUGHTER]
Winslow Homer, more
19th century.
Stations of the Cross, Barnett
Newman.
Now Edo art in Japan,
so we're an 18th, 19th century.
Picasso.
Thomas Moran,
the great late 19th century
American painter.
Alexander Calder.
We worked with Calder's
grandson, Sandy Rower, with whom
we worked, again,
on the installation upstairs.
Recent archaeological finds
from China.
Everything in this show
was excavated in the last 25
years.
It was a breathtaking show.
American Modernism.
Art Nouveau.
And now, this room, just
to pause here for a minute,
this was a very eccentric room
that had no right angles.
And if ever there was a room
more or less designed for Hector
Guimard, the designer
of the metro stations,
if ever there was a room that
would not have a life after 90
days, it was this room.
But this is exactly
the same room with paint
and we patched up, obviously,
the architectural grid
on the wall.
And it worked very well
for Henry Moore during the World
War II years.
It's the same room.
Two mummies, put them in,
paint it, Valley of the Kings.
But for Kirchner,
hard-edged German expressionist
works, it did not.
So that is changed.
And now to show you how little
happens in a room like this.
The only change here
is the doors are six inches
narrower for Romare Bearden.
But for a Maya exhibition
and a small recreation
of the Temple of Bonampak,
we needed to change the room.
Again, Dan Flavin required
his own spaces.
Dada was a big sprawling
exhibition in six
different cities.
And then Le Douanier, Rousseau,
Henri Rousseau
and the Naive painter.
This is a good slide to talk
to graphic designers
about enlargements
because this was a wood
engraving about 9 by 12.
And you can blow those up
with clarity almost to any size.
And in a sense, it defined,
I think, very well--
or, underscored the theme
of the exhibition, which
the title was Jungles in Paris.
And Rousseau, who was
a postal clerk,
never left Paris.
So if you look closely,
you see he's actually
in the greenhouse
like the Botanical Gardens.
And then Hopper.
Same room, we put in a skylight
and painted it.
And the same curved wall
for Barbizon painting.
Same skylight.
Now we are working with Pompeii.
Postwar art from the Meyerhoffs.
Canaletto and his rivals.
Andy Warhol.
Joan Miro, these are more
or less all
of his wonderful Constellation
paintings.
Large paintings by Lichtenstein.
These are big.
These are 10 foot doors, just
to give you a sense of how big
that room is.
And then, Diaghilev, which was
the last exhibition up
in that space until we
closed for three years.
We stripped it out like that.
That's the way it looks today.
The good old rooster.
Seen from the top.
[LAUGHTER]
And that--
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
