The Anxious Eye: German Expressionism and Its Legacy @ National Gallery of Art, Washington

The Anxious Eye: 

German Expressionism and Its Legacy

National Gallery of Art, Washington

February 11 - May 27, 2024

Max Pechstein

Nude, 1909

Watercolor on brown paper

overall: 33.8 x 43.9 cm (13 5/16 x 17 5/16 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Rosenwald Collection

Otto Mueller

Two Bathers, c. 1920

Color crayons and watercolor

overall: 68.7 x 52.8 cm (27 1/16 x 20 13/16 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Rosenwald Collection

Lovis Corinth

The Fall of Man (Der südenfall), 1919

Color woodcut monotype

sheet: 30.5 x 23.5 cm (12 x 9 1/4 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund

Conrad Felixmüller

Couple in the Woods (Menschen Im Wald), 1918

Color woodcut on wove paper

block: 25.1 x 30.2 cm (9 7/8 x 11 7/8 in.)

sheet: 35.2 x 42.4 cm (13 7/8 x 16 11/16 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Ruth Cole Kainen

Max Beckmann

Group Portrait, Eden Bar (Gruppenbildnis Edenbar), 1923

Woodcut on heavy Japan paper

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Rosenwald Collection

Through their bold distortions, angular, simplified forms, and use of non-naturalistic colors, the German expressionists sought to convey complex emotional and psychological responses to their changing world during the social, cultural, and political upheavals of the early 20th century. Dissatisfied with conventional social norms, the German expressionists rejected academic conceptions of idealized, timeless beauty and instead pursued daring artistic strategies that would both reflect and contribute to revolutionary change. The Anxious Eye: German Expressionism and Its Legacy presents insights into the work of these inventive artists and their continuing impact in the 21st century. Many of these artists were drawn to the expressive possibilities of printmaking. They achieved a range of textures and tonalities in their prints, from the fine, velvety lines of drypoint to the alternating crisply splintered or gesturally gouged marks of woodcut, and from the granular crayon and wash-like drawing effects of lithography to the subtle shifts in continuous tone that are possible in aquatint. Additionally, the various approaches to applying ink and use of different color inks in their prints were well suited to the artists’ desire to experiment with materials.

The exhibition is on view in the West Building of the National Gallery of Art. It features more than 100 prints, drawings, illustrated books, portfolios, and two sculptures. The works range in date from 1908 to 2021. All of the works, including recent acquisitions and works that have rarely been on view, are drawn from the National Gallery’s permanent collection. Works by such well-known artists as Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Käthe Kollwitz, Emil Nolde, and Egon Schiele will be seen alongside prints by lesser-known artists, including Paul Gangolf, Walter Gramatté, and Otto Mueller.

“This exhibition invites visitors to consider the striking parallels between the intensity of human emotion and experience conveyed in the work of the German expressionists during a transformational historic period in the early 20th century and current responses to the cultural and political shifts taking place in our world today,” said Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art.

Divided into four thematic sections, The Anxious Eye: German Expressionism and Its Legacy features works of art that focus on portraits and modern life; nature and spirituality; relationships and body language; and the “legacy” of German expressionism. This exhibition shares insights drawn from the increased understanding we now have of the complexities and impact of World War I, which concluded more than a century ago in 1918. It also introduces new approaches to broadening conventional art historical narratives. Artists working in Germany and Austria in the 1910s and 1920s challenged themselves to create expressive strategies for making art that reflected a heightened understanding and authentic representation of human experience amidst rapid social, cultural, and geopolitical transformations. The final room of the exhibition explores these ideas in the work of later artists whose similar approaches to mark making, materials, and sense of immediacy have been employed to respond to comparable circumstances and concerns—the most strikingly analogous circumstances being those facing contemporary artists working today.

Walter Gramatté

Die grosse Angst (Selbstportrat, Kopf im Halbprofil nach rechts), 1918

Drypoint with extensive additions in watercolor

Sheet: 30 x 23.81 cm (11 13/16 x 9 3/8 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, 

Gift of Christopher and Beverly With 

in memory of Karl and Gerda With

The first room features penetrating portraits and self-portraits that focus on inner thoughts and emotional states of being rather than realistic accuracy of appearance. These works draw on concepts that were then emerging about personality traits and states of mind as developed by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, groundbreaking psychology scholars and philosophers in the early 20th century. The incisive diagonals, quavering lines, and gnarled fingers of the figure in Die Grosse Angst (The Great Anxiety), Walter Gramatté’s 1918 self-portrait, and the close cropping and gouged, carved, and scratched marks that define the facial features in the woodcut portrait Fanny Wocke (1916) by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner demonstrate the ways artists used the characteristics of different media to impart emotional intensity. Prints and illustrated books by Max Beckmann, Lovis Corinth, Otto Dix, Paul Gangolf, and George Grosz convey the emotional and political timbre of the time by showing the dynamics of modern life, increasingly congested cities and the accompanying sense of isolation and anonymity within them, dissatisfaction with the existing social order and bourgeois values, and the horrors of World War I.

The second gallery presents the religious subjects and landscapes that artists pursued in seeking refuge from the complexities and stress of daily life on one hand, while questioning faith and humankind’s destructive impact on the world on the other. Some of the highlights in this section include Lovis Corinth’s and Otto Mueller’s representations of the Old Testament story of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, Karl Schmidt-Rotluff’s dazzling pink and green woodcut of rocky mountains, and Emil Nolde’s murky view of the harbor in Hamburg, Germany.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Two Women (Zwei Frauen), 1914

Color lithograph printed in black and orange

image: 42 x 32 cm (16 9/16 x 12 5/8 in.)

sheet: 53.8 x 41.9 cm (21 3/16 x 16 1/2 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Ruth Cole Kainen

Emil Nolde

Dancer (Tänzerin), 1913

5-color lithograph on japan paper

sheet: 60.2 x 77.5 cm (23 11/16 x 30 1/2 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund

Egon Schiele

Standing Nude with a Patterned Robe, 1917

gouache and black crayon on buff paper

sheet: 29.3 x 45.9 cm (11 9/16 x 18 1/16 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, 

Gift of The Robert and Mary M. Looker Family Collection

The German expressionists were fascinated by the ways gestures and movement could signify love, fear, sorrow, joy, and other aspects of people’s emotional state or personality. The different approaches these artists explored to depict the body, sexuality, and interpersonal relationships are featured in the third gallery. The tensions that can arise between husband and wife are represented by the green band that cuts horizontally across the composition in Walter Gramatté’s The Couple (Self-Portrait with Wife) of 1922. Love and security are felt in Käthe Kollwitz’s bronze relief In God’s Hands (1935/1936), which shows a small child protectively enveloped in the arms of an adult (represented only by a pair of hands). Counter to the traditional academic depictions of idealized nudes, these artists embraced a range of body types and discomforting positions, from the exaggeratedly puckered colorful surface of Egon Schiele’s Standing Nude with Patterned Robe (1917) to the awkwardly posed model kneeling on a rug in Erich Heckel’s Nude (c. 1913). Sources of inspiration include the art of Africa and the South Pacific Islands, which were inaccurately viewed through the bias of colonialism as “primitive” societies untainted by “civilization.” Elongated and exaggerated shapes, and the manner of articulation of certain features, as seen in the front-facing figure in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s lithograph Two Women (1914) and his rough-hewn wooden sculpture Head of a Woman (1913), and the dynamic movement in Emil Nolde’s color lithograph Dancer (Tänzerin) (1913) demonstrate the artists’ investigation of what they misinterpreted as “primal” aesthetic sensibilities that express vital forces of human experience.

Rashid Johnson

Untitled Anxious Red, 2021

Screenprint on wove paper

Image and sheet: 57.5 x 77.4 cm (22 5/8 x 30 1/2 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund

The final room presents the legacy of German expressionism and how artists continue to draw upon its stylistic approaches to convey the heightened emotional and psychological experiences that accompany transformational moments in society. Among the highlights is Leonard Baskin’s The Hydrogen Man (1954), whose one-armed transparent figure, rendered in an intricate network of woodcut lines, warns of the ravages of modern nuclear warfare. Rashid Johnson’s grid of highly abstract boxes of “scribbled” faces fills the composition Untitled Anxious Red (2021), which was created during the COVID pandemic. It captures not only the elevated fear of contracting a deadly disease but also the challenge of negotiating the anxiety of being a Black man in America with tensions heightened by the death of George Floyd and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. Among the National Gallery’s recent acquisitions are Nicole Eisenman’s Beer Garden (2012–2017), which combines self-portraiture with various “types” of caricatured figures that recall Max Beckmann’s prints in the first gallery, and Orit Hofshi’s Time… thou ceaseless lackey to eternity (2017), in which the artist, standing in a landscape ravaged by war and climate change, is surrounded by displaced people seeking refuge and a path to a better future.

The Anxious Eye: German Expressionism and Its Legacy is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, which is the only venue, and is curated by Shelley Langdale, curator and head of modern and contemporary prints and drawings, National Gallery of Art.

NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART

Sixth Street and Constitution Avenue NW, Washington, DC 

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Dorothea Lange @ National Gallery of Art, Washington DC - "Dorothea Lange: Seeing People" Exhibition

Dorothea Lange: Seeing People 

National Gallery of Art, Washington DC 

November 5, 2023 – March 31, 2024 

Dorothea Lange

Child Living in Oklahoma City Shacktown, August 1936

gelatin silver print

image: 24.2 x 19.4 cm (9 1/2 x 7 5/8 in.)

mat: 17 x 14 in.

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase

Dorothea Lange

End of Shift, 3:30, Shipyard Construction Workers, Richmond, California, September 1943

gelatin silver print

image: 24 x 19 cm (9 7/16 x 7 1/2 in.)

sheet: 25.4 x 20.32 cm (10 x 8 in.)

mat: 18 x 14 in.

frame (outside): 19 x 15 in.

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

Dorothea Lange

Line of men inside a division office of the State Employment Service office at San Francisco, California, waiting to register for unemployment benefits, January 1938, printed c. 1960s

gelatin silver print

image: 19 x 24 cm (7 1/2 x 9 7/16 in.)

sheet: 25.08 x 20.32 cm (9 7/8 x 8 in.)

mat: 14 x 17 in.

frame (outside): 15 x 18 in.

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

Dorothea Lange

Formerly Enslaved Woman, Alabama, from The American Country Woman, 1938, printed c. 1955

gelatin silver print

image: 24 x 19 cm (9 7/16 x 7 1/2 in.)

sheet: 25 x 20 cm (9 13/16 x 7 7/8 in.)

mat: 16 x 13 in.

frame (outside): 17 x 14 in.

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

During her prolific and groundbreaking career, the American photographer Dorothea Lange (1895–1965) made some of the most iconic portraits of the 20th century. Dorothea Lange: Seeing People examines Dorothea Lange’s decades-long investigation into how portrait photography could embody the humanity of the people she depicted. It demonstrates how her photographs helped shape contemporary documentary practice by connecting everyday people with moments of history—from the Great Depression through the mid-1960s—that still resonate with our lives in the 21st century. Featuring 101 photographs, the exhibition addresses her innovative approaches to picturing people, emphasizing her work on various social issues including economic disparity, migration, poverty, and racism. The exhibition is on view in the West Building of the National Gallery of Art.

“Throughout the course of her 50-year career, Lange created an intensely humanistic body of work that sought to transform how we see and understand people,” said Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art. “Merging her skills as a portrait artist, a social documentary photographer, and a storyteller, she helped redefine photography through images that emphasize social issues.”

Dorothea Lange: Seeing People examines how Lange’s portraits have shaped our contemporary understanding of documentary photography as well as its importance to her vision and creative practice. Divided into six thematic sections, the exhibition features portraits ranging from her early career as a San Francisco studio photographer—the earliest work is from 1919—and her powerful coverage of the Great Depression through expressive photographs of everyday people and communities during the 1950s and early 1960s.

Among the works on view are portraits of Indigenous people in Arizona and New Mexico from the 1920s and early 1930s; later depictions of striking laborers, migrant farmworkers, rural African Americans during the Jim Crow era, Japanese Americans denied their civil rights during World War II, and postwar baby boomers; and portraits of people in Ireland, Korea, Vietnam, Egypt, and Venezuela that Lange made in the decade before her death in 1965.

Lange began her career as a commercial studio photographer in San Francisco in 1918. Her studio became a gathering spot for artists who had serious discussions about photography and art. In 1920 she married Maynard Dixon, a painter of western subjects, who encouraged Lange to take her photography outside. She accompanied him on trips through the American Southwest, photographing rural landscapes and Dixon at work, along with the Indigenous communities he was portraying.

She started to work in the streets of San Francisco in 1933, making photographs such as White Angel Breadline, San Francisco, California (1933) that capture the effects of the Great Depression and the plight of the city’s dispossessed men and women. Lange also photographed labor organizers and protesters at May Day events around San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza: she focused on the protesters speaking, listening, or holding signs, and vowed to produce prints within 24 hours, as in May Day, San Francisco, California (1934). She also documented ensuing strikes, creating portraits of speakers and demonstrators with placards as well as photographs of the police presence in works such as Street Demonstration, San Francisco (1934). When she met the labor economist Paul Schuster Taylor in 1934, Lange began to photograph the plight of migrant farmers who had moved to California from the South and Midwest seeking new livelihoods.

Dorothea Lange

Dispossessed Arkansas farmers. These people are resettling themselves on the dump outside of

Bakersfield, California, from An American Exodus, 1935

gelatin silver print

image: 24.1 x 18.8 cm (9 1/2 x 7 3/8 in.)

sheet: 25.3 x 20.7 cm (9 15/16 x 8 1/8 in.)

mat: 16 x 14 in.

frame (outside): 17 x 15 in.

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

Dorothea Lange

Street Meeting, San Francisco, 1934

gelatin silver print

image/sheet: 23.5 x 17.5 cm (9 1/4 x 6 7/8 in.)

mat: 16 x 13 in.

frame (outside): 17 x 14 in.

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

Dorothea Lange

Japanese American-Owned Grocery Store, Oakland, California, March 1942

gelatin silver print

image: 19 x 24.4 cm (7 1/2 x 9 5/8 in.)

sheet: 20.3 x 25.4 cm (8 x 10 in.)

mat: 14 x 18 in.

frame (outside): 15 x 19 in.

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

Dorothea Lange

Unemployed Man, San Francisco, California, 1934, printed before 1950

gelatin silver print

image: 24.8 x 19.1 cm (9 3/4 x 7 1/2 in.)

sheet: 25.2 x 19.6 cm (9 15/16 x 7 11/16 in.)

mat: 16 x 14 in.

frame (outside): 17 x 15 in.

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

Dorothea Lange

Demonstration, San Francisco, 1934

gelatin silver print

image: 12.1 x 14.3 cm (4 3/4 x 5 5/8 in.)

sheet: 12.1 x 14.3 cm (4 3/4 x 5 5/8 in.)

mount: 14.6 x 23.8 cm (5 3/4 x 9 3/8 in.)

Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gilman Collection, Purchase, Joseph M. Cohen Gift, 2005

(2005.100.309)

From 1935 to 1943, while working for the for the US Resettlement Administration, Farm Security Administration, and War Relocation Authority, Lange focused on the resilience of Depression-era families, farmworkers, rural cooperative communities, migrant camps, and the forced incarceration of Japanese Americans in the early days of World War II. The resulting images illustrate the human and economic impact wrought across the United States by farm tenancy, racism, the legacy of slavery, climate change, and migrations. These portraits, sometimes combined with interviews, added a personal element to Lange’s stark pictures of makeshift housing and agricultural fields and cemented her documentary style.

During World War II Lange produced one of her most powerful series for the War Relocation Authority, depicting the forced incarceration of California’s Japanese Americans at Manzanar, in works on view such as Grandfather and Grandson of Japanese Ancestry at a War Relocation Authority Center, Manzanar, California (July 1942). She also photographed the shifts in California’s social fabric as its rising economy—sparked by growing defense industries—drew African Americans from the South and women into previously male-dominated and segregated businesses such as shipbuilding. In the 1950s, Lange continued to pursue stories about people and their communities for personal projects, as well as for Life magazine, that include her first photographs from Europe. Asia, South America, and North Africa.

Exhibition Publication

Dorothea Lange: Seing People

Published by the National Gallery of Art and distributed by Yale University Press, this 208-page illustrated volume explores Dorothea Lange’s decades-long investigation of how photography, through articulating people’s core values and their sense of self, helped to expand our current understanding of portraiture and the meaning of documentary practice. Lange’s sensitive, humane portraits of often-marginalized people galvanized public understanding of important social problems in the 20th century.

Compassion guided Lange’s early portraits of Indigenous people in Arizona and New Mexico from the 1920s and 1930s, as well as her depictions of striking workers, migrant farmers, rural African Americans during the Jim Crow era, Japanese Americans in internment camps, and the people she met while traveling in Europe, Asia, Venezuela, and Egypt. Drawing on new research, Philip Brookman, Sarah Greenough, Andrea Nelson, and Laura Wexler, examine Lange’s roots in studio portraiture and demonstrate how her influential and widely seen photographs addressed issues of identity as well as social, economic, and racial inequalities—topics that remain as relevant for our times as they were for hers.

The exhibition is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

This exhibition is curated by Philip Brookman, consulting curator in the department of photographs, National Gallery of Art.

NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART

6th Street and Constitution Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20565

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Sam Gilliam @ National Gallery of Art, Washington - Gift of Elinor K. Farquhar

Sam Gilliam - Acquisition

Gift of Elinor K. Farquhar 

National Gallery of Art, Washington

Sam Gilliam

Yellow Edge, 1972

Acrylic on canvas

Overall: 139.7 x 114.3 cm (55 x 45 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington

Gift of Elinor K. Farquhar 

2023.17.1

American artist SAM GILLIAM (1933–2022) was associated with the Washington Color School, a group of Washington, DC-area abstract artists focused on color field painting from the 1950s to the 1970s. The National Gallery of Art has acquired Yellow Edge (1972), an example of Sam Gilliam’s revolutionary beveled-edge Slice paintings. The work was given to the National Gallery by Elinor K. Farquhar. Yellow Edge exemplifies Sam Gilliam’s innovations in process and display from the 1960s and 1970s and his predilection for bright hues, which are seen in much of his 1970s work.

Sam Gilliam came to Washington, DC, in 1962 and joined the second generation of Washington Color School painters. Like the first generation of the group, which included Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, Sam Gilliam was interested in the expressive qualities of color. By applying acrylic paint to unprimed canvas, his work took on an organic, intuitive quality. As he became more interested in process and the ways he could manipulate his materials, Sam Gilliam developed more innovative techniques that allowed the materials to manipulate themselves.

Throughout the 1970s, Sam Gilliam would alternate making his celebrated Drape paintings with his Slice paintings, in which he stretched canvas over beveled-edge frames. The Slice paintings protrude from the wall so that they are encountered, rather than simply seen, by the viewer. The rich atmosphere of Yellow Edge is dominated by a sea of orange acrylic with stains of acidic yellow across the surface. Splashes of red and blue appear in the top left, bottom right, and middle of the canvas, as a pool of electric green seems to emerge from an amorphous field of yellow in the lower right corner.

Sam Gilliam was the first African American artist to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1972. Among other prizes, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Art Institute of Chicago’s Norman Walt Harris Prize. He received honorary doctorates from the University of Louisville in 1980 and Northwestern University in 1990. Sam Gilliam’s works have been acquired by numerous museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the Walker Art Center.

NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART

Sixth Street and Constitution Avenue NW, Washington, DC

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Early Photographs of African American Life @ National Gallery of Art, Washington with the Acquisition of the Ross J. Kelbaugh Collection

National Gallery of Art Acquires the Ross J. Kelbaugh Collection of 19th- and early 20th-Century American Photographs

Portrait of a Man, c. 1855

American 19th Century

Daguerreotype with applied color

Image (visible): 7 x 5.7 cm (2 3/4 x 2 1/4 in.)

Mat: 8 x 7 cm (3 1/8 x 2 3/4 in.)

Case (closed): 9.5 x 8.3 x 1.6 cm (3 3/4 x 3 1/4 x 5/8 in.

National Gallery of Art, Washington

Ross J. Kelbaugh Collection, 

Purchased with support from the Ford Foundation

2023.39.6

The National Gallery of Art has acquired the Ross J. Kelbaugh Collection, one of the most important holdings of 19th- and early 20th-century American vernacular photographs, purchased with support from the Ford Foundation. Formed over 50 years, it includes 248 photographs of and by African Americans made from the 1840s through the early 20th century that provide compelling insights into the forces that have helped shape modern America and the lives of everyday people. The collection will be featured as part of the National Gallery’s commemoration in 2026 of the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding, presenting an opportunity to reflect on our past as depicted and lived by artists and look to the future.

“The exceptional photographs in the Ross J. Kelbaugh Collection,” said Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, “include images by celebrated early Black photographers and powerful depictions of African Americans—some renowned, some unknown—that expand the story of 19th and early 20th century American photographic portraiture.”

“As a young social studies teacher in the Baltimore County public schools some 50 years ago, Ross Kelbaugh recognized that he could use photographs as a springboard for learning in his classroom,” said Sarah Greenough, senior curator and head of the department of photographs at the National Gallery. “He knew that the numerous photographs of African Americans that he discovered as he built his collection—pictures that were largely overlooked by other collectors at the time—could engage his racially diverse students, allowing them to see that everyone’s past, as he has written, ‘is an integral part of this nation’s story of E pluribus unum, out of many, one.’”

“After decades of collecting adventures, I am honored to have this portion of my photographic treasures now join the National Gallery of Art, where they can be studied and appreciated by everyone. These photographers and the people preserved in their photographs can finally become a permanent part of the American memory,” said Ross J. Kelbaugh.

The Kelbaugh collection includes 11 rare photographs by the three most celebrated early Black photographers: James Presley Ball, Glenalvin Goodridge, and Augustus Washington. 

James Presley Ball (1825–1905) was a freeman born in Frederick County, Virginia, who learned photography at an early age. By 24, he had opened Ball’s Great Daguerrean Gallery of the West in Cincinnati, where he became an award-winning artist, internationally celebrated for his portraits of well-known white individuals, such as Jenny Lind, and African Americans, including Frederick Douglass. He also employed the African American painter Robert Seldon Duncanson to hand color and retouch photographs. 

Glenalvin Goodridge (1829–1867) was the son of a formerly enslaved man turned entrepreneur whose home in York, Pennsylvania, was a stop on the Underground Railroad. Goodridge opened a daguerrean studio there in 1847, which prospered until 1862 when he was falsely convicted of a crime and sentenced to five years in prison; he was subsequently pardoned by the governor. 

Augustus Washington (1820/1821–1875), the son of a freeman and an Asian woman, learned how to make daguerreotypes while he was a student at Dartmouth College. He set up a daguerrean studio in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1846 where he photographed both Black and white clients. He ran the studio until 1854, when he emigrated to Liberia to avoid discrimination and enjoy equal rights.

“With their compelling stories, these three men represent important examples of Black entrepreneurship and the struggle for equality and justice in the years before and after Emancipation,” said Diane Waggoner, curator of photographs at the National Gallery.

The Kelbaugh collection contains many pictures of African Americans—several were made without the consent of their subjects, often to support white concepts of family, wealth, and status. Among these images are disquieting photographs of African American women shown attentively caring for their white charges while they were denied the ability to form their own stable family units. In one haunting picture of two young African American girls holding hands, a label pasted on the front states “Peculiar Institution”—the euphemism used by John C. Calhoun and other defenders of slavery in the South. Other images were taken to aid abolitionist causes and sold to support the education of newly freed people; for example, the carte de visite entitled Wilson Chinn, a Branded Slave from Louisiana depicts a man wearing a spiked neck collar, ankle chains, and an iron leg brace. While the purpose of other photographs is not known, the picture of two men—one Black, one white—holding hands could reflect the widely embraced abolitionist slogan “Am I not a Man and a Brother?”

Most of the pictures in the Kelbaugh collection were made to bear witness to Black pride and accomplishment. Although the identity of several of the people depicted is unknown, their elegant clothing and determined, self-confident expressions suggest that they were freemen and freewomen eager to record their prosperity. Many were made to ensure that history remembered their subjects, such as the tintype with color applied by an unknown artist that included a slip of paper inscribed “Annie/Remember Me.” Several images celebrate acts that were previously denied to African Americans. For example, an unknown Civil War soldier paid extra for the photographer to highlight with gold not only his ring, brass buttons, and belt buckle, but also his knife and revolver, which he, like other African Americans, had previously been prohibited from possessing. After Emancipation, in an important rebuttal to the practice of depicting enslaved women with white children, some prosperous African American women had themselves recorded with their own children, while others had their children depicted carrying haversacks, as if on their way to school, another right previously denied to African Americans. Still others depicted themselves with books, proudly projecting an air of defiance.

The Kelbaugh collection also includes photographs of celebrated African Americans, such as Frederick Douglass and Josiah Henson (whose courage and resilience inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe’s portrayal of the hero in her book Uncle Tom’s Cabin). Several pictures directly address the history of enslavement, such as depictions of the “Slave Pen” in Alexandria, Virginia (1861); enslaved people on Edisto Island (1862); and recently freed enslaved people on the Bullard Plantation, Louisiana (1864). Other pictures address Reconstruction, such as one of an African American cowboy and images from the Jim Crow era. The collection extends into the 20th century, with compelling portraits of distinguished African American members of the Knights of Pythias and World War I and II soldiers.

NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART

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Lorser Feitelson @ National Gallery of Art, Washington - Acquisition

Lorser Feitelson 

National Gallery of Art, Washington - Acquisition

An important figure in the development of West Coast modernism, LORSER FEITELSON (1898–1978) is best known for his abstract paintings of the 1950s through the 1970s. The National Gallery of Art has received two transitional works of 1945—a painting and a drawing— from the collection of Tobey C. Moss. The works capture Lorser Feitelson’s stylistic shift from surrealism and cubism into abstraction.

Featuring flamelike abstract shapes in red, orange, blue, and turquoise with two small, biomorphic forms at bottom center, Dancers (Magical Forms) (1945) shows the transition from a surrealist style influenced by Yves Tanguy to the rhythmic abstraction that would characterize Lorser Feitelson’s "ribbon" paintings of the 1960s and 1970s, including the National Gallery's Untitled (1964). Figure Evolving into Magical Forms (1946), a small study in ink on paper, depicts several distinct forms, from a seated female figure seen in three-quarters view in sharp light, to blocky abstract shapes that convey the simplified bent gesture of her neck and head.

Lorser Feitelson - Biography

Born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1898, LORSER FEITELSON soon moved with his family to New York City. After attending the 1913 Armory Show and being inspired by its modernist works, he immersed himself in the growing community of New York artists. In the 1920s he relocated to Paris, hoping to find an audience that would be more receptive to modern art. He settled in Los Angeles in 1927, where he began teaching at the Chouinard Art Institute and organizing exhibitions with groups of fellow artists. He was an informal mentor to Philip Guston, whose early works show Lorser Feitelson's influence. In 1934 Lorser Feitelson founded the so-called post-Surreal movement with his future wife and close collaborator, the artist Helen Lundeberg. During this time, he also began creating murals across Los Angeles as part of the California Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project.  He was one of the four artists featured in the landmark 1959 Four Abstract Classicists exhibition curated by Jules Langsner at the Los Angeles County Museum in Exposition Park. From the mid-1960s, influenced by minimalism, Lorser Feitelson began reducing his compositions, creating sleek paintings comprised of sensuous lines set against solid backgrounds of color. Lorser Feitelson’s work was featured in Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design and Culture at Midcentury (2007) at the Orange County Museum of Art, as well as the J. Paul Getty Museum’s Pacific Standard Time (2011–2012). Works by Lorser Feitelson are in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and numerous other public and private collections.

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Philip Guston Now @ National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Philip Guston Now

National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

March 2 – August 27, 2023

Philip Guston

Nude Philosopher in Space-Time, 1935

oil on canvas

overall: 116.21 × 62.87 cm (45 3/4 × 24 3/4 in.)

Private Collection

© The Estate of Philip Guston

Philip Guston

Passage, 1957-1958

Oil on canvas

Overall: 165.1 × 188.6 cm (65 × 74 1/4 in.)

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. 

Bequest of Caroline Wiess Law, 2004.20

© The Estate of Philip Guston

One of America's greatest modern painters, PHILIP GUSTON (1913–1980) bridged the personal and the political, the abstract and the figurative, and the humorous and the tragic in paintings of lively touch and memorable impact. A major retrospective of the artist, Philip Guston Now, presents of the full scope of the artist's 50-year career. Organized by the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Tate Modern, London, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the exhibition is on view in the National Gallery's East Building from March 2 through August 27, 2023. The exhibition will then travel to Tate Modern, which will be its final venue.

“Philip Guston has inspired generations of artists—not just for his remarkable paintings, but also for his courage. We hope this complete look at Guston’s career connects a wide audience with his art’s power and continued relevance,” said Kaywin Feldman, director, National Gallery of Art. “We are grateful to the many people, both inside and outside the museum, whose voices have challenged, guided, and inspired us as we prepared our presentation of the exhibition. The lessons we’ve learned and new processes we’ve implemented will allow us to better fulfill our mission of serving the nation in all its complexity.”

The presentation at the National Gallery will include approximately 110 paintings and 115 drawings from some 40 public and private collections—the largest presentation among the four venues, with more than 30 paintings and drawings on view only in Washington. Also unique to the museum’s presentation is a separate installation on the East Building Ground Floor of all 73 drawings from Guston’s series of Poor Richard drawings, inspired by the life and career of Richard Nixon, which are a promised gift of the Guston Foundation to the National Gallery of Art.

Related programs offer both in-person and virtual opportunities to get inspired by Philip Guston's art. A conversation on Guston’s public artworks is also a rare chance to see one of his largest commissioned murals, The Reconstruction and Well-Being of the Family (1943) in the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building in Southwest DC. Other offerings include a virtual studio that invites participants to make their own artistic creations.

Since the exhibition’s postponement in 2020, the National Gallery has been broadly rethinking its exhibitions processes, including how to meaningfully engage a wider range of perspectives. Among these are the voices of external advisors, including thinkers, artists, educators, and community leaders, and internal advisors, including staff most directly involved with the public. These conversations, framed by the National Gallery’s people-centered mission, vision, values and strategic priorities, have generated new insights into the impact of our work, and have influenced interpretive, design, and operational decisions, including the opening date of the exhibition. The new opening date of March 2, 2023, rather than February 26, 2023, allows more time for training and conversation for front-facing staff and also addresses concerns about opening the exhibition during Black History Month.

Philip Guston

Untitled, 1968

Acrylic on panel

Overall: 49.53 × 41.91 cm (19 1/2 × 16 1/2 in.)

Private Collection

© The Estate of Philip Guston

Philip Guston

Untitled (Shoe), 1968-1973

Oil on panel

Overall: 24.77 × 30.48 cm (9 3/4 × 12 in.)

Private Collection

© The Estate of Philip Guston

Philip Guston

Poor Richard (no. 37), 1971

Ink on paper

Overall: 26.67 × 35.24 cm (10 1/2 × 13 7/8 in.)

The Guston Foundation

© The Estate of Philip Guston

Philip Guston

Painting, Smoking, Eating, 1973

Oil on canvas

Overall: 196.85 × 262.89 cm (77 1/2 × 103 1/2 in.)

Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

© The Estate of Philip Guston

EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS

Philip Guston Now charts the 50-year career of one of America’s most influential modern artists. The exhibition follows Philip Guston’s epic, winding career as he changes artistic styles, explores abstraction, moves in and out political involvement, and finally arrives at the dark, tragicomic imagery of his late work.

Following a new short biographical video, the exhibition begins with Guston’s Painter’s Table (1973), a promised gift of Ambassador and Mrs. Donald Blinken to the National Gallery. This “painting about painting” features various motifs Guston used in his late works—cigarette butts, books, an eyeball, shoes, irons, a lightbulb, and spikes.

The exhibition continues with works Guston made at the beginning of his career in the 1930s and 1940s, including early forays into politics and contemporary events such as Bombardment (1937), from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, made in response to the April 1937 Nazi bombing of the Spanish town of Guernica. Philip Guston’s progress toward abstraction is shown in such pivotal examples as The Tormentors (1947–1948) from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Next comes a presentation of Philip Guston's abstract period—a rich group of some 20 paintings and drawings made between 1950 and 1965 showing his embrace of abstract expressionism (the dominant tendency in New York at the time), followed by his growing doubts about that movement. This gallery includes several works not seen at the previous venues, including Native’s Return (1957), from the Phillips Collection, and The Return (1956–1958), from Tate Modern.

The experiments that gradually brought Philip Guston all the way back to figuration are represented by a dazzling array of some 50 small works made between 1966 and 1972, including what he called “pure” drawings and “object” drawings, in which he developed his new vocabulary of hoods, books, bricks, and shoes. These objects would appear in the large-scale paintings that were displayed in his groundbreaking Marlborough Gallery show in 1970.

The Marlborough show was shocking at the time for Philip Guston’s abandonment of abstraction in favor of a raw, cartoony figuration—but today it is the paintings’ anti-hero, a hooded Ku Klux Klan figure, that grabs our attention. Guston was impelled to return to this figure, which had first appeared in his protest art of the 1930s, by Vietnam War and civil rights demonstrations that triggered childhood memories of Klan racist violence and police brutality.

As Guston contemplated his own unwitting complicity in the injustices of his time, he made “self-portraits” of artists in Klan hoods in works such as The Studio (1969). Philip Guston Now includes the largest reunion of paintings from his pivotal Marlborough Gallery show—in total 12 of the original 33 paintings shown. At the National Gallery these include the imposing Courtroom (1970), from the Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection.

Philip Guston

Legend, 1977

Oil on canvas

Overall: 175.26 × 199.39 cm (69 × 78 1/2 in.)

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. 

Museum purchase funded by the Alice Pratt Brown Museum Fund, 88.35

© The Estate of Philip Guston

Philip Guston

The Ladder, 1978

Oil on canvas

Overall: 177.8 x 274.3 cm (70 x 108 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Edward R. Broida

© The Estate of Philip Guston

The final three rooms of the exhibition present a powerful selection of large, often symbolic and confessional paintings of the later 1970s that form the artist's last major artistic statement. Works in this section only on view in Washington are The Street (1977) from The Metropolitan Museum of Art; two related paintings, Balance (1979) and Reverse (1979), from private collections; and seven smaller single images (a sandwich, a pile of cherries, a kettle) in acrylic and ink made in 1980 in Philip Guston's final days. In an adjoining auditorium visitors can watch Michael Blackwood’s 1982 documentary, Philip Guston: A Life Lived, which features extensive interviews with the artist.

Upstairs, a separate installation displays the full set of Philip Guston’s Poor Richard drawings, a promised gift to the nation from the Guston Foundation. Conceived by the artist as a book, the satirical drawings of Richard Nixon and his associates were unpublished during his lifetime. These galleries also include the only painting the artist made of Nixon—San Clemente (1975), from Glenstone Museum—and City (1969), a promised gift of Musa Guston Mayer to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

EXHIBITION DATES

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, May 1–September 11, 2022 Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, October 23, 2022–January 15, 2023 National Gallery of Art, Washington, March 2–August 27, 2023, Tate Modern, October 3, 2023–February 25, 2024

EXHIBITION ORGANIZATION

The exhibition is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Tate Modern, London; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

EXHIBITION CURATOR

The National Gallery of Art’s presentation of Philip Guston Now is organized by Harry Cooper, senior curator and head, department of modern and contemporary art.

PUBLICATIONS

PHILIP GUSTON NOW

Published in 2020 by the National Gallery of Art and D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, Inc., Philip Guston Now includes essays by the exhibition's co-curators and leading art historians; a detailed chronology of the artist’s life and work based on new research; and reflections by 10 of the most daring contemporary artists on their engagement with Guston and the impact of his work and legacy.

PHILIP GUSTON, POOR RICHARD

Also released in 2020, Poor Richard by Philip Guston publishes the artist’s 73 satirical, imaginative drawings of Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Spiro Agnew, and John Mitchell, including an original title page. Conceived as a book, the drawings were unpublished during Philip Guston’s lifetime were not exhibited until September 2001.

Both publications are available at shop.nga.gov

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Vittore Carpaccio @ NGA, Washington DC - Master Storyteller of Renaissance Venice, National Gallery of Art

Vittore Carpaccio 

Master Storyteller of Renaissance Venice 

National Gallery of Art, Washington 

November 20, 2022 – February 12, 2023

Vittore Carpaccio

Virgin Reading, c. 1510

Oil on canvas transferred from panel

Overall: 78 x 51 cm (30 11/16 x 20 1/16 in.)

Framed: 119.7 x 86.4 x 10 cm (47 1/8 x 34 x 3 15/16 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Samuel H. Kress Collection

Vittore Carpaccio

The Flight into Egypt, c. 1516/ 1518

Oil on panel

Painted surface: 72 x 111 cm (28 3/8 x 43 11/16 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Andrew W. Mellon Collection

A leading figure in the art of Renaissance Venice, Vittore Carpaccio (c. 1460/1466–1525/1526) is best known for his large, spectacular narrative paintings that brought sacred history to life. Celebrated in his native city of Venice for centuries, beloved for his observant eye, fertile imagination, and storytelling prowess, Carpaccio remains little known in the U.S.—except as a namesake culinary dish, "Steak Carpaccio.”

Vittore Carpaccio: Master Storyteller of Renaissance Venice is set to establish the artist’s reputation among American visitors with this, his first retrospective ever held outside Italy. Some 45 paintings and 30 drawings will include large-scale canvases painted for Venice’s charitable societies and churches alongside smaller works that decorated the homes of prosperous Venetians. The exhibition is organized by the National Gallery and Musei Civici di Venezia, also the organizers of the 2019 exhibition Tintoretto: Artist of Renaissance Venice.

“The National Gallery of Art is pleased to partner, once again, with the Musei Civici di Venezia, this time to introduce American audiences to a lesser-known protagonist of the Venetian Renaissance, Vittore Carpaccio,” said Kaywin Feldman, director, National Gallery of Art. “Our visitors will be delighted by Carpaccio’s vivid and dynamic paintings that bring to life Venice in the 15th and 16th centuries. Through his masterful storytelling, Carpaccio illustrated the maritime empire during a fascinating period when it was a cultural crossroads between West and East. We are grateful to the many museums, churches, and collectors who have generously lent their works to share with the public in this historic exhibition.”

Several paintings have been newly conserved for the exhibition. Two of Carpaccio’s best-known canvases from the Scuola degli Schiavoni were treated with the support of Save Venice, the organization dedicated to the preservation of the city’s cultural heritage: Saint Augustine in His Study (shortly after 1502)and Saint George and the Dragon (c. 1504–1507). Other treatments uncover discoveries about the original compositions. National Gallery conservator Joanna Dunn’s treatment of the museum’s Virgin Reading (c. 1505) reveals a baby Jesus previously hidden beneath a later repainting that sought to disguise where the painting had been cut down centuries ago.

The two paintings from the Scuola degli Schiavoni are among several works never before exhibited outside Italy, including the full, six-painting narrative cycle, Life of the Virgin (c. 1502–1508) made for the Scuola di Santa Maria degli Albanesi. The exhibition also includes the reunification of Fishing and Fowling on the Lagoon (c. 1492/1494)from the J. Paul Getty Museum and Two Women on a Balcony (c. 1492/1494) from Venice’s Museo Correr—two paintings that likely adorned a folding door.

Vittore Carpaccio: Master Storyteller of Renaissance Venice begins in the West Building’s West Garden Court with a special installation of Fishing and Fowling on the Lagoon (c. 1492/1494)and Two Women on a Balcony (c. 1492/1494). The two compositions were painted on the same panel of wood but were likely cut in half in the 1700s. When seen together, the paintings tell the story of two women sitting on a balcony while their husbands enjoy a day of sport on the Venetian lagoon. The panels are believed to have decorated folding doors that led into a domestic space in a Venetian palace. Here, they lead visitors into the exhibition.

The exhibition continues with an emphasis on Carpaccio’s innovations in Venetian painting. Early examples of private devotional paintings by the artist include Virgin and Child with the Young Saint John the Baptist (c. 1493–1496) from Germany’s Städel Museum, a unique depiction of the Virgin and Child as aristocratic Venetians of the 15th century. Another highlight of the exhibition is the reunification of the complete cycle of six canvases depicting the life of the Virgin Mary made for the Scuola di Santa Maria degli Albanesi. Carpaccio sets the story in Venice of his own day, blending details of Venetian architecture, furniture, and clothing with elements that evoke Jerusalem. Carpaccio also transposed scenes from classical mythology to contemporary Venice in other works like Departure of Ceyx from Alcyone (c. 1498/1503) from the collection of The National Gallery, London.

The exhibition includes examples from the three extant narrative cycles that Carpaccio was commissioned to create. His final narrative cycle made for the Scuola di Santo Stefano is represented by Ordination of Saint Stephen (1511) from the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie. Among the largest works in the exhibition is the Lion of Saint Mark (1516) from the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, Palazzo Ducale. Spanning more than twelve feet, the painting shows the traditional symbol of Venice, a winged lion. The lion stands half in the sea and half on land, alluding to the vast sea-faring empire.

Carpaccio pioneered narrative subjects in altarpieces. The Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand Christians on Mount Ararat (1515) from the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice, was created to decorate the altar of the Ottobon family in the church of Sant’Antonio di Castello, which no longer exists. Its original context can be seen in another painting, Vision of Prior Francesco Ottobon (c. 1513), from the Gallerie dell’Accademia.

More of Carpaccio’s drawings survive than those of any other Venetian painter of his generation. Outstanding works on their own, the drawings include rough sketches for paintings presented in the exhibition, along with meticulous preparatory drawings for paintings too large to travel for this show. Preparatory drawings for a narrative cycle of the Life of Saint Ursula for the Scuola di Sant’Orsola, the artist’s first major commission, include a remarkable double-sided drawing Head of a Young Woman in Profile/Head of a Young Woman in Three-Quarter View (c. 1488–1489) from the collection of the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

Finally, an interpretive and reading room features View of Venice (1500), a remarkable woodcut by Jacopo de’ Barbari. Drawn from the National Gallery’s collection, the six-sheet print details Venice as it appeared in Carpaccio’s day and shows the thousands of buildings, squares, canals, bridges, gardens, and sculptures that filled the bustling city-state.

Exhibition Catalog

Copublished by the National Gallery of Art and Yale University Press, this 340-page illustrated catalog features essays by curators Peter Humfrey and Andrea Bellini along with contributions by other leading scholars exploring the full range of Carpaccio’s artistry and presenting new research on the extraordinary artist. Sara Menato of the Fondo Ambiente Italia analyzes extensively Carpaccio’s drawings. Susannah Rutherglen, independent scholar and former exhibitions research assistant at the National Gallery of Art, illuminates Carpaccio’s narrative paintings for the Venetian confraternities known as scuole. Professor Deborah Howard, St. John’s College, Cambridge, explores the artist’s rendering of architecture. Professor Catherine Whistler of the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford, offers her insights on Carpaccio as draftsman. Joanna Dunn, conservator at the National Gallery of Art, reveals elements of the artist’s pictorial technique. Professor Linda Borean, Department of Humanities and Cultural Patrimony, University of Udine, Italy, offers a historical perspective on early collectors and critics of Carpaccio. Andrea Bellieni of the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia shares his insights on the modern understanding of Carpaccio that began in the 19th century.

Vittore Carpaccio: Master Storyteller of Renaissance Venice is organized by the National Gallery of Art and Musei Civici di Venezia. The exhibition will be presented at Palazzo Ducale, Venice, March 18, 2023 – June 18, 2023.

The exhibition is curated by Peter Humfrey, internationally recognized scholar of 15th- and 16th-century Venetian painting and Professor Emeritus of art history at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, in collaboration with Andrea Bellieni, curator at the Musei Civici di Venezia, and Gretchen Hirschauer, curator of Italian and Spanish painting at the National Gallery of Art.

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The New Woman Behind the Camera @ The Met, NYC & the NGA, Washington DC

The New Woman Behind the Camera

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

July 2 - October 3, 2021

National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

October 31, 2021 - January 30, 2022

TSUNEKO SASAMOTO

Unknown, Tsuneko Sasamoto, Tokyo, 1940 

Inkjet print, 2020, 18.2 cm x 18.2 cm (7 3/16 in. x 7 3/16 in.). 

Courtesy Tsuneko Sasamoto / Japan Professional Photographers Society

The New Woman of the 1920s was a powerful expression of modernity, a global phenomenon that embodied an ideal of female empowerment based on real women making revolutionary changes in life and art. The New Woman Behind the Camera features 185 photographs, photo books, and illustrated magazines by 120 photographers from over 20 countries. This groundbreaking exhibition highlights the work of the diverse “new” women who made significant advances in modern photography from the 1920s to the 1950s. During this tumultuous period shaped by two world wars, women stood at the forefront of experimentation with the camera and produced invaluable visual testimony that reflects both their personal experiences and the extraordinary social and political transformations of the era.

Max Hollein, Marina Kellen French Director of The Met, commented, “The international scope of this project is unprecedented. Though the New Woman is often regarded as a Western phenomenon, this exhibition proves otherwise by bringing together rarely seen photographs from around the world and presenting a nuanced, global history of photography. The women featured are responsible for shifting the direction of modern photography, and it is exhilarating to witness the accomplishments of these extraordinary practitioners.”

The first exhibition to take an international approach to the subject, The New Woman Behind the Camera examines women’s pioneering work in a number of genres, from avant-garde experimentation and commercial studio practice to social documentary, photojournalism, ethnography, and sports, dance, and fashion photography. It highlights the work of photographers such as Ilse Bing, Lola Álvarez Bravo, Claude Cahun, Florestine Perrault Collins, Elizaveta Ignatovich, Dorothea Lange, Lee Miller, Niu Weiyu, Tsuneko Sasamoto, Gerda Taro, and Homai Vyarawalla, among many others.

Known by different names, from nouvelle femme and neue Frau to modan gāru and xin nüxing, the New Woman of the 1920s was easy to recognize but hard to define. Her image—a woman with bobbed hair, stylish dress, and a confident stride—was everywhere, splashed across the pages of magazines and projected on the silver screen. A symbol that broke down conventional ideas of gender, the New Woman was inspiring for some and controversial for others, embraced and resisted to varying degrees from country to country.

For many of these daring women, the camera was a means to assert their self-determination and artistic expression. The exhibition begins with a selection of compelling self-portraits, often featuring the photographer with her camera. Highlights include innovative self-portraits by Florence Henri, Annemarie Heinrich, and Alma Lavenson.

For many women, commercial studios were an important entry point into the field of photography, allowing them to forge professional careers and earn their own income. From running successful businesses in Berlin, Buenos Aires, and Vienna to earning recognition as one of the first female photographers in their respective country, women around the world, including Karimeh Abbud, Steffi Brandl, Trude Fleischmann, Annemarie Heinrich, Eiko Yamazawa, and Madame Yevonde, reinvigorated studio practice. Photography studios run by Black American women, such as Florestine Perrault Collins, not only preserved likenesses but also countered racist images then circulating in the mass media.

The availability of smaller, lightweight cameras spurred a number of women photographers to explore the city and the diversity of urban experience outside the studio. The exhibition features stunning street scenes and architectural views by Alice Brill, Rebecca Lepkoff, Helen Levitt, Lisette Model, Genevieve Naylor, and Tazue Satō Matsunaga, among others. Creative formal approaches—such as photomontage, photograms, unconventional cropping, and dizzying camera angles—came to define photography during this period. On view are experimental works by such artists as Valentina Kulagina, Dora Maar, Tina Modotti, Lucia Moholy, Toshiko Okanoue, and Grete Stern, all of whom pushed the boundaries of the medium.

During this period, many women traveled extensively for the first time and took photographs documenting their experiences abroad in Africa, China, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Others, including Marjorie Content, Eslanda Goode Robeson, and Anna Riwkin, engaged in more formal ethnographic projects. This period also gave rise to new ideas about health and sexuality and to changing attitudes about movement and dress. Women photographers such as Lotte Jacobi, Jeanne Mandello, and Germaine Krull produced images of liberated modern bodies, from pioneering photographs of the nude to exuberant pictures of sport and dance.

The unprecedented demand for fashion and advertising pictures between the world wars provided new employment opportunities for many female photographers, including Lillian Bassman, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Toni Frissell, Frances McLaughlin-Gill, Margaret Watkins, Caroline Whiting Fellows, and Yva. Fashion magazines such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar visually defined the tastes and aspirations of the New Woman and offered a space in which women could experiment with pictures intended for a predominantly female readership.

The rise of the picture press also established photojournalism and social documentary photography as dominant forms of visual expression. Galvanized by the effects of a global economic crisis and growing political unrest, many women photographers, including Lucy Ashjian, Margaret Bourke-White, Kati Horna, Dorothea Lange, and Hansel Mieth, created powerful images that exposed injustice and swayed public opinion. While women photojournalists often received so-called “soft assignments” on the home front, others risked their lives on the battlefield. The exhibition features combat photographs by Thérèse Bonney, Galina Sanko, and Gerda Taro, as well as unsparing views of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps by Lee Miller. Views of Hiroshima by Tsuneko Sasamoto and photographs of the newly formed People’s Republic of China by Hou Bo and Niu Weiyu underscore the global complexities of the postwar era.

The New Woman Behind the Camera is curated by Andrea Nelson, Associate Curator in the Department of Photographs, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. The Met’s presentation is organized by Mia Fineman, Curator, with Virginia McBride, Research Assistant, both in the Department of Photographs.

The exhibition is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, in association with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Following its presentation at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the exhibition will travel to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, published by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and distributed by DelMonico Books.

It is made possible in part by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, The Daniel and Estrellita Brodsky Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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