Retrospective exhibition Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies @ Brooklyn Museum, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, Art Institute of Chicago

Elizabeth Catlett  

A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies 

Brooklyn Museum 

September 13, 2024 – January 19, 2025

National Gallery of Art, Washington  

March 9 – July 6, 2025 

Art Institute of Chicago 

August 30, 2025 – January 4, 2026

The retrospective exhibition Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies showcases the enduring legacy of ELIZABETH CATLETT (1915–2012) as a visionary artist and an unwavering activist. As the most comprehensive presentation devoted to Catlett in the United States, it features more than 150 works, including well-known sculpture and prints, rare paintings and drawings, and important ephemera. The exhibition is co-organized by the Brooklyn Museum and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and presented in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago.

Elizabeth Catlett was an avowed feminist, lifelong activist, and deft formalist. Coming of age as an artist during the 1930s and 1940s, an era marked by the Great Depression and global economic turmoil, she witnessed class inequality, racial violence, and U.S. expansionism, which continue to shape the world today. Elizabeth Catlett passionately addressed these injustices through her politically engaged art. Her prints and sculptures draw on organic abstraction, American and Mexican modernism, and African art, centering the trials and triumphs of Black American and Mexican women.

For nearly a century—from Jim Crow segregation to the McCarthy era and the Cold War to President Obama’s first term—Elizabeth Catlett dedicated her life to the pursuit of formal rigor and social justice, which she understood to be mutually reinforcing. A transnational artist, Elizabeth Catlett worked in Washington, DC, Chicago, and New York before settling in Mexico, where she lived and taught for more than sixty years. She embraced a political radicalism that merged the goals of the Black Left in the United States with the lessons of the Mexican Revolution. Through her dual practices in sculpture and printmaking, Elizabeth Catlett remained committed to depicting the strength and struggles of both Black American and Mexican communities.

Organized chronologically and thematically, the exhibition traces Elizabeth Catlett’s career of creative artistry and bold political activism. From protests she staged while in high school against lynchings in Washington, DC, to her academic pursuits at Howard University and the University of Iowa, Catlett’s path was marked by a dedication to developing rigorous formal excellence and progressive social politics that deftly brought together issues of race, gender, and class. After becoming the first-ever recipient of a master of fine arts degree at the University of Iowa, Elizabeth Catlett continued her education studying ceramics at the Art Institute of Chicago, and honing her practice in lithography at the South Side Community Art Center.

Elizabeth Catlett then spent four years in New York, where she studied the tenets of modernist European sculpture and became a part of a community of artists and intellectuals who coalesced around Popular Front politics. Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies includes a number of Catlett’s early paintings and sketches from this period, defying notions that she was exclusively a printmaker and sculptor and underscoring her versatility as an artist.

Elizabeth Catlett's early interest in art and politics was cemented in 1946 when she went to Mexico City to pursue printmaking at the highly regarded Mexican artist collective Taller de Gráfica Popular. Catlett ultimately became a Mexican citizen and an active participant in leftist cultural circles in Mexico City and Cuernavaca. While raising a family and teaching in Mexico, Elizabeth Catlett never lost sight of the Black liberation struggle in the United States. As she told Ebony magazine in 1970, “I am inspired by Black people and Mexican people, my two peoples.”

Through bold line work in prints and voluptuous forms in sculpture, Elizabeth Catlett draws parallels between the female experience in the United States and Mexico. In Homage to My Young Black Sisters (1968) and her public monument, Floating Family (1996), Elizabeth Catlett examines intersectional feminism and familial bonds through the medium of sculpture, referencing Brancusi, Henry Moore, historical African and Mesoamerican sculpture. The exhibition includes a selection of Elizabeth Catlett’s most iconic prints, from the Sharecropper and Black Woman series of the 1940s and 1950s to works such as Watts/ Detroit / Washington / Harlem / Newark, inspired by radical political activism of the 1960s and 1970s.

“Elizabeth Catlett’s artistry and activism resonate powerfully in today’s world, reminding us of ongoing national and international struggles against inequality and injustice. The exhibition not only celebrates Catlett’s contributions to the art world but also brings a historical voice into the present—showing how generations of Black feminists continue to inspire us to fight for a more equitable and just society,” says Catherine Morris, Sackler Senior Curator, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum.

“In honoring Elizabeth Catlett’s legacy, we hope that her work will resonate as a poignant reminder of art’s power to ignite change and unite communities in the ongoing struggle for equality and liberation. A Black revolutionary artist, Catlett made real, material sacrifices—including nine years of political exile—to speak truth to power and to make art for all. Her political conviction was matched by her aesthetic principles. She was capacious in her artistic influences, and while she loved abstraction, she loved her people more,” says Dalila Scruggs, Augusta Savage Curator of African American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

The exhibition title takes inspiration from a talk Elizabeth Catlett gave in 1970, following a decade of exile from the United States in response to her political activism in Mexico. Elizabeth Catlett said: “I have been, and am currently, and always hope to be a Black Revolutionary Artist and all that it implies.” Her impassioned speech highlights the exhibition’s core themes: a commitment to formal rigor, Black empowerment through progressive activism, and a belief that everyday people deserve access to fine art. The works throughout the presentation are evidence of Elizabeth Catlett’s enduring legacy of driving social change, both through her contributions to the art world and the movements she championed.

After the Brooklyn Museum, the exhibition will be on view at the National Gallery of Art and at the Art Institute of Chicago. 

Elizabeth Catlett  

A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies 

Edited by Dalila Scruggs

304 pages | 240 color plates | 9 x 11 | © 2024

Accompanying publication: The traveling retrospective is accompanied by a book of the same title, edited by Dalila Scruggs and distributed by the University of Chicago Press. The 304-page publication offers a revelatory look at Catlett and her nearly century-long life, highlighting overlooked works alongside iconic masterpieces. Essays address topics including Catlett’s early development as an artist-activist, the impact of political exile on her work, and the diverse influences that shaped her practice. 

Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies is organized by Dalila Scruggs, Augusta Savage Curator of African American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum; Catherine Morris, Sackler Senior Curator, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum; and Mary Lee Corlett, Associate Curator of Modern Prints and Drawings (retired), National Gallery of Art; with Rashieda Witter, Curatorial Assistant, National Gallery of Art, and Carla Forbes, Curatorial Assistant, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum. The exhibition is organized by the Brooklyn Museum and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago.

BROOKLYN MUSEUM

200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, New York 11238 

www.brooklynmuseum.org

NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART

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

www.nga.gov

ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO

111 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL 60603

www.artic.edu

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

www.nga.gov

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

www.nga.gov

Etched by Light: Photogravures from the Collection, 1840–1940 @ National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Etched by Light

Photogravures from the Collection, 1840–1940

National Gallery of Art, Washington

October 15, 2023 - February 4, 2024 

Mathilde Weil

Beatrice, 1899

Photogravure

Image: 16.7 x 9 cm (6 9/16 x 3 9/16 in.)

Sheet: 18.8 x 10.4 cm (7 3/8 x 4 1/8 in.)

Mount: 37.8 x 27.8 cm (14 7/8 x 10 15/16 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington 

Anonymous Gift

Etched by Light: Photogravures from the Collection, 1840–1940 tells the fascinating story of the search to find and perfect a way to print photographs in ink. The process, which came to be called photogravure, resulted in some of the most beautiful photographs ever made—featuring delicate highlights, lush blacks, a remarkably rich tonal range, and a velvety matte surface. Presenting 46 photogravures and 5 bound volumes illustrated with them (many recently acquired and exhibited here for the first time), Etched by Light shows how this process enabled photographs to circulate widely and help shape our collective visual experience. The exhibition is on view in the West Building of the National Gallery of Art.

The exhibition coincides with the symposium Photomechanical Prints: History, Technology, Aesthetics, and Use, organized by the FAIC Collaborative Workshops in Photograph Conservation and hosted by the photograph conservation department of the National Gallery from October 31 through November 2, 2023.

“Discover an intriguing chapter in the history of photography, as innovative practitioners developed a method to produce photographic prints in ink,” said Sarah Greenough, senior curator and head of the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art. “Including photogravures from the National Gallery’s collection, this exhibition shows the pivotal role photogravures played in the history of photography by enabling the creation and widespread dissemination of tonally rich and lasting prints.” 

From its very beginnings, photography revolutionized the way pictures were made and knowledge about the visual world was disseminated. But in the early 1840s, artists and scientists working across Europe discovered that it had drawbacks. The daguerreotype process, developed by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, created astonishingly vivid images, but each one was unique and could only be copied by making another photograph. William Henry Fox Talbot’s negative/positive process held more promise, but his silver-chloride prints faded when exposed to light. Early practitioners also learned that it was hard to make numerous identical prints that could be tipped into books or journals, owing to variabilities in the paper and chemicals that were used to make prints. Such obstacles, at least initially, frustrated their hopes of fully realizing the potential of this new medium.

Charles Nègre

Cathédrale de Chartres—Portique (South Portico), c. 1854

Photogravure

Image: 53 x 73 cm (20 7/8 x 28 3/4 in.)

Sheet: 59.3 x 80 cm (23 3/8 x 31 1/2 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington 

The Sarah and William L Walton Fund

Divided into three sections, Etched by Light traces the search—unfolding across 100 years—for a process to print photographs in ink, which were more stable than traditional silver-based photographic prints. It moves from the experiments in the 1840s and 1850s by French and British photographers such as Armand-Hippolyte-Louis Fizeau, Charles Nègre, and William Henry Fox Talbot, who discovered the chemical and technical components necessary to print photographs in ink, to the successful solution invented by Talbot in the 1850s and perfected by Karl Klíč in 1879. In their photomechanical process, which came to be called photogravure, a photographic image is etched into a printmaking plate, ink is rubbed into the etched surface, a damp sheet of paper is laid on top of the plate, and both are put through a printing press to transfer the ink to paper. Favored from the mid-1880s through the 1930s, revived in the 1980s and 1990s, and still popular today, photogravures have a smooth, continuous tonal range, although an extremely fine grain is evident under magnification.

Peter Henry Emerson

A Winter's Morning, 1887

Photogravure

Image: 17.7 x 28.7 cm (6 15/16 x 11 5/16 in.)

Sheet: 21.5 x 32.4 cm (8 7/16 x 12 3/4 in.)

Mount: 40 x 50.8 cm (15 3/4 x 20 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington 

Carolyn Brody Fund and Robert B. Menschel and the Vital Projects Fund

Peter Henry Emerson

The Poacher—A Hare in View, 1888

Photogravure

Image: 28.5 x 23.7 cm (11 1/4 x 9 5/16 in.)

Sheet: 30.5 x 25.7 cm (12 x 10 1/8 in.)

Mount: 42.5 x 34.2 cm (16 3/4 x 13 7/16 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington 

Gift of Mary and Dan Solomon and Patrons' Permanent Fund

Peter Henry Emerson

Marsh Leaves, published 1895

1 vol: ill: 16 photogravures on wove paper

Page size: 28.4 x 18.4 cm (11 3/16 x 7 1/4 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington 

Gift of Harvey S. Shipley Miller and J. Randall Plummer, 

in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art

The exhibition also shows how photographers working in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including Peter Henry Emerson and Alfred Stieglitz, exploited the photogravure process for its artistic potential. They highlighted the individuality of their pictures through their choice of paper and inks, and even manipulated the photographic image itself. They also utilized the reproducibility of the process, inserting their photogravures into limited edition books, portfolios, and journals that they circulated in an effort to prove the artistic merit of photography.

Clarence H. White

Edge of the Woods, Evening, 1900

Photogravure

Image: 14.5 x 10.1 cm (5 11/16 x 4 in.)

Sheet: 28.5 x 19.8 cm (11 1/4 x 7 13/16 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington 

Robert B. Menschel and the Vital Projects Fund

Alvin Langdon Coburn

Tunnel Builders, 1910

Photogravure

Image: 21 x 17 cm (8 1/4 x 6 11/16 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington 

Gift of Funds from John S. Parsley and Nancy Nolan Parsley

The exhibition concludes with the work of modernist photographers, such as Alvin Langdon Coburn, Laure Albin Guillot, Man Ray, and Margaret Bourke-White, who used the process to enlarge small negatives, creating big, bold, and sometimes colorful photogravures. Circulating their photogravures widely in books and portfolios, as well as commercial advertisements, these artists demonstrated that photography could tackle new subjects, revitalizing our view of life, art, and science, and in the process revealing critical new insights about the world around us.

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

The exhibition is curated by Sarah Greenough, senior curator and head of the department of photographs, with Andrea Coffman, collection manager in the department of photographs, both at the National Gallery of Art.

NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART

Sixth Street and Constitution Avenue NW, Washington, DC 

nga.gov

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.

NGA - NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, WASHINGTON

www.nga.gov

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

NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART 

Sixth Street and Constitution Avenue NW, Washington DC

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The American Pre-Raphaelites: Radical Realists @ National Gallery of Art, Washington

The American Pre-Raphaelites: Radical Realists
National Gallery of Art, Washington
April 14 - July 21, 2019

Thomas Charles Farrer 

Mount Tom, 1865

Oil on canvas

National Gallery of Art, Washington, 

John Wilmerding Collection, Promised Gift

In celebration of the 200th anniversary of the birth of John Ruskin (1819–1900), the most influential art critic of the Victorian era, the National Gallery of Art presents more than 80 paintings, watercolors, drawings, and photographs created by American artists who were profoundly influenced by the renowned critic. John Ruskin's call for a revolutionary change in the practice of art found a sympathetic audience in America among a group of like-minded artists, architects, scientists, critics, and collectors who organized the Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art. New research reveals that the members of the Association sought reform not only in the practice of art, but also in the broader political arena during the Civil War era. The American Pre-Raphaelites: Radical Realists, includes several recently discovered works never exhibited publicly.

John Ruskin's (1819–1900) influence was most profound through the 1860s, when his ideas and opinions inspired an organized reform of American art and architecture. Although he never traveled to the United States, Ruskin's ideas reached America through his many publications, most notably in Modern Painters, which had inspired the British Pre-Raphaelite artists.

The Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art was founded in January 1863 to promote Ruskin's teachings. Member artists not only recorded the natural world with strict fidelity, as Ruskin advocated, but also created a number of works that included rich political subtexts referencing the ongoing war.

The Association existed for less than a decade. Its members included artists who produced a remarkable number of stunningly beautiful works during the period when they were active members and paying strict attention to Ruskin's admonition that they leave tradition behind, exit the studio, work outdoors, and reproduce nature's "truth" with exacting detail.

Thomas Charles Farrer (1839–1891), a young British expatriate who had studied in London with Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), became the leader of this eclectic group. Among the several works in the exhibition by Farrer is his stunning landscape Mount Tom (1865).

Other "radical realists" hailed by the Association's journal, The New Path, as America's modern painters are included in the exhibition: John Henry Hill (1839–1922); John William Hill (1812–1879); Charles Herbert Moore (1840–1930); Henry Roderick Newman (1843–1917); Robert J. Pattison (1838–1903); and William Trost Richards (1833–1905). Nonmember artists who were attracted by Ruskin's ideas and felt the Association's influence are also represented in the exhibition including Fidelia Bridges (1834–1923), the best known among Ruskinian women artists; Robert B. Brandegee (1849–1922); Henry Farrer (1844–1903), Thomas's brother; William John Hennessy (1839–1917); Aaron Draper Shattuck (1832–1928); and William James Stillman (1828-1901). Several works by John Ruskin himself introduce the exhibition.

New research reveals that the members of the Association sought reform not only in the practice of art, but also in the broader political arena, particularly in the debate about slavery. They were united by a patriotic commitment to the preservation of the Union and the abolition of slavery. The founding meeting of the Association took place at the height of the Civil War—just days after Abraham Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

Coded references to the war are present in several detailed landscape paintings that do not appear—at first glance—to carry symbolic meaning, including William Trost Richards's A Neglected Corner of the Wheatfield (1865) and Charles Herbert Moore's Hudson River, Above Catskill (1865). Both works resonate with a range of explicit and hidden messages related to the war.

During the heyday of the movement in the mid-1860s, the realists' hyper-detailed and vividly colored oil paintings and watercolors were interpreted by the partisan critical voices of The New Path as vibrant agents promoting reform when displayed among conventional works.

The exhibition is curated by Linda S. Ferber, museum director emerita and senior art historian at the New-York Historical Society, with Nancy K. Anderson, curator and head of the department of American and British paintings at the National Gallery of Art.

The exhibition is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington. Made possible through support from the Terra Foundation for American Art. Major support provided by the Henry Luce Foundation. Additional funding is provided by The Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation for the Arts.

NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, WASHINGTON DC
www.nga.gov

Oliver Lee Jackson @ National Gallery of Art, Washington DC - Recent Paintings

Oliver Lee Jackson: Recent Paintings
National Gallery of Art, Washington
April 14 - September 15, 2019

OLIVER LEE JACKSON

No. 7, 2017 (7.27.17), 2017

Oil-based paints on panel

Courtesy of the artist

Photo M. Lee Fatherree

A distinguished painter, printmaker, and sculptor, Oliver Lee Jackson (b. 1935) has created a complex and original body of work that remains rooted in the human figure while drawing on all the resources of modernist abstraction and expression. Jackson's paintings, often large in scale, defy categorization. Figurative elements captivate the eye, while the dynamic compositions, vibrant colors, and vigorously worked surfaces in a variety of materials capture the viewer's attention. On view in the East Building of the National Gallery of Art, Oliver Lee Jackson: Recent Paintings presents some 20 paintings created over the past 15 years, many of which are being shown publicly for the first time.

Oliver Lee Jackson's mastery of painting is evident in the works, which reflect his personal sensibility and ease with his materials. His compositions offer connections between gestural actions (pointing, kneeling), recurrent motifs (figures with hats, instruments, or carts), and references to the act of making (drawing, brushing, measuring). The exhibition also includes a film created by the Gallery featuring an interview with the artist in his Oakland studio.

"Jackson's experience working with writers, musicians, dancers, and other visual artists directly inspires his colorful compositions. His work has captivated audiences worldwide and challenges viewers to see in new and different ways," said James P. Gorman, chairman and chief executive officer, Morgan Stanley. "At Morgan Stanley, we strive to challenge ourselves to discover new perspectives to share with our clients and communities, and we are pleased to be able to play a part in sharing Oliver Lee Jackson's work with you."

"Unlike many artists who came of age in the wake of abstract expressionism, Jackson never abandoned his figurative orientation," said Harry Cooper, senior curator and head of modern art, National Gallery of Art, Washington. "Having worked with Jackson for over two decades (including on a 2002 exhibition at the Harvard Art Museums), I am excited that we are presenting his recent work, which for all its discipline has an extraordinary freedom and daring. The paintings presented here may be the fruit of Jackson's long experience but they have a youthful energy that recalls Ezra Pound's battle cry of modernism, 'Make it new.'"

Exhibition Highlights

One of the most striking works in the exhibition is the large Triptych (2015), consisting almost entirely of colored felt cut and applied to board. In each panel, dark forms suggesting figures or parts of figures seem to move, dance, or run in and through fields of light blue, orange, pink, green, and white. Figurative references—looming heads and recumbent bodies—are also contained within the fields of color. The imagery, with its simultaneous suggestions of joy and intense energy, dance and flight, echoes thematic material that has permeated Jackson's career, from the dynamism of his works of the 1970s inspired by newspaper photographs of the 1960 massacre in Sharpeville, South Africa, to persistent themes of a grand dance evoking a sense of spectacle and ritual. While collage and cut-outs have a long history in 20th-century art, Jackson's embrace of felt, which he values for its saturated color and optical neutrality, is distinctive. He folds and overlaps the cloth to create sensations of depth that complicate (without ever contradicting) the inherent flatness of the materials.

Another highlight of the exhibition is a group of eight paintings from 2003 and 2010-2011, each just over five feet square, made with water-based pigments on canvas with touches of spray paint and gold and silver leaf. Once again, Jackson's unusual choice of materials at this scale (watercolors are usually confined to small works on paper) allows for striking and original effects. These works are notable in Jackson's oeuvre for their dramatic restraint and apparent simplicity. Some seem to be entirely abstract while others make clear references to birds, flowers, and figures. The paintings exhibit an improvisational daring that the medium of watercolor both allows and enforces.

Oliver Lee Jackson

Born in 1935 in Saint Louis, Missouri, Oliver Lee Jackson collaborated on community cultural projects with composers and saxophonists, including Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake, and Marty Ehrlich, and members of the cross-disciplinary collective Black Artists Group. Jackson served as assistant director of the People's Art Center (1963–1964) and as director of Program Uhuru (1967–1968), which he established at the Pruitt & Igoe public housing project to bring creative discipline to its youthful residents. He moved to California in 1971 and has lived and worked in Oakland since 1982.

Jackson's paintings, prints, and sculptures have been the focus of solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Museum, Saint Louis; Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, Harvard University; and Seattle Art Museum, among others. Jackson's work has also been included in group exhibitions at museums including the Whitney Museum of American Art; Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. His work is included public and private collections across the United States, including the National Gallery of Art, Washington; Museum of Modern Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Yale University Art Gallery; Detroit Institute of the Arts; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

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

The exhibition is curated by Harry Cooper, senior curator and head, department of modern art, National Gallery of Art, Washington.

The exhibition is made possible through the generous support of the Robert and Mercedes Eichholz Foundation. Morgan Stanley is proud to sponsor Oliver Lee Jackson: Recent Paintings. Additional funding is provided by The Tower Project of the National Gallery of Art.

NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, WASHINGTON DC
www.nga.gov

Street Photography at National Gallery of Art, Washington DC - I Spy: Photography and the Theater of the Street, 1938-2010

I Spy: Photography and the Theater of the Street, 1938-2010

National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Curator: Sarah Greenough

April 22 - August 5, 2012

This exhibition is devoted to street photographs by some of the genre's greatest photographers: Walker Evans (1903-1975), Harry Callahan (1912-1999), Robert Frank (b. 1924), Bruce Davidson (b. 1933), Philip-Lorca diCorcia (b. 1951), and Beat Streuli (b. 1957). "The Gallery is pleased to continue its long tradition of exhibitions devoted to the innovative ways in which photographers have captured and explored the urban environment," said Earl A. Powell III, director, National Gallery of Art. "I Spy also showcases the Gallery's strong holdings in this genre, featuring more than 20 works from the collection along with nine promised gifts."

Philip-Lorca diCorcia 

Head #22, 2001

chromogenic print,121.92 x 152.4 cm (48 x 60 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Charina Endowment Fund

© Philip‑Lorca diCorcia

Since the invention of small hand-held cameras and faster films in the late 19th century, photographers have recorded everyday life in the urban environment. Mining the city rich potential, they have explored its varied subject matter —people, architecture, and modes of transportation— to celebrate the cacophony and diversity of modern life, as well as its rapid pace.

The photographers represented in this exhibition have creatively pursued this genre by setting rigid parameters on how they made their works. Like children playing the game "I Spy" by looking through the narrow frame of a car window, these photographers restricted the ways they made their pictures as a means of selecting and ordering the chaos of the city. Walker Evans hid the camera from the unsuspecting public and photographed without even looking through the lens, Robert Frank photographed only what could be seen from the windows of a bus moving through the city, and Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Beat Streuli placed their cameras in single spots to capture photographs of random passersby. But all these photographs and videos court chance and serendipity, and all these artists view the street as a perpetually fascinating spectacle.

Arranged both chronologically and monographically, I Spy: Photography and the Theater of the Street, 1938-2010 explores these ideas through the presentation of nearly 90 works, including a video and a digital still sequence. Evans, Callahan, and Frank embarked on their projects as a challenge to create images in a fundamentally different manner than they previously had; diCorcia and Streuli incorporate such devices into their regular practice. All the works address questions of voyeurism, surveillance, and privacy.

The exhibition includes photographs made by Walker Evans between 1938 and 1941 on the New York subways with a camera concealed beneath his coat, as well as those he took standing on a street corner in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1941. Harry Callahan is represented with an evocative group of photographs of women lost in thought on the busy Chicago streets in 1950. Robert Frank's elegant, almost balletic suite of photographs made from the windows of a bus moving through New York City in 1958 will also be presented, as will a series of bold, aggressive color photographs by Bruce Davidson taken on the New York subways between 1980 and 1985.

Contemporary artists Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Beat Streuli have pushed this genre still further in works made in the 1990s and into the 21st century. Mining the latent theatricality of the street, diCorcia erected scaffolding and lights in busy urban areas to create a series of monumental portraits of hapless pedestrians who chanced to pass in front of his camera.

The exhibition concludes with two works by the Swiss artist Beat Streuli made on the streets of New York: a digital still sequence, reconfigured expressly for this show from its original display in 2002, and a video made in 2009. Using a telephoto lens to capture richly saturated scenes, Beat Streuli reveals not only the congestion and heterogeneity of modern urban life, but also its beauty. As he transforms the ordinary into the iconic, he shows the isolation and anonymity of the individual in a crowd. In addition, his work calls into question the surveillance photography now so routinely captured by governments and corporations, and it makes us realize ever more keenly how in our daily lives we are both watching the world around us and are being scrutinized by it.

The exhibition curator is Sarah Greenough, senior curator and head, department of photographs, National Gallery of Art.

I Spy: Photography and the Theater of the Street, 1938–2010 was organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, USA. For information visit the Gallery's Web site at www.nga.gov.

Supports: The exhibition is made possible through the generous support of The Ryna and Melvin Cohen Family Foundation and the Trellis Fund. Tru Vue has provided in kind support of Optium Acrylic Glazing for the works of art.