Current Exhibition

Back and Forth: Rozeal., Titian, Cezanne

Details

  • Dates

    -

  • Locations

    West Building, Main Floor, Gallery 11

  • Ticketing Information

    Admission is always free and passes are not required

Spanning six centuries and different cultures, four paintings reveal how artists engage with art history—and become part of it.

Art history isn’t linear. Artists mix and remix references, finding inspiration across time.  

When contemporary artist Rozeal. began painting afro.died, T. in 2011 in her studio just outside Washington, DC, she didn’t have Titian’s Venus with a Mirror in mind. Paul Cezanne wasn’t thinking about Titian’s Ranuccio Farnese when he painted Boy in a Red Waistcoat in 19th-century France. Yet these works share striking visual similarities with Titian’s 16th-century paintings.

Back and Forth illuminates unexpected connections between these four works and invites us to see them in new ways. 

A woman sitting on a floor with her body angled to our left nearly fills this stylized, vertical painting. Her skin is light tan in some areas, as around her eyes, chest, one hand, and the leg and foot we can see, while what seems like brown paint creeps up her neck to drip upward around her cheeks and onto her forehead. The brown also drips down onto her cleavage, along one arm toward her wrist, and down the shin of her leg. Her right hand, on our left, is entirely brown. She holds her long hair up over her head with her brown hand in front of her face, looking at it with blue eyes and touching it with the other hand. Her hair is blond with dark roots at her scalp, created with long, parallel brushstrokes. Her long nails and curling lips are scarlet red. She wears an emerald-green robe trimmed with white fur and a long strand of pearls that drape over her left arm, closer to us. She sits on a cushion decorated with brown koi fish and stylized blue waves of water, but the exact arrangement of her legs is unclear. A stack of patterned pillows is piled behind her to our left, and comes up to her shoulder. Red circular forms behind her head are painted slate blue with deep brown shadows and red highlights. The words “BACK AND FORTH” are repeated in rows, written in capital yellow letters edged with red, filling the background. Two Japanese characters are painted in red near the lower right corner.
Rozeal. (formerly known as iona rozeal brown), afro.died, T., 2011, acrylic, pen, ink, marker, and graphite on birch plywood panel, Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase with funds provided by the Women's Committee of the Corcoran Gallery of Art), 2015.19.243
Shown from the thighs up, a boy wearing a crimson-red waistcoat stands against swags of fabric painted with visible strokes in white, sky blue, harvest yellow, and sage green in this loosely painted, vertical portrait. Painted with choppy brushstrokes, the boy has pale, ivory-white skin, blushing pink cheeks, pursed lips, faint eyebrows, and topaz-blue eyes that gaze down to our right. His shoulder-length, dark brown hair is tucked behind one ear under a brown wide-brimmed hat. His red waistcoat is worn over a long-sleeved, slate-blue shirt. The collar of his skirt is slightly flipped up on his right side, to our left, and a swipe of cobalt blue suggests a tie or scarf between the lapels. A band of sapphire blue could be a belt above olive-green trousers, and dashes of navy blue create shadows. His right hand, to our left, is planted on that hip. The other arm hangs straight and loose by his side, those fingertips almost brushing the bottom edge of the canvas. The boy’s body is outlined in dark blue. The drapery behind him falls in folds that sweep gently to our right. The background is painted with patches and swipes of cool blues and greens, and pale golden yellow. One swag of the drapery, over the shoulder to our left, is painted with a loose pattern suggesting leaves. One back post and a sliver of the curving back of a wooden chair peeks into the composition in the lower left corner.
Paul Cezanne, Boy in a Red Waistcoat, 1888-1890, oil on canvas, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art, 1995.47.5
Shown from the hips up, a young boy with pale, peachy skin wears a voluminous, black cloak that nearly falls off his shoulders over a rose-pink tunic, with a sword hanging from one hip in this vertical portrait painting. His body is angled slightly to our right, and he looks off to our left with dark brown eyes under gently arched brows. He has a wide nose, and his pink lips are closed with the corners pulled slightly back. His skin is smooth and his cheeks slightly flushed. His dark brown hair is cut close and comes to a point in front of his ears. His tunic is painted with dusky pink highlights against wine-red to suggest a sheen across a vertically striped, leafy pattern. The garment has a high neck lined with a white ruffle and has a row of buttons down the front. His black coat has wide lapels that reach beyond his shoulders, and the puffy sleeves gather on his arms. The coat has a silvery-white cross over the chest to our right. The left and right arms of the cross are lost in the folds but the arms at the top and bottom are forked at the ends. The boy’s pine-green belt is edged with gold, and the hilt of the sword is angled toward us on his left hip, to our right. He holds one fawn-brown glove in his right hand, to our left, and his other arm disappears behind the folds of his coat. The background is deep olive green, almost brown. The artist signed the painting with dark paint near the right edge of the canvas near the boy’s shoulder, “TITANVS F.”
Titian, Ranuccio Farnese, 1541-1542, oil on canvas, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1952.2.11

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