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Release Date: November 13, 2000
"A Century of Drawing: Works on Paper from Degas to Lewitt"
on View at the National Gallery of Art November 18, 2001 - April 7, 2002
Washington, DC -- For the first time, a comprehensive selection of important drawings spanning the 20th century from the collection of the National Gallery of Art, including promised gifts, can be seen in the new exhibition A Century of Drawing: Works on Paper from Degas to LeWitt. Approximately 140 works chart the development and refinement of modern art through the century and represent some of the most aesthetically compelling and intellectually intriguing works from the era. The exhibition is on view in the West Building from November 18, 2001 through April 7, 2002.
"The Gallery has an impressive collection of 20th-century drawings, remarkable in both its range and distinction," said Earl A. Powell III, director, National Gallery of Art. "A Century of Drawing offers visitors a marvelous opportunity to see these fine works that trace the development of the medium during the past hundred years."
The Exhibition
Selected from more than 4,000 20th-century drawings belonging to or promised to the National Gallery of Art, the works are arranged in chronological order, roughly decade by decade through the century. Examples by older masters who created some of their most inspiring work after the turn of the century open the exhibition: Edgar Degas, Auguste Rodin, and Winslow Homer. Homer's watercolor, The Coming Storm (1907), seems surprisingly modern for an artist most often associated with the 19th-century. The early works in the show include a rare color pastel by Käthe Kollwitz, Self-Portrait as a Young Woman (c.1900), and a sumptuously patterned charcoal by Pablo Picasso, Two Fashionable Women (1900 or 1901).
Visitors can also see superb works by a younger generation of artists active in the first half of the century, including Henri Matisse, Egon Schiele, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Great early collages, such as Picasso's The Cup of Coffee (1913), and Braque's Aria de Bach (1913), initiated a technique shown in remarkably varied examples throughout the exhibition. By sanctioning nontraditional materials, such as wallpaper, these artists extended the parameters of what could be called "drawing."
A number of powerful self-portraits punctuate the exhibition, including marvelous examples by Kollwitz, Picasso, Matisse, Schiele, Kirchner, Marsden Hartley, and Joseph Stella. Visitors can see Kirchner's Self-Portrait (1928), an early example of his new "abstract" style, as well as Matisse's Self-Portrait (1937), exemplifying his brisk, authoritative draftsmanship.
Alongside European works, American drawings figure prominently in watercolors and charcoals by John Marin, Edward Hopper, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Charles Sheeler. Extraordinary mid-century works are also featured in the exhibition, including classic abstract expressionist compositions by Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning, David Smith, and Mark Rothko.
Highlighting the 1960s are drawings by pop generation artists such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Claes Oldenburg, which usher in the panorama of styles from minimalism to neoexpressionism that characterize drawing in the last few decades of the 20th century. The exhibition closes with an enormous colored gouache by Sol LeWitt, Wavy Brushstrokes (1996); a highly-tactile drawing made from paper pulp by Helen Frankenthaler, Freefall (1992); and Ellsworth Kelly's enchanting ten-foot-high graphite drawing, Beanstalk (1999).
Curators and Catalogue
The exhibition is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington. The curators are Andrew Robison, Mellon senior curator of prints and drawings, National Gallery of Art, and Judith Brodie, associate curator of prints and drawings, National Gallery of Art. A fully illustrated catalogue with scholarly entries accompanies the exhibition. It can be purchased for $55 hardcover in the Gallery Shops. To order by phone, call 1(800) 697-9350.
General Information
The National Gallery of Art and its Sculpture Garden, located on the National Mall between 3rd and 9th Streets at Constitution Ave. NW, are open Monday through Saturday from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and Sunday from 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. The Gallery is closed on December 25 and January 1. For information call (202) 737-4215 or the Telecommunications Device for the Deaf (TDD) at (202) 842-6176, or visit the Gallery’s Web site at www.nga.gov.
Visitors will be asked to present all carried items for inspection upon entering. Checkrooms are free of charge and located at each entrance. Luggage and other oversized bags must be presented at the Fourth Street Entrance of the East or West Building to permit X-ray screening and must be deposited in the checkrooms at those entrances. Any items larger than 17 X 26 inches cannot be accepted by the Gallery or its checkrooms. For the safety of the art work and visitors, nothing may be carried into the Gallery on a visitor’s back. Any bag or other items that cannot be carried reasonably and safely in some other manner must be left at the checkrooms.
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