Release Date: March 29, 2002

NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART ACQUIRES PAINTING BY YAYOI KUSAMA AND WORKS BY BEARDEN, MANGOLD, AND OTHERS FOR ITS COLLECTION OF MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART

Washington, DC – The National Gallery of Art announced today the acquisition of Yellow Net (1960) by Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929), a Japanese artist who has assumed a significant place in the history of postwar art. The acquisition of this work and other works--ten photographs made between 1986 and 2000 from Nicholas Nixon’s The Brown Sisters series; two monoprints by Mel Bochner titled If the Color Changes (2001); The Mushroom Book (1972), a portfolio of 20 lithographs by John Cage and Lois Long; and Robert Mangold: Prints 1968 –1998, a catalogue raisonné with seven original woodcuts--was made possible by the Gallery’s Collectors Committee.

The Street (Composition for Richard Wright) (c. 1977), a felt-tip pen drawing by Romare Bearden, was a gift of Werner H. and Sarah-Ann Kramarsky, with additional support from the Collectors Committee Fund. The acquisition of six additional photographs by Nicholas Nixon was made possible by the Gallery’s Fund for Living Photographers.

"The ongoing generosity of the Collectors Committee and other key donors allows the National Gallery of Art to continuously expand and enhance its collection of contemporary art. Yellow Net, considered one of Kusama’s finest paintings, as wells as the photographs and works on paper, are all superb additions to our collection," said Earl A. Powell III, director, National Gallery of Art.

Yellow Net is a large-scale painting (94 1/2 x 116 inches) from Kusama’s celebrated Infinity Net series, produced between 1958 and 1961. These paintings, composed of a "net" of minutely worked, interlocking lines, were originally executed in a soft white-on-white palette and eventually produced in two-color permutations. Yellow Net stands between two central tenets of postwar art: the "all-over" composition of New York School painting, and the reduced palette and repetition of motifs that would come to characterize minimal art. However, the irregularity of Kusama’s accumulated brushstrokes, and the absence of exact repetition in the chains of loops present in the work, distinguish Yellow Net from minimal art. The "net" motif is also related to hallucinations from which the artist suffered as a child, making the paintings in this series deeply personal. The painting has belonged to renowned artist Frank Stella since the 1960s. It is scheduled to go on view in the East Building during the summer.

HISTORY OF THE COLLECTORS COMMITTEE

Since 1975 the Collectors Committee has made possible the acquisition of more than two hundred works of art. Approximately half of these acquisitions have been works by living artists. The committee was formed in 1975 under the leadership of Ruth Carter Stevenson, chairman of the Gallery’s Board of Trustees from 1993 to 1997. Barney A. Ebsworth and Doris Fisher, both major collectors of 20th-century art, currently chair the Collectors Committee. Ebsworth, from St. Louis, is the founder and retired chairman of INTRAV, Royal Cruise Line, and Clipper Cruise Line. Fisher lives in San Francisco and is co-founder, with her husband Donald, of The Gap.

General Information

The National Gallery of Art and its Sculpture Garden are at all times free to the public. They are located on the National Mall between 3rd and 9th Streets at Constitution Avenue NW, and 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 the East and West Buildings. Checkrooms are free of charge and located at each entrance. Luggage and other oversized bags must be presented at the 4th Street entrances to the East or West Building to permit x-ray screening and must be deposited in the checkrooms at those entrances. For the safety of visitors and the works of art, 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 in the checkrooms. Items larger than 17 x 26 inches cannot be accepted by the Gallery or its checkrooms.

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