Past Exhibitions

Learn about past exhibitions going back as far as 1941 when the National Gallery of Art first opened to the public.

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Mark Rothko
Closed August 16, 1998

The exhibition presented 97 paintings and 17 graphics by the artist, encompassing all phases of his career from the 1920s to his death in 1970, with an emphasis on the so-called surrealist and classic periods. The exhibition was the first comprehensive American retrospective of Rothko's work in 20 years.

Degas at the Races
Closed July 12, 1998
The sculpture depicts a horse in mid-stride. It is made of dark, polished bronze material and mounted on a rectangular wooden base. A thin metal rod supports the horse from underneath. The musculature is well-defined, and the horse is posed with one front leg extended forward and the opposite back leg lifted. The scale suggests it is a small display piece.
Alexander Calder 1898-1976
Closed July 12, 1998
Two disks, one black and one white, and ten smaller red disks hang from eleven red wire branches in this free-floating sculpture, called a mobile. The uppermost branch ends with the white disk jutting out to our right, and the next ends with the black disk, projecting out and slightly up to our left. The red disks cluster in a loose line below, some higher and some drooping down. The mobile is suspended with an unseen filament in a white room in this photograph.
Building a Collection
Closed April 19, 1998
Lorenzo Lotto
Closed March 1, 1998
Set on a strip of land under a cloud-filled sky and in front of a stormy sea, a nude, light-skinned satyr reclines to our right as a nude, pale-skinned, blond child crouches over some objects on the dirt ground to our left in this vertical landscape painting. The satyr has with a man’s body and shaggy, goat’s legs. He leans over and peers into a golden urn, which has a round bottom and tall, flaring sides about the height of his torso. One hand holds the single handle and the other wraps around the body of the urn. The tips of the satyr’s ears are elongated and pointed, and the corner of his mouth curves up into an exaggerated smile in his brown beard. Red liquid pours from an object, perhaps an overturned urn, near the satyr’s outstretched leg and white liquid pours from another urn between us and the satyr. Next to the satyr, at the center of the painting, a thick, upright tree trunk is broken off abruptly but one shoot grows tall with emerald-green leaves. A translucent, shield-shaped object decorated with an open-mouthed, human face hangs from a pink ribbon around the broken trunk near the branch. A second shield outlined in red with a rearing, white lion against a royal-blue field leans against the foot of the tree to our left. Nearby, the pale, naked child holds a pair of sticks, possibly a compass, and reaches for other objects on the ground near the shield, including a white disk, a pair of small, red-covered books, a square and possibly a plumb line, a flute, pan pipes, and a scroll of paper. The ground and landscape around each person are distinctly different. To our left, the dirt ground under the child is littered with small rocks. Beyond a row of larger boulders, a sweeping field of lemon-lime green sweeps up into a bank of clouds. A small nude person with dark forms, perhaps representing wings, on their shoulders, arms hips, and ankles ascends a path up toward the clouds. To our right, the satyr reclines on green grass in front of a screen of three lush trees. Beyond, across the entire landscape, a choppy sea extends into the far distance beneath the steel-gray clouds above. A masted ship is swallowed by waves behind the satyr, to our right.
M.C. Escher
Closed April 27, 1998
Thomas Moran
Closed January 11, 1998

This first retrospective of Moran's works included 97 paintings and watercolors and 17 photographs. Some of the watercolors were lent by the National Park Service as part of the 125th anniversary celebration of the creation of Yellowstone National Park.

Sheer, vertical, cliffs, brightly lit in cream white and rust orange by the low sun, tower over a band of people riding horses into the distance in this long, horizontal landscape painting. The glowing cliffs dominate the upper right quadrant of the painting. They lighten from burnt orange along the jagged tops to flame orange down the steep sides, and are and warm, parchment white near the earth. One tall, narrow promontory to our right looms over a range of lower, rounded cliffs. As the cliffs move into the distance, they are shrouded with a lavender-purple haze. The land closest to us dips into a shallow valley at the bottom center of the composition, leading away from us. The dirt-packed earth is dotted with pine-green, scrubby bushes and vegetation and a grove of low, gnarled trees a short distance to our right. One chestnut-brown horse walks along the path at the bottom center of the composition, lagging behind a cluster of at least two dozen horses and riders winding into the distance. The horses range from ivory white to tawny brown and charcoal gray. The riders are loosely painted so some details are indistinct, but they all seem to have brown skin and dark hair. They wear feathered headdresses and garments in teal blue, fawn brown, or golden yellow. They ride over a low hill toward a crystal-blue river, and then back along a flat expanse toward a row of minuscule, triangular tepees lining the horizon in the deep distance. The horizon comes halfway up the composition, and the tepees are backed by a row of rose-pink, flat-topped cliffs. A pale yellow disk hangs low in the sky, over the distant cliffs. The sky above deepens from soft, lilac purple along the horizon to ice and sapphire blue along the top. A few wispy clouds are burnished orange in the sunlight. The artist signed and dated the painting in the lower right corner, “TYMoran 1881,” with the T, Y, and M overlapping to make a monogram.
Winslow Homer and the Civil War
Closed September 21, 1997

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