Audio Tour

Visite du bâtiment est

Utilisez votre smartphone pour découvrir une grande variété d’œuvres grâce aux commentaires des conservateurs de la National Gallery of Art. Allez à votre rythme en écoutant autant de commentaires que vous le souhaitez dans l’ordre que vous voulez.

Pour obtenir des informations sur une œuvre, tapez le numéro du commentaire dans le cadre ci-dessous, cliquez sur « Go » et appuyez sur Play lorsque le commentaire apparait. Veillez à ne pas déranger les autres visiteurs et à mettre des écouteurs lorsque vous utilisez l’audioguide.

19 stops

  • A wood table is piled with stylized and abstracted objects, including a jug, lemons, a knife, guitar, newspaper, and a smoking pipe in this horizontal still life painting. The objects are made up of areas of mostly flat color and many are outlined in black, creating the impression that some shapes are two-dimensional and assembled almost like a collage. We look down onto the top of the table and at the front, where the grain of the wood is painted in tan against a lighter background. Concentric black and white circles make up the knob on the face of the table’s single drawer. There are two rows of objects on the table. Along the front, near the left corner of the table, the knife hangs with its blade slightly over the open drawer. A newspaper with the title “LE JOUR” rests next to the knife. Next to the newspaper are two yellow pieces of fruit, near the front right corner of the table. Behind the fruit, the right third of the pitcher is marine blue and the left two thirds is mostly straw yellow, with one round olive-green area near the handle. Next to the pitcher is a tobacco pipe, and, at the back left edge of the table, the guitar. The instrument rests on its side so the front of the soundboard faces the viewer, and the neck extends to our left. The instrument is bisected lengthwise into two halves that appear to be spliced together, and the edges and features of the halves are not symmetrical or aligned with each other. The bottom half of the guitar is painted a beige color, and is curved like a typical guitar body. The top half is painted black, and the contour of the instrument’s body rises into two pointed peaks instead of mirroring the rounded forms below. The sound hole is markedly smaller on the bottom half, and the two halves of the hole do not exactly line up. A rectangular form behind the table could be a screen. The left side is fern green, the right side black. Behind the screen is a wallpapered wall above wood paneling. The wallpaper is patterned with teardrop shapes, dots, and zigzagging lines in fawn brown against parchment white. The artist signed and dated the painting in the lower right corner, “G Braque 29.”

    Audio Tour Stop 4

    Still Life: Le Jour, Georges Braque

    NGA, East Building, EG-103-B, N

    Georges Braque est connu pour son travail avec Pablo Picasso, les deux artistes ayant ensemble créé le nouveau style du cubisme vers 1910. Cette peinture est représentative d'une période plus tardive de la carrière de Braque au cours de laquelle il incorpore des éléments cubistes à des natures mortes et autres sujets. Ici, le grain du bois de la table, le motif du papier peint au fond et le texte du journal soulignent le jeu de motifs et de textures.

    Still Life: Le Jour (French)
  • The elongated head and neck of a person with stylized features is carved from beige-colored limestone for this freestanding sculpture. Though mostly carved smooth, the surface of the porous limestone is pocked and textured. In this photograph, the face is angled to our right. Short bangs line the narrow forehead of the tall, oval face. The hair flaring around the crown and behind the tidy, oval ear we see is roughly carved. The marquis-shaped eyes are set high on the face. Eyebrows immediately over the eyes join to make a long, blade-like nose that nearly reaches the bottom of the oval face. The arrow-shape of the nose ends just above a half-moon-shaped lip over a round chin. The long neck continues to a block of limestone that acts as the base. The sculpture is photographed in front of a background that lightens from charcoal gray across the top to nearly white across the bottom.

    Audio Tour Stop 5

    Head of a Woman, Amedeo Modigliani

    NGA, East Building, EG-103-A, E

    Cette sculpture, aux traits étirés et aux yeux en amande, possède les caractéristiques des personnages stylisés que l'on retrouve dans de nombreuses peintures d'Amedeo Modigliani. Modigliani se concentre sur la sculpture entre 1909 et 1914 environ, avant de mourir de tuberculose à l'âge de 35 ans en 1920.

    Head of a Woman (French)
  • We look slightly down onto a crush of pedestrians, horse-drawn carriages, wagons, and streetcars enclosed by a row of densely spaced buildings and skyscrapers opposite us in this horizontal painting. The street in front of us is alive with action but the overall color palette is subdued with burgundy red, grays, and black, punctuated by bright spots of harvest yellow, shamrock green, apple red, and white. Most of the people wear long dark coats and black hats but a few in particular draw the eye. For instance, in a patch of sunlight in the lower right corner, three women wearing light blue, scarlet-red, or emerald-green dresses stand out from the crowd. The sunlight also highlights a white spot on the ground, probably snow, amid the crowd to our right. Beyond the band of people in the street close to us, more people fill in the space around carriages, wagons, and trolleys, and a large horse-drawn cart piled with large yellow blocks, perhaps hay, at the center of the composition. A little in the distance to our left, a few bare trees stand around a patch of white ground. Beyond that, in the top half of the painting, city buildings are blocked in with rectangles of muted red, gray, and tan. Shorter buildings, about six to ten stories high, cluster in front of the taller buildings that reach off the top edge of the painting. The band of skyscrapers is broken only by a gray patch of sky visible in a gap between the buildings to our right of center, along the top of the canvas. White smoke rises from a few chimneys and billboards and advertisements are painted onto the fronts of some of the buildings. The paint is loosely applied, so many of the people and objects are created with only a few swipes of the brush, which makes many of the details indistinct. The artist signed the work with pine-green paint near the lower left corner: “Geo Bellows.”

    Audio Tour Stop 6

    New York, George Bellows

    NGA, East Building, EG-106-B, W

    Achevé en février 1911, New York est un tableau ambitieux de grande taille par lequel George Bellows saisit l'essence de la vie moderne dans la ville de New-York. L’intention de Bellows ici n’est pas de représenter un lieu particulier ou identifiable de la ville. S'inspirant de plusieurs quartiers commerciaux très fréquentés, il imagine une image composite et incroyablement saturée pour mieux donner le sentiment du rythme effréné de la ville.

    New York (French)
  • A buoy and a sailboat with three men and a woman tip at an angle on rolling aquamarine and azure-blue waves in this horizontal painting. The white wooden boat sails away from us toward the right side of the composition. Its unfurled sail is tinged with taupe and pale blue and attached to a pale wooden mast. The boat has a low cabin with round portholes on the side we can see. Two of the men are shirtless, tanned, and have their backs to us. One sits in the cockpit wearing a white hat with a short brim as he holds the tiller. The other man stands on the deck with his arms crossed. Beyond the standing man, the woman lies along the roof of the cabin, her head at about the height of the man’s chest. She is barefoot and lies on her stomach wearing long, blue pants and a watermelon-pink halter top and matching kerchief covering her hair. The third man stands to her right, his slender body angled toward us while holding onto the mast with one hand and rigging with the other. The woman and third man have noticeably pale skin. A buoy near the boat is battleship-gray with streaks of rust along its base and a copper-green bell inside. It floats just to the left of and tips toward the boat on a rising swell. The scene is lit by bright sunlight coming from the left side of the baby-blue sky with bands of feathery clouds, which takes up the top two-thirds of the composition. The artist signed the lower right, “EDWARD HOPPER.”

    Audio Tour Stop 7

    Ground Swell, Edward Hopper

    NGA, West Building, G-006, N

    Le ciel bleu, les personnages exposés au soleil et la houle de Ground Swell donnent une impression immédiate de calme, mais certains détails de la peinture remettent en question ce sentiment initial de sérénité. Le bateau se trouve face à une bouée au milieu d'un paysage marin qui est par ailleurs vide. Son usage – l'avertissement d'un danger invisible ou imminent – rend la scène inquiétante. Les nuages cirrus dans le ciel bleu, souvent annonciateurs d'orage, renforcent cette impression de perturbation.

    Ground Swell (French)
  • A winged person blowing a horn stands silhouetted in lilac purple against a field of alternating celery and muted lime-green bands in this abstracted vertical painting. The person’s body is angled toward us but they look over their shoulder, to our left in profile, as they hold a horn to their lips. The horn reaches into the top left corner of the composition, and the wings extend off the top edge of the canvas. A shallowly curving slit indicates the eye. The person stands with each foot on two rounded forms like stylized hills. The mound on our right is higher so the knee is bent, and the person holds a skeleton key in the hand propped on that knee. The hill to our right has wavy bands of muted pine and sage green, and the hill to our left has a zigzag line of the sage across the darker green. Farther from us, four people, smaller in scale, are outlined as amethyst-purple silhouettes. One person to our right of the angel kneels and raises their hands high overhead, face turned to the sky. Two more people standing on or behind the left mound are framed between the trumpeter’s legs. The fourth person stands with hands clasped, also looking up. Concentric arcs of lemon yellow and pale green suggest a sun in the upper left corner. The artist signed and dated the work with dark green paint in the lower right corner: “A. Douglas ’39.”

    Audio Tour Stop 9

    The Judgment Day, Aaron Douglas

    En 1927, James Weldon Johnson, personnage emblématique de la Renaissance de Harlem, publie son chef-d'œuvre, God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse. Chaque sermon, sous forme de poème, est accompagné d'une illustration d'Aaron Douglas, un jeune artiste afro-américain récemment venu vivre à Harlem. Des années plus tard, Douglas commence à traduire ses illustrations en peintures à huile de grand format. The Judgment Day est le dernier d'une série de huit tableaux. Au centre, l'imposant ange Gabriel enjambe terre et mer. Avec sa trompette, l'archange appelle les nations de la terre à se présenter au Jugement.

    The Judgment Day (French)
  • A group of three men, two children, and one woman gather in an empty, dusky rose-pink landscape under a blue, cloudy sky in this nearly square painting. Most of the people have muted, peachy skin, and the woman and the youngest boy have cream-white skin. The woman sits on the ground to our right, apart from the rest of the men and children. She wears a coral-red skirt, a beige shawl, and straw hat, and she looks into the distance to our right. The others stand in a loose semi-circle on the left half of the composition. A man wearing a multicolored, diamond-patterned costume stands with his back to us to the left. He looks to our right in profile and holds the hand of a little girl who also stands with her back to us. She wears a pink dress and white stockings, and her right hand rests on the tall handle of a white basket. A portly man wearing a scarlet-red jester’s costume and pointed hat stands opposite this pair, facing us to our right. Next to him to our right a young man wears a tan-colored leotard with a black bottom. He holds a barrel over his right shoulder and looks over to our right. The sixth person is the youngest boy, who wears a baggy blue and red outfit, and he looks toward the woman. The eyes of all the figures are deeply shadowed.

    Audio Tour Stop 11

    Family of Saltimbanques, Pablo Picasso

    NGA, East Building, EM-217-C, E

    Famille de saltimbanques est la peinture la plus importante du début de la carrière de Pablo Picasso. À ses yeux, ces saltimbanques vagabonds (acrobates, danseurs, bouffons) représentent la mélancolie de la classe marginalisée et négligée des artistes, une sorte de famille élargie à qui il s'identifie. Comme les membres de cette famille, le peintre espagnol a connu la pauvreté lors de ses premières années à Paris alors qu'il cherchait à être reconnu. L'arlequin triste – au costume à losanges, tout à gauche – a le visage sombre et intense du jeune artiste lui-même.

    Family of Saltimbanques (French)
  • A French window with its sill lined with flowerpots opens into a view of boats floating in a body of water in this loosely painted, vibrantly colored, stylized, vertical painting. The doors open inward, and they are painted with coral orange and cranberry red. The wall behind the door to the left is peacock blue and the wall to our right is fuchsia pink, and those colors are reflected in the opposite windows of the doors. Three flowerpots in crimson red, marmalade orange, or royal blue sit on the windowsill in front of us. Foliage in the pots is painted with short strokes of cardinal red and turquoise blue. Over the window, a two-paned transom window pierces a forest-green wall. The view through the panes has a band of salmon pink across the top and dabs of celery green and banana yellow below. The dabs and dashes of pine and lime green continue down the sides of the window and across the sill, suggesting vines growing up around the opening. A band of ultramarine blue beyond the flowerpots could be a balcony. Several rust-orange masts of ships with hulls painted with swipes of indigo blue, flamingo pink, forest green, and marigold orange float in the water beyond. The water is painted with parallel strokes in pale pink and butter yellow. The sky above is painted with thick, wavy lines of steel blue, periwinkle purple, and seafoam green. The artist signed the work in red paint in the lower right, “Henri Matisse.”

    Audio Tour Stop 13

    Open Window, Collioure, Henri Matisse

    NGA, East Building, EM-217-B, E

    Aujourd'hui Fenêtre ouverte, Collioure de Henri Matisse peut sembler suave et lyrique, mais à l'époque, ses gros coups de pinceaux et l'intensité des couleurs ont été reçus comme violents. De petite taille mais visuellement explosif, ce tableau emblématique du début du modernisme est désormais reconnu comme l'une des toiles les plus importantes du mouvement fauve, un groupe d'artistes qui cherchaient à libérer la couleur et les textures des représentations aux apparences naturelles. Fenêtre ouverte, Colliourereprésente la naissance de cette approche dans l'art de Matisse.

    Open Window, Collioure (French)
  • Two nude women, painted in vibrant coral peach and bubblegum pink, stand under a red umbrella in a landscape in this stylized, vertical painting. The scene is painted with areas of flat or streaked color with visible brushstrokes throughout. The women and umbrella take up most of the picture. The woman on our left stands facing our right almost in profile. Her skin is vivid peach. Slashes of red outline her breasts, groin, and legs. Her hair, eyes, and eyebrows are painted with black strokes. She stands on one leg and stretches the other in front of her to overlap the far foot of the other woman. The first woman hooks her arm through the elbow of the other, who stands facing us to our right. This second woman has vivid pink skin also outlined in red. Her face is a darker shade of pink, resembling a mask, and her eyes are parallel strokes of black and blue. Her left arm, on our right, hangs by her side, and she holds the umbrella with the other arm. She either wears a hat or her hair is painted with alternating bands of black, red, and brown, and there is a red flower or bow to one side. Black lines in the candy-red umbrella suggest a rib on the underside and the handle. Cobalt-blue branches of a tree above the women has blue and green leaves. The landscape beyond them is made up of bands of acid green, yellow, saturated blue, and cool green.

    Audio Tour Stop 14

    Two Girls under an Umbrella, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

    NGA, East Building, EM-217-A, S

    Cette œuvre date du début de la carrière prolifique d'Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, lorsqu'il était l'un des membres fondateurs du groupe expressionniste Die Brücke (Le Pont) à Dresde en 1905. Dans ce tableau, Kirchner présente deux nus dans un décor naturel plutôt que dans un espace artificiel d'atelier académique. La peinture illustre également l'utilisation de formes franches, souvent crues, et de couleurs vives par l'artiste.

    Two Girls under an Umbrella (French)
  • Black lines and one small, black triangular shape stand out against patches of color, in indigo and sky blue, pumpkin orange, butter yellow, emerald green, and ruby red, against a white background in this vertical, abstract painting. The paint seems thinly applied, resembling watercolor. Near the lower right corner, the black shape is roughly triangular and has five curving, parallel lines emanating from the bottom. Given the title of this painting, Improvisation 31, Sea Battle, the black lines could represent tall masts and outlines of sails amid areas of vibrant color that make up a boat and water around it.

    Audio Tour Stop 15

    Improvisation 31 (Sea Battle), Wassily Kandinsky

    NGA, East Building, EU-415-A, S

    La peinture de Wassily Kandinsky n'est pas sans rapport au réel, mais les détails sont ici déformés et adaptés de façon à exprimer une atmosphère. Bien que les formes indéfinies et les lavis de couleurs semblent parfaitement abstraits a priori, ils composent quelques images reconnaissables. Deux bateaux, motif central d'Improvisation n° 31 (Bataille navale), dont les mâts sont suggérés par de fines lignes noires, sont en plein combat. Le sujet, que l'on retrouve dans plusieurs Improvisations de Kandinsky, a probablement été inspiré par l'imagerie apocalyptique du Livre de la Révélation.

    Improvisation 31 (Sea Battle) (French)
  • Carved from a slab of white marble, the top surface of this sculpture is covered with shallow, cuplike and deep rectangular depressions of various sizes. We look slightly down onto the slab in this photograph. The surface is divided into three vertical sections, which are defined by incised lines. The cuplike depressions are in the sections to the left and right. Two tiny, carved, dark wooden objects, like game pieces, stand upright in a cup with one the left and one to the right. Each piece is flat with a symmetrical design and a point at the bottom that inserts into the cup. The left piece has a disk flanked by triangular protrusions with a clover shape at top. The second piece has four stacked, small circles, and a U-shaped form to suggest the outline of a person with raised arms. Three smaller but deep rectangular cavities are carved into the middle section, and each one has a lid. Two lids sit askew on the top surface of the board near their respective openings, and inside are additional wooden pieces. A blank, rectangular section outlined with lightly inscised lines in the lower right is carved with reversed script letters that read, “on ne joue plus.” The entire surface has beveled edges, so it sits on a stepped base.

    Audio Tour Stop 16

    No More Play, Alberto Giacometti

    NGA, East Building, EU-415-B, CENTER

    Alberto Giacometti, l'un des grands sculpteurs surréalistes, incorporait souvent des thèmes ludiques dans ses premières œuvres, comme dans cette sculpture. La forme utilisée ici par l'artiste ressemble à un jeu de société, avec des pièces déplaçables, mais ce en quoi le jeu consiste n'est pas clair. L'espace ambigu et les règles inconnues du « jeu » représenté par On ne joue plus donnent le sentiment qu'il s'agit d'un objet que l'on pourrait voir en rêve.

    No More Play (French)
  • This free-standing sculpture is a French window with a teal-colored frame and black, leather-lined glass panes standing on a flat, shallow base. Each door is made up of four, vertically stacked, equally sized panes. The doors are hinged on a narrow frame and open with small, clear knobs placed next to the second pane down from the top. The doors are slightly ajar. Black writing in capital block letters on the top surface of the base is legible in this photograph. It reads, “FRESH WIDOW COPYRIGHT ROSE SELAVY 1920.”

    Audio Tour Stop 17

    Fresh Widow, Marcel Duchamp

    NGA, East Building, EU-415-B, CENTER

    Marcel Duchamp cherchait à défier les hypothèses sous-jacentes aux appréhensions traditionnelles de la peinture et de la sculpture. Fasciné par le concept américain des reproductions faciles et peu onéreuses, Duchamp commence à s'approprier des objets trouvés pour ses readymades, terme anglais qu'il emprunte à l'industrie du prêt-à-porter à l'époque où il vit à New-York. Il choque le monde de l'art en tentant d'exposer ces objets ordinaires, ne montrant souvent aucune altération, si ce n'est l'ajout de sa signature. Le titre de cette œuvre est un jeu de mot où la lettre n des mots French et window est supprimée (French window en anglais signifie « porte-fenêtre », tandis que Fresh Widow se traduit par « tout juste veuve ») et fait référence aux femmes récemment devenues veuves suite à la Première Guerre mondiale. Duchamp n'a pas fabriqué la fenêtre miniature lui-même ; il a confié le travail à un menuisier américain.

    Fresh Widow (French)
  • The top section of this abstract sculpture is made up of a vertical, elongated form cast in gleaming brass that swells gently at the center and tapers to a point at either end. Near the bottom point, the form flares out slightly to make a tall, conical foot. This sits atop a short, cylindrical, white limestone base on a wood pedestal. The pedestal is carved to look like a disc at the center flanked above and below by semicircles with the flat edges facing up and down. The sculpture is photographed against a pale gray background.

    Audio Tour Stop 18

    Bird in Space, Constantin Brâncuși

    NGA, East Building, EU-415-C, CENTER

    Bien que cette sculpture puisse sembler abstraite, Constantin Brancusi insistait sur le fait que ses œuvres révèlent l'essence profonde de ses sujets. Son travail s'inspire des traditions des sculptures africaines et de la sculpture roumaine populaire, et fait du socle un élément intégrant de l'œuvre. Brancusi passe plusieurs années à travailler sur sa série Oiseau dans l'espace, concevant un ensemble qui s'avérera être le couronnement de son œuvre. Contrairement aux autres sculpteurs, Brancusi n'avait pas un grand atelier. Il travaillait seul sur ses matériaux, en l'occurrence à graver de la pierre et à polir le laiton.

    Bird in Space (French)
  • This abstract, geometric painting has been tipped on one corner to create a diamond form rather than a square. The surface of the canvas is crisscrossed by an irregular grid of black lines running vertically and horizontally like offset ladders. The black lines create squares and rectangles of different sizes, and the width of the lines vary slightly. One complete square sits at the center of the composition and is painted white. Other rectangles are incomplete, their corners sliced by the edge of the canvas, and each is a different shade of white with hints of pale blue and gray. The black grid creates triangular forms where it meets the angled edge of the canvas in some places, and some of these are filled with flat areas of color. A tomato-red triangle is placed to the left of the top center point, and a vibrant yellow triangle is to the left of the lower center point. A black triangle is next to it at the bottom center, and a cobalt-blue triangle is situated just below the right point. The painting is signed with the artist’s initials at the lower center: “PM.”

    Audio Tour Stop 19

    Tableau No. IV; Lozenge Composition with Red, Gray, Blue, Yellow, and Black, Piet Mondrian

    NGA, East Building, EU-415-C, W

    Dans ses peintures abstraites, Piet Mondrian cherchait à exprimer sa conception spirituelle selon laquelle des harmonies universelles règnent dans la nature. Les éléments horizontaux et verticaux de ses compositions, soigneusement calculés de façon à produire une asymétrie équilibrée, représentent des forces opposées qui évoquent l'équilibre dynamique du monde naturel. Selon Mondrian, les compositions en losange mettent en valeur la coupure, et ce sentiment de recadrage est en effet frappant ici. Les formes sont incomplètes et tronquées par les bords de la toile, suggérant une continuation au-delà des limites physiques de la peinture.

    Tableau No. IV; Lozenge Composition with Red, Gray, Blue, Yellow, and Black (French)
  • Tall, narrow, black building fronts fill this abstracted, horizontal painting. Partitions separating the buildings extend above the rooflines, and those, along with low domes atop some of the buildings, brush the top edge of the canvas. The narrow band of sky between the flat rooflines and the top of the composition is filled with cream-white paint, applied heavily in thick strokes. The buildings are painted with wide, horizontal strokes of black paint. The outlines of doors, windows, and the brick partitions between the buildings were incised into wet paint to delineate those features. Some of the outlines are also streaked with cobalt blue, butter yellow, brick red, and plum purple. Six people with oversized, round, peach-colored heads on spindly black bodies look out at us from windows across the composition. Cartoon-like eyes, noses, and smiling mouths are incised into wet paint. Along the bottom level, the buildings are numbered 78, 80, 82, and 84. Signs, also incised in wet, black paint to reveal white outlines, appear over the doors. The leftmost building reads “OPTICIEN” above “Leroy.” The next store is “PARFUMS,” then “MODES,” “Coiffeur,” “JOURNEAX,” “PRIMEURS,” and “BAR.” Under “PRIMEURS,” a sign on the store front reads “FRUITS ET LEGUMES.” Two people walk along the street, at the bottom of the canvas. One is to our left of center and stands facing us, smiling. The other is to our right, also smiling as he walks to our left in profile.

    Audio Tour Stop 20

    Façades d'immeubles (Building Façades), Jean Dubuffet

    NGA, East Building, EU-407-A, N

    Ayant le sentiment que la peinture a besoin de repartir de zéro au lendemain de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, Jean Dubuffet s'inspire du travail des non initiés, en particuliers des enfants et des artistes autodidactes, qu'il collectionne et appelle « art brut ». Dans Façades d’immeubles, Dubuffet montre son propre « art brut ». En utilisant une pratique scolaire consistant à gratter la peinture noire pour révéler un fond de couleur peint au préalable, Dubuffet crée la vue d'une rue parisienne telle qu'elle pourrait apparaître à un enfant. Cependant, la grille soigneusement contrôlée et le mur compact et imposant de peinture démontrent que Dubuffet connaissait les tactiques modernistes.

    Façades d'immeubles (Building Façades) (French)
  • Densely spaced lines and splatters in black, white, pale salmon pink, teal, and steel gray crisscross a rectangular cream-colored canvas in this abstract horizontal painting. The lines move in every direction. Most are straight but some curve slightly. The density eases a bit near the edges. Two sets of ghostly white handprints are visible at the upper corners. The artist signed and dated the painting in black paint in the lower left corner: “Jackson Pollock ’50.”

    Audio Tour Stop 22

    Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist), Jackson Pollock

    NGA, East Building, EU-407-B, W

    En 1948, les premières peintures de taille murale de Jackson Pollock qui utilisent la technique de l'égouttement, ou « dripping », suscitent des avis partagés. Pour cette peinture, Pollock étend une grande toile à même le sol dans son atelier (une grange reconvertie), recouvrant presque tout l'espace. Il utilise de la peinture de décoration d'intérieur, de la peinture à l'huile, de l’émail et de l’aluminium, et il fait goutter (en anglais : drip), gicler ou il verse de la couleur avec des pinceaux ou des bâtons dégoulinants tout en marchant autour de la toile. Il disait que c'était sa façon d'être « dans » son œuvre, en agissant comme intermédiaire dans le procédé créatif. Il a apposé sa « signature » dans l'angle en haut à gauche et au sommet de la toile avec l'empreinte de ses mains.

    Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist) (French)
  • The Disney cartoon characters, Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, fish off a dock in this horizontal painting. The scene and characters are painted entirely flat areas of canary yellow, cobalt blue, tomato red, and white. To our left, Donald leans over the edge of the dock with his feet spread and duckbill hanging open. He has a white body outlined in blue, big eyes filled with a pattern of tiny blue dots, and yellow feet and duckbill. He wears a blue sailor’s hat and jacket with a red bow tie and yellow circles indicating buttons. He holds a fishing pole with an oval, red bobber near the fishhook high over his head. The pole has bent back with the fishhook snagged on the back hem of Donald’s jacket. A white speech bubble over Donald’s head is outlined in blue, and blue text inside reads, “LOOK MICKEY, I’VE HOOKED A BIG ONE!!” Mickey stands to our right, covering his smiling mouth with his left hand, on our right, and holding an upright fishing pole with the other hand. His round face is filled with a pattern of tiny red dots, and his curving hairline and ears are blue. He wears blue pants, a red shirt and shoes, and white gloves. The dock is mostly yellow with a white area on the right. Its planks and three white, round posts supporting it are outlined in blue. Rippling water surrounding the dock is defined by wavy lines and undulating bands of blue against a yellow background. The artist signed his initials in the lower left, “rfl.”

    Audio Tour Stop 25

    Look Mickey, Roy Lichtenstein

    Look Mickey est peut-être le tableau où Roy Lichtenstein, pour la première fois, transpose une scène et un style issus d'une référence de culture populaire : le livre pour enfants de 1960 Donald Duck: Lost and Found. Lichtenstein modifie légèrement l'original pour en faire une image plus homogène. Il omet des personnages en arrière-plan, il tourne le point de vue à 90 degrés, il organise les couleurs en aplats de jaune ou de bleu, et il simplifie les traits des personnages. Au niveau stylistique, Lichtenstein imite les techniques d'impression : ses contours épais noirs, ses couleurs primaires et, dans les yeux de Donald et le visage de Mickey, ses points d'encre Benday, une technique d'impression moins coûteuse alors utilisée pour produire les bandes dessinées en livres et dans les magazines.

    Look Mickey (French)
  • A long, rectangular strip of yellowed painted fabric is draped over a horizontal wooden rod that hangs from the ceiling in this sculptural piece. The dowel is perpendicular to the wall so juts into the gallery space. In this photograph, we are almost in front of the piece, near the wall to look onto one of the long sides. The cheesecloth hangs straight down either side of the dowel so it is longer in the back, and the ends do not touch. An uneven application of latex paint on most of the fabric gives the work a rubbery appearance, and causes some variation in the surface to create shiny areas. The loose weave of the cheesecloth is visible at the ends where the fabric was not painted. The cloth and dowel seem to float in midair because the filament from which the rod hangs is invisible in this photograph.

    Audio Tour Stop 27

    Test Piece for "Contingent", Eva Hesse

    Eva Hesse ne voulait pas créer ce qu'elle considérait comme de la belle sculpture conventionnelle. Elle refusait d'utiliser des matériaux de sculpture traditionnels, tels que le métal ou la pierre, et préférait des matières plus flexibles telles que les fibres, le plâtre ou, comme pour cette ébauche, le latex. Il s'agit de l'une des études pour l'œuvre finale Contingent, composée de huit bannières similaires, aujourd'hui exposée à la National Gallery of Australia. Hesse a décrit cette œuvre comme « ni peinture, ni sculpture. [...] C'est tout simplement une peinture suspendue ».

    Test Piece for "Contingent" (French)
  • Two black bands span the height of this vertical canvas against a field of white mottled with shades of ivory, bone, and parchment in this abstract painting. A narrow, solid black stripe lines the left edge of the canvas, like the spine of a book. About a quarter of the way in from the right edge, black paint swirls and wafts like smoke on either side of a narrow white stripe the same color as the background. The artist signed and dated the painting in black paint in the lower right corner of the canvas: “Barnett Newman 1958.”

    Audio Tour Stop 29

    First Station, Barnett Newman

    NGA, East Building, ET-615-B, W

    Personnalité importante du mouvement de l'expressionnisme abstrait, Barnett Newman était un intellectuel qui élaborait ses idées au travers de sa peinture, de sa sculpture et de ses écrits. Au milieu des années 1940, il crée ses premières œuvres utilisant les éléments verticaux distinctifs, ou « fermetures Éclair », qui traversent les surfaces de couleur unie de ses toiles. Cette peinture est la première d'une série de 14 toiles que Newman appellera plus tard The Stations of the Cross, « les stations du chemin de croix » (ainsi qu'une coda : une 15e peinture intitulée Be II). The Stations of the Cross est la tentative la plus ambitieuse de Newman pour aborder ce qu'il appelle une « crise morale » à laquelle les artistes font face suite à la Seconde Guerre mondiale et à l'Holocauste : « Qu'allons-nous peindre ? »

    First Station (French)

You may also like

Audio Tour:  Kids West Building Tour: Featured Selections

Audio Tour:  West Building Tour: Featured Selections

Audio Tour:  West Building Tour: Featured Selections