Ten themes—Scrape, Concentricity, Line, Gesture, Art on Art, Drip, Stripe to Zip, Figure or Ground, Monochrome, and Picture the Frame—illuminate specific works across the Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection. The resulting juxtapositions, often surprising and provocative, provide a new way to tel... Read more
Ten themes—Scrape, Concentricity, Line, Gesture, Art on Art, Drip, Stripe to Zip, Figure or Ground, Monochrome, and Picture the Frame—illuminate specific works across the Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection. The resulting juxtapositions, often surprising and provocative, provide a new way to tell the story of postwar American art, and of a great collection. Through remarkable acuity, exhaustive study, and close relationships with the artists, the Meyerhoffs amassed one of the most outstanding collections of modern art, with an emphasis on six American masters: Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Brice Marden, Robert Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella, in addition to important works by leading abstract expressionists and younger artists. A number of the ten themes concern the material process of creation, others address issues of form and composition, and still others extend past material and formal issues to broach the self-reflexive aspects of modernist painting. Some 126 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints include several acquisitions made after the collection was last highlighted in a major exhibition at the Gallery in 1996. All of the works in the exhibition have been donated or promised to the National Gallery of Art and continue to shape and greatly enhance the Gallery’s modern and contemporary collection.
