National Gallery featuring postwar American art from Meyerhoff Collection
By: Chris Klimek
Special to The Examiner
October 26, 2009
If you goThe Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection: Selected Works
Where: National Gallery of Art (East Building), Fourth Street and Constitution Avenue NW
When: Through May 2, 2010
Info: Free; 202-737-4215; nga.gov
The story of postwar American art is thrillingly retold in the Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection, now being given pride of place at the National Gallery of Art for the first time since 1996, and featuring two dozen works added in the intervening years.
This domestic treasure trove of 126 paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints concentrates on the work of six transformative masters: Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Brice Marsden, Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella, though other luminaries, like Mark Rothko, are present, too.
The works, culled from nearly 300 pieces the Meyerhoffs collected between 1958 and 2004, are grouped loosely by theme, rather than ordered chronologically. Some -- Scrape, Drip, Gesture -- address the physical processes by which the works came to be.
Monochrome and Concentricity are categories governing palette and composition. Still other classifactions -- Stripe to Zip, Picture the Frame -- posit headier, more conceptual throughlines.
"They're a little more about the project of Modernism," says exhibition curator Harry Cooper.
