In the Library: The Intersection of Commerce and Instruction in Art

February 22 – June 3, 2016
http://www.nga.gov

The art we experience often depends as much upon the materials available to the artists who make it as it depends on the artists themselves. This exhibition looks at a variety of literature surrounding artists’ materials and instruction, and charts the ways in which the increasing commercialization of their production may have affected the practice of artists, especially following the industrial revolution. From trade catalogs to instruction manuals, these books give us clues about the materials and techniques artists were using at a given time. This allows today’s scholars and conservators alike to better understand the physical attributes of the artworks they study and preserve. In ages past, merchants would supply raw materials; artists, to a large degree, controlled the fabrication of usable tools from those materials on a relatively small scale, grinding their own pigments to make paint and fashioning pencils and brushes based on techniques handed down from master to apprentice in an artist’s workshop

Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World

December 13, 2015 – March 20, 2016
http://www.nga.gov

Overview: Some 50 bronze sculptures and related works survey the development of Hellenistic art as it spread from Greece throughout the Mediterranean between the fourth and first centuries BC. Through the medium of bronze, artists were able to capture the dynamic realism, expression, and detail that characterized the new artistic goals of the period. This exhibition will feature works from world-renowned archaeological museums in Austria, Croatia, Denmark, France, Georgia, Great Britain, Greece, Italy, Spain, and the United States. The exhibition presents a unique opportunity to witness the importance of bronze in the ancient world, when it became the preferred medium for portrait sculpture.

Louise Bourgeois: No Exit

November 15, 2015 – May 15, 2016

http://www.nga.gov/

Overview: Louise Bourgeois’s ties to surrealism and existentialism will be explored through 17 works on paper and 4 sculptures. While surrealism informed Bourgeois’s early endeavors, she bristled when critics labeled her a surrealist, preferring instead to identify herself as an existentialist. She often quoted existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and even named one of her sculptures after Sartre’s play No Exit, an act of homage from which this exhibition takes its title. Works presented will include a rare copy of He Disappeared into Complete Silence (1947), early totem-like sculptures, and M is for Mother (1998), a drawing of an imposing letter M that conveys not only maternal comfort but also maternal control.

Drawing in Silver and Gold: Leonardo to Jasper Johns

May 3 – July 26, 2015
http://www.nga.gov

This first comprehensive exhibition to examine the history of metalpoint—the art of drawing with a metal stylus on a specially prepared ground—presents some 90 drawings from the late Middle Ages to the present, from the collections of the British Museum, the National Gallery of Art, and other major museums in the United States and Europe. Often regarded as a limited and unforgiving medium, metalpoint is actually capable of a surprising range of effects, as seen in these drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Rogier van der Weyden, Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt van Rijn, and Jasper Johns, among others.

Organization: Organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington

Piero di Cosimo: The Poetry of Painting in Renaissance Florence

February 1 – May 3, 2015
http://www.nga.gov/

Overview: The first major retrospective exhibition ever presented on the imaginative Italian Renaissance master Piero di Cosimo's paintings will premiere at the Gallery. Some 40 of the artist's most compelling paintings will be on view, including beguiling mythologies and religious works (some on loan from churches in Italy), as well as one of his greatest works, the Madonna and Child with Saints Elizabeth of Hungary, Catherine of Alexandria, Peter, and John the Evangelist with Angels from the Museo degli Innocenti, Florence. Several important paintings will undergo conservation treatment before the exhibition, including the Gallery's Visitation altarpiece (c. 1489–1490)—one of the artist's largest extant paintings.

Organization: The exhibition is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and the Galleria degli Uffizi, Superintendency of Cultural Heritage for the City and the Museums of Florence.