With the opening of the East Building, the National Gallery will have increased space for the display of contemporary art.
GALLERY 76: Pablo Picasso, Family of Saltimbanques, painted in 1905
Obsessed in 1905 with the theme of the circus, Picasso sought the company of performers not only as potential subjects for his paintings but also as companions. Their agility and grace delighted him; their gypsy lives intrigued him, as did their professional pursuit of the fine art of illusion. The circus family in this painting is assembled in a lonely landscape devoid of any living thing. Their static poses suggest that each member, caught up in reverie, is unaware of the others. A sense of equilibrium is maintained, however, in the compact shape of the five figures at the left balanced against the single figure in the right foreground. The pastel tints of red, violet, and blue, moreover, create an aura of elegiac melancholy. Although Picasso has abandoned the predominantly blue palette of his earlier, more pensive work, the Family of Saltimbanques still exudes a feeling of pathos and isolation. (The thirteen paintings by Picasso in the National Gallery represent the major phases within the first half of Picasso’s career.)
GALLERY 76: Georges Braque, Still Life: Le Jour, dated 1929
Although common, everyday items, the objects in this painting are not shown in an everyday arrangement. Rather, through a precise, rational manipulation of shapes, the artist has so structured the objects as to arrive at a fresh understanding of their reality. The pitcher and the wineglass, for example, are each shown as an overview of the rim (presenting one angle of vision) and a profile view of the object’s body (presenting a second angle of vision); these and other aspects of the objects are combined to reveal a new, but nonetheless accurate, perception of the object. And, as Braque intended, it is this flattened perception that, throughout the composition, constantly reminds us of the two-dimensional surface of the canvas. Braque’s geometric compositions—which to outraged critics were nothing more than “cubes”—were one aspect of a style known as cubism which developed shortly after the turn of the century.
WEST STAIR HALL: Salvador Dali, The Sacrament of the Last Supper, dated 1955
Known neither for his Christian themes nor for simplicity of organization, Dali has in this painting moved away from the surrealism that preoccupied him during his earlier years. The composition of the Last Supper is clearly defined in two main planes: foreground action and background scenery. The placement of the figures is symmetrical with a mirror-image repetition of the same figures from one side of the painting to the other. The men, their faces hidden, are more the idealized participants in a timeless Eucharist than specific men of a specific time and place. The strange translucent enclosure—a geometrical dodecahedron—is meant to be understood as part earthly, part celestial. The enigma of this intellectual and complex painting centers finally in the all-embracing arms—symbolic of the heavens and of the creator, who is seen as youthful rather than patriarchal but whose face is hidden.