Summers in Washington is a bit damp and stuffy. If you walk on the exposed National Mall for a while, you will sweat all over. It is very pleasant to hide in the museum to see the exhibition in this weather. I chose the National Art Gallery on the easternmost part of the square to start visiting, trying to finish it in one day.
National Gallery of Art (NGA) is divided into three parts. The main building on the west was built in 1941, and the east wing was expanded in 1978. It was designed by Chinese architect I.M. Pei for displaying modern art works. The architectural styles of the east and west are completely different, and the two buildings are connected by an underground exhibition hall.
Unfortunately, the East Wing is currently being renovated, and is not open to the public .
West Wing Main Building exhibits classical art works, from paintings and sculptures from the Middle Ages to Renaissance, to Impressionist and modern works, with a large time span and many works.
Art Museum has many visitors, not only white people, but also many Middle Eastern people, Asians and blacks. Art is not divided into race or culture. I guess there are also many foreign tourists like me. There are also a large number of students visiting the art gallery. Some children follow their parents and families to watch the exhibition, and many children visit the teacher, which is a bit similar to the field trip of middle school students.
I asked a student sitting on the ground in a circle what was doing. I thought they were copying famous paintings. He showed me the notes in his hand. It turned out that they were taking an art appreciation class, and the teacher was explaining the background, meaning, artistic value of these works, etc. This kind of physical teaching method is very intuitive and the effect is definitely better than that of books and classrooms.
The original famous paintings in the art museum were mainly donated by Andrew William Mellon and Samuel Henry Kress, which led many people to donate their own private collections. In addition to the famous paintings that the art museum has continuously purchased, the number of famous works in the embassy ranks among the top in the world.
Mellon is a banker born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He served as the Treasury Secretary of the Three U.S. Presidents. In his later years, he donated a large number of famous paintings in his private collection to the society and initiated the establishment of the National Gallery of Art (NGA). Another contribution he made to society was to donate to establish Carnegie Mellon University (Carnegie Mellon University , CMU).
Carris is an entrepreneur and philanthropist born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is also a very skilled art lover and has collected a large number of works from Italian Renaissance .
Art gallery can even be seen in some European artworks from the pre-Renailles medieval period.
The artworks of this period are mainly religious themes.
Some works clearly reflect the images of the characters in that period.
Only in terms of the expression form of character sculpture works, European portrait sculptures grasp the shape of the characters more accurately, while most oriental sculptures have blurred images.
After entering the Renaissance period, European paintings underwent great changes, and the themes of expression began to shift from religion to folk, and became mainly used to describe secular life and characters.
After the Renaissance, even the portrayal of the image of Christ was no longer blindly sacred, but instead brought the distance to people closer and touched people's hearts more.
Myths still appear in paintings during this period.
But these myths are no longer limited to the stories in " Bible ", and incorporate many Greek mythological themes, and the character shapes and scenes are more humanized and secular.
Sculpture works since the Renaissance have also transformed into secular "people" and have begun to call for "people-oriented".
This pair of marble statues is very interesting. The same character and different outfits give people a completely different feeling.
From the perspective of sculpture style, it inherits the delicate style of ancient Greek and ancient Roman period, and looks very vivid and realistic.
I personally like the works of painters of Rembrandt very much. Modern oil paintings should have started with Dutch . The level of portrait paintings of this period is far better than the works of Italian painters in the early Renaissance.
Dutch painters painted on canvas with oil paint, breaking through the previous painting restrictions of wooden board egg white paintings and church murals. It was an almost revolutionary progress in terms of the richness of color or the treatment of light.
With the advancement of painting materials and painting technology, the size of oil paintings has also far exceeded that of the small egg white paintings in the early Renaissance, and many works that express grand scenes have appeared. A picture of "Young Girl Reading" collected in the gallery is an oil painting created by French painter Jean Honoré Fragonard in 1769. This work has undergone a relatively large change in color and light treatment with Rembrandt's paintings, and the picture becomes warmer and brighter.
From this stage, the European style began to shift towards impressionism. This "The Woman Holding an Umbrella - Madame Monet and Son" by Claude Monet was written in 1875 and was donated to the art gallery by Paul Mellon, son of Andrew W. Mellon, the founder of the National Gallery.
Art galleries all over the United States have always attached great importance to collecting works by Impressionist painters. This genre originated from France has a wide influence on modern world painting and is even more respected in the American painting world. Most of the representative works of French Impressionist masters are bought and collected by American collectors.
Impressionist’s treatment of light, especially the processing of light in shadows, breaks through the limitations of traditional paintings. The shadows are no longer simple darkness, but very detailed reflections of light, layers and colors appear, and no longer emphasizes the unified light source, making the paintings closer to the real world.
The works of American painters collected in the art gallery span several eras, and the style of painting is basically consistent with the world's painting trend.
Among the works of these native American painters, this oil painting "My Daughter" created by Frank Weston Benson has reached an extremely high artistic level with realistic techniques.
This is a work by American female painter Cecilia Beaux. It is also quite accurate in grasping the character's shape and expression, color and light.
There is an exhibition hall in the National Gallery that specializes in displaying huge paintings of founding fathers such as Acura American Revolution and Washington. The House of Representatives, created by Samuel F. B. Morse in 1822, reflects the pride of Americans after they escaped from British independence.
However, the National Gallery has an obvious disadvantage, which is that there are too many works in the exhibition hall and display, making it difficult to read them all in one day.
Fortunately, the art museum does not charge for tickets. If you have time, you can return to continue watching the next day.
Due to the limited time I stayed in Washington, I could only pass many exhibition halls in a hurry and didn’t have time to read them carefully.
The third part of the National Gallery is an open sculpture garden on the westmost side.
There is a very open fountain in the park. The weather is too hot. The white mother and daughter sitting next to me don’t care so much, so they just took off their shoes and sat by the pool to soak their feet. I guess they would feel extremely hot when they walked barefoot on the road.
Originally I planned to visit the National Air and Space Museum, but the place was closed for renovation all summer, so I could only adjust my plan. Where are you going tomorrow? I haven't made up my mind yet.
to be continued.........
