Art & Design

Washington’s Crown Jewel

Miró: "The Farm"

Amid Intimate Galleries, a Jewel of a Painting Collection

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: January 15, 2009
The next several days promise to be unusually euphoric for the nation’s capital, even by the standards of past presidential inaugurations. If you’re in town for this historic event and have some extra time, you can always duck into the National Gallery of Art without clouding your elation. Thanks to the museum’s magnificent painting collection, the euphoria possible inside its walls can easily match the mood outside. It may also strike you as similarly alive with a sense of human possibility.

The National Gallery, founded in 1937 as a gift to the nation from the financier Andrew W. Mellon, opened its doors in 1941. It is the jewel in the crown of Washington’s many great museums. It is open, with free admission, 363 days a year, although this year that number will drop to 362. Like many institutions along the Mall, it will be closed on Inauguration Day.

Although the gallery has impressive holdings in prints, drawings, photography, the decorative arts and especially sculpture, it is not an encyclopedic museum like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and others across the nation. Its art is almost entirely European and American, and its long suit by far is painting.

The bulk of the National Gallery’s paintings are arrayed on its vast main floor, where warrens of wonderfully intimate galleries feed into two long halls that meet at a domed rotunda. It is as if the arcades of the Palais Royale in Paris were attached to either side of the Pantheon in Rome.

The galleries are numbered, and the first 25 or so offer an amazing review of the font of Western painting in 13th- to 16th-century Italy, especially if you attend primarily to the abundant renderings of the Madonna and Child. The starting point is “Madonna and Child Enthroned” by Margaritone d’Arezzo in Gallery 1. Dated around 1270, it encapsulates the gold ground, frozen poses and flattened space of Byzantine art.

One possible end point is “The Alba Madonna,” Raphael’s glorious tondo from around 1510 in Gallery 20. Here the Madonna leans toward the Christ Child like a mother (albeit a very dignified mother) on a picnic; the graceful, fully rounded figures occupy an immense dome of crystalline, blue-skied space that stretches out behind them.

In between these two paintings virtually every Italian painter of the time seems to weigh in on the subject, as well as on how to render the figure expressively in space. The progression of works gives unusual force to both the idealism and realism of the High Renaissance. Of course the Renaissance portraits in these rooms are not small change, starting with Leonardo’s ineffable “Ginevra de’ Benci” (Gallery 6).

Across the hall the Northern Renaissance and its repercussions unfold almost as compellingly, with scores of must-see galleries, including two (48 and 51) devoted to Rembrandt and his school. One of the choicest places to pause is Gallery 39, where you’ll find three pinnacles of the astounding realism favored in Germany and the Netherlands.

First is Jan van Eyck’s meticulous “Annunciation,” from around 1434-6, in which the Angel Gabriel finds Mary in a Gothic church standing on a carpet whose delicate lines depict scenes from the Old Testament. Second is Petrus Christus’s grand “Nativity,” from around 1450. The elaborate manger includes an arch decorated with statues of Adam and Eve and a peaked roof with green leaves sprouting from a horizontal beam directly above the Christ Child. Yet this sign of growth and hope is framed by a triangle of spindly wood that subtly evokes torturously stretched arms, as on the Cross. Third is Rogier van der Weyden’s luxuriously austere “Portrait of a Lady” of around 1460, her delicate face framed by white veils in a shape reminiscent of a sphinx.

A quick stop in Gallery 50C, not much bigger than a large closet, will bring you face to face with Vermeer’s dewy “Girl With the Red Hat” (1665-66), turning around to peer out of the picture so quickly that you can almost hear the rustling of her blue silk garment. The space behind her is muffled by a yellow and green tapestry in soft focus.

On the other side of the rotunda, French Impressionism and a few galleries of American art await. (More are in the process of being reinstalled after a temporary exhibition, along with galleries of British art.) Among the Impressionists, keep an eye out for Cézanne’s rough-surfaced, all-thumbs portrait of his domineering father in Gallery 83. He is clothed like a laborer, despite being a banker (as he thought Cézanne should have been) and is shown seated beneath one of his son’s still lifes, reading a newspaper that favorably reviewed his son’s work.

Another standout in this section is Gauguin’s “Still Life With Peonies” (Gallery 84), a relatively unfamiliar work painted in a quasi-Impressionistic manner but with the deep reds, greens and yellows typical of Gauguin’s mature style. An early work, it shows Gauguin’s bowing to his elders, probably by depicting art that he owned: part of a drawing by Degas is visible, tacked to the wall, along with a village scene that might be by Pissarro.

Acquired by the gallery in 1995, the Gauguin is an early work painted in 1884, the year he quit his day job as a bank clerk and began to paint full time, but it conveys the turbulence central to both his life and his art.

Across the hall the American paintings include examples of the limpid American landscape style called Luminism and the more flamboyant Ash Can School. Of particular interest is a gallery (No. 65) devoted to Gilbert Stuart’s portraits, including those of the first five American presidents (Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Monroe and Madison), which the National Gallery has never exhibited together.

My favorite, however, is Stuart’s portrait of Catherine Brass Yates (Mrs. Richard Yates), possibly one of the nation’s first ladies who lunch, from 1793-4. Dressed completely in light gray lace or satin or tulle, this thin, immaculately turned-out older woman looks up from her sewing to scrutinize us and seems noticeably unimpressed.

It could take quite a bit of time to exhaust the West Wing’s paintings, but there are more in the East Wing. Just inside the main entrance, for example, are several tiny galleries of small French paintings, most of them gifts of Ailsa Mellon Bruce, Mellon’s daughter.

These include a wonderful portrait of a young woman by Corot, her face tenderly rendered, her plaid dress dashed off with palpable verve (Gallery 103B); numerous mysterious interiors by Édouard Vuillard; and another reasonably recent acquisition, Antoine Vollon’s lush “Mound of Butter” from 1875-85, in Gallery 103D.

The two carefully rendered eggs in front of the butter give it a monumentality that seems more commercial than domestic. The butter also evokes a landscape, possibly a quarry, or a pile of clay awaiting its sculptor. And finally, it is primarily a pile of weightless brushstrokes, perhaps a comment by this academic artist on the excesses of Impressionism, which was all the rage during the time “Mound of Butter” was painted.

There are numerous paintings that should be seen upstairs in the East Wing’s galleries of Modern art, including an early Cubist Braque, wonderful Fauvist works by Derain, Matisse, Dufy and Marquet, and of course Matisse’s mini-masterpiece, “Open Window, Collioure,” from 1905 (Gallery 404B), which looks back to Fauvism and forward to his Nice paintings of the 1920s.

But if you have time for only one painting, see Miró’s golden, finely itemized work of abstract realism, “The Farm,” of 1921-22, in Gallery 404E. Once owned by Hemingway and donated to the gallery by his widow, Mary, it portrays farmyard, fields, barns and animals in a constantly varying Morse code of dots, dashes, arcs and squares, as well as dabs of paint. Every detail is at once recognizable, but also reduced to a symbol.

Sometimes the details add up to something monumental; just spend a little time staring at the cracks, pockmarks and delicious little flourishes of the tall, white-pink stucco barn. It is a landscape unto itself, a desert beachscape in advance of Dalí.

Miró painted his farm from the farmer’s point of view, as seen by someone who knew every pebble and leaf, every pigeon and coop, every bucket and seed. It is, like all paintings, but a little more directly than some, a picture of human striving.