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Tag: National Portrait Gallery

1970s Face-off: Portrait Exchange by Jamie Wyeth and Andy Warhol

This post was written by Sofia Silva, Katzenberger Intern at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Library and American Art & Portrait Gallery Library as part of a series exploring the Art & Artists Files at the Smithsonian Libraries.

 

Cover of the invitation to the 1976 exhibition "Andy Warhol and Jamie Wyeth Portraits of Each Other" at the Coe Kerr Gallery-- Hirshhorn
Cover of the invitation to the 1976 exhibition “Andy Warhol and Jamie Wyeth Portraits of Each Other” at the Coe Kerr Gallery– Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Library.

 

Though contemporaries, the artists James Browning Wyeth and Andy Warhol could not be more diametrically opposed. James, more commonly known as Jamie, is a third-generation member of the famed Wyeth family, who are celebrated as central figures in the revival of realism in American art (his father is Andrew Wyeth, painter of the American classic Christina’s World and his grandfather, N.C. Wyeth is acclaimed painter of vast landscapes and epic narratives of early Americana). Jamie continued this family tradition as a portraitist and landscape painter, whose naturalistic approach to painting produced highly detailed and visually complex work that captured life in rural Maine, Delaware and Pennsylvania.

Elaine de Kooning: Portraits in the Art and Artist Files

Announcement for Elaine de Kooning's exhibition of portraits at Washburn Gallery, 1994-- AAPG
Announcement for Elaine de Kooning’s exhibition of portraits at Washburn Gallery, 1994– AAPG

The National Portrait Gallery is currently exhibiting the work of Elaine de Kooning in the show Elaine de Kooning: Portraits, organized by Brandon Brame Fortune, the Portrait Gallery’s chief curator and senior curator of painting and sculpture. Elaine was an active member of the Abstract Expressionists in New York, a group known for a style defined by vivid colors, spontaneity and emotive strokes of thick, layered paint on monumental canvases. She married fellow Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning in 1943. However, Elaine’s work was not solely abstract, in fact, the majority of her work is representational in nature—a style that could be categorized as Figurative Expressionism.

Discovering the artwork of the original AA/PG Library

~This post was written by Katherine Williamson, an intern at the American Art/ Portrait Gallery library.

Smithsonian NCFA/NPG Library c. 1975. Photo by Wolfgang Freitag
Cast-iron Eagle in the Smithsonian NCFA/NPG Library c. 1975. Photo by Wolfgang Freitag
Smithsonian NCFA/NPG Library, 1975. Photo by Wolfgang Freitag
Smithsonian NCFA/NPG Library, 1975. Photo by Wolfgang Freitag

As part of my work as an American Art/Portrait Gallery Library (AA/PG) intern, I answer reference questions from patrons that involve some type of research, either within our collection or using  online sources that the library subscribes to. One of the most interesting reference questions I have received actually came from our Head Librarian, Doug Litts. Through his own research involving the original location of the AA/PG library – Room 331 of the main museum building – he came across a list of paintings, a marble bust and a cast iron sculpture, that were located in what was known as the NCFA/NPG Library when it was housed in the museum. Through circumstances unknown to us, those artworks were never transported to the Victor Building when the library moved here in 2000. He became very interested in the history of the artworks, as well as where they are now, and recruited me to help him in his research.