Director's Choice Tour

Image: Peter Carl Fabergé  |  Peter the Great Egg (detail)

Andy Warhol
Triple Elvis (1964)
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Against an aluminum background, Elvis Presley steps forward. Drawing his gun, he is a cowboy from the legendary Wild West and a rock ‘n’ roll icon.

Andy Warhol began his career as a designer for advertising and magazines, and this image is characteristic of his work, which came to be known as "pop" art—art that borrowed from popular culture. Triple Elvis is based on a movie publicity photo that has been reproduced with silk screening, a technique often used in advertising. With this method, an image can be copied by anyone—a slap at the traditional idea that art worthy of being hung in a museum can only be created by a few talented, specially trained people.

Warhol fell in love with the idea of Hollywood. From Elvis and Marilyn Monroe to Jackie Kennedy and the Chinese Chairman Mao Tse Tung, his images of stars are 20th-century saints in a society that worships fame and celebrity.

Jasper Johns
Between the Clock and the Bed (1983)
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Quick glimpses of images often inspire the art of Jasper Johns. Once, in 1972, he explained "I was riding in a car when a car came in the opposite direction. It was covered with these marks, but I only saw it for a moment—then it was gone. But I immediately thought I would use it for my next painting." In this painting, those crosshatch marks became raw material for Johns' art and he would use them for almost 10 years.

The title of this painting, Between the Clock and the Bed refers to a self-portrait from the late 1940s by the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch. In it, the pattern on the bedspread reminded Johns of his hatch marks. Munch's work shows the artist between a clock without hands—representing time—and his bed, a symbol of sleep or death. His paintings hang in the background. If you look closely at the lower right, you can see small, red marks which represent Munch's red and white bedspread.
Though the crosshatch paintings use simple, straight lines, Johns applies them in a way that is far from simple. He uses encaustic, a wax paint that dries very quickly and is very difficult to work with, but it adds a wonderful texture to the surface of the paint.

Louis Comfort Tiffany
Punch Bowl (1900)
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If you could turn this amazing punch bowl upside down it would look like the glass domes of buildings at the Paris World’s Fair in 1900, where it was first displayed. And its forms imitate swirling water, echoing the fountains at the fair that were lit with colored lights each night. This bowl by the famous American designer Louis Comfort Tiffany not only attracted attention, it won first prize.

The bowl is a fabulous demonstration of Tiffany’s skills as a glassmaker and designer. Its shimmering glass, which Tiffany called favrile, was his invention. Look up through the glass and you’ll see swirling rainbows of colors. Tiffany was often inspired by nature. Here the theme is the sea—waves and shells adorn the bowl, while ladles hang from arms like tentacles. We see wild curves everywhere, a decorative style known as Art Nouveau.

Louis Comfort Tiffany, son of the jeweler who founded New York City’s famous Tiffany & Co., started out as a painter. He approached glassmaking as though it were painting or drawing, exploring the endless possibilities of line, texture, and shape. Tiffany devoted over 30 years to experimenting with glass. By the time this bowl was made in 1900, his studio of chemists and artisans had already come up with 5,000 different textures and colors.

Frank Lloyd Wright
Windows (1912, ADB 12/16)
Windows from Avery Coonley Playhouse
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These delightful windows by Frank Lloyd Wright were part of a series that the famous American architect dubbed his "Kindersymphony," or "symphony for children." Each set of panels had its own design. Inspired by a parade, with colorful balloons, flags, and confetti, the windows decorated Wright's Avery Coonley Playhouse, a small building that served as a schoolhouse and playroom for a client’s daughter. The Coonley home, also designed by Wright, stood some distance apart on their large suburban estate outside Chicago.

Wright completed the playhouse windows in 1912, around the time the first totally abstract European paintings were created. Wright was so fond of their brightly colored balloon motif that he borrowed it for his own children's playhouse. His son later recalled that "He brought colored gas balloons by the dozen—released them in the playroom—and arranged and played with them by the hour."

Eileen Gray
Canoe Sofa (1919-20 ADB 12/16)
(Pirogue Chaise Longue)
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Imagine a stylish woman lying on this sofa, surrounded by pillows and a casually draped throw. A wisp of smoke curls slowly from the cigarette in her hand. This image actually appeared in an advertisement for perfume. The model was the fashion designer Suzanne Talbot, who hired the Irish designer Eileen Gray to decorate her entire Paris apartment. Gray designed the furniture, including this unusual sofa, which was one of a pair. She meant, she once said, to create that “which was impossible, but which no one was doing.”

John Singer Sargent
The Sketchers (c. 1913)
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John Singer Sargent, an American artist who spent most of his life abroad, celebrates painting in this work called The Sketchers, done around 1913. Six years earlier, in 1907, when he was considered England’s greatest portraitist, Sargent gave up painting portraits. His fashionable clients were shocked and dismayed. But the artist was delighted to return to working outdoors, traveling with family and friends and putting them in his paintings.

Here, he shows fellow artists Jane and Wilfrid de Glehn painting in the Italian hillside resort of Frascasti, outside Rome. Sargent loved the gardens there, declaring that he could paint them “from morning to night.”

In this light-filled picture, he seems to attack the canvas with the brush, slashing on yellow and scribbling on green. Jane wears a dazzling blue smock, highlighted with touches of turquoise. She lifts her arm, about to dash paint on her easel, which stands outside the frame, out of our line of sight.

He worked in the open air, using short, broken strokes of paint to capture light—a practice the French Impressionists had pioneered more than forty years earlier.

Edward Hopper
House at Dusk (1935)
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In House at Dusk—as in most of Edward Hopper’s work—we sense some kind of story that never gets told. The scene is at twilight in an unnamed city. We peer into upper floor windows of an old stone building. The only person we see is a woman staring out from the middle window. Her face shrouded in shadow, she seems lost in her own thoughts.

There’s a feeling of separateness, of loneliness that can be overwhelming in a city that you know is full of people, even if you can’t see them. To convey this idea, Hopper constructs the composition as carefully as a stage set. His props are few: a backdrop of dark foliage, a sidewalk with no beginning or ending, a single street light, an angled building whose lower floors and doors we can’t see.

But what makes House at Dusk so powerful and mysterious is Hopper’s masterful use of light. It plays on the simplified shapes of the picture, shining out of some windows but not others, illuminating only part of a path. The French poet Paul Verlaine called dusk “an exquisite hour,” a line that Hopper was fond of quoting. In fact, the artist painted this haunting time of day many times throughout his career.

Georgia O'Keeffe
White Iris (1924)
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With her striking flower paintings, American artist Georgia O’Keeffe bowled people over with what had long been though of as a gentle, feminine subject. She once said, “I’ll paint what I see—what a flower is to me—but I’ll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it. I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.”

You could almost drown in Light Iris, one of her most beautiful works, made in 1924. By magnifying the flower and simplifying its details, O’Keeffe underscores its beauty: the delicate, curving petals; their exquisite pinks, greens, and lilacs; and in the middle of the picture, those sudden bursts of yellow. O’Keeffe designed this simple frame, too. It has the same kind of curves as the iris it sets off, but instead of competing with the image, it seems to push the picture forward closer to us.

Underneath the painting is a small still life of an iris by O’Keeffe’s teacher in New York at that time, Frank Vincent Dumand. Art, of course, often grows out of earlier art. Dumand’s picture is the same size as many of O’Keeffe’s early flower pictures. But the huge sensuous, simplified forms in the O’Keeffe you see here point to an artist who is exploring new, modern terrain.

Henri Rousseau
Tropical Landscape—An American Indian Struggling with a Gorilla (1910)
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It is hard to imagine any sounds disturbing this make-believe jungle—the roar of the gorilla as he attacks…or the wind rustling the perfect leaves. It seems more like a flat stage set, with each leaf painted in painstaking detail.

This magical landscape is worlds away from the artist Henri Rousseau’s real-life job as a toll collector. In fact, the only exotic plants the self-taught painter ever encountered were in the Paris Botanical Garden. He saw animals in the zoo, and travel brochures and children's stories sometimes inspired him. But in his paintings Rousseau added a dreamlike quality to create a mysterious and fascinating fantasy world.

At first, art critics hated his work. In time, some artists began to appreciate Rousseau's special vision; he and the great modern painter Matisse even exhibited their work together. About 10 years after this picture was painted, Rousseau himself inspired the dream-like visions of the artists called the Surrealists.

Artemisia Gentileschi
Venus & Cupid
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The langourous goddess Venus is fanned with peacock feathers by the winged cupid. But is this really Venus – some have speculated she might be a courtesan, a patron’s mistress, or even fantasy? What is most unusual is that the artist was female . Artemisia Gentileschi worked quietly within the male-dominated society of 17th century Italy, as well as in the shadow of her artist father, Orazio Gentileschi (1563-1634) who, in turn, because of his nomadic life at the courts of Europe, has never entirely received the recognition he deserves.

When Artemisia began painting in Rome at the early age of sixteen she had first hand knowledge of the revolutionary style of the painter Caravaggio, who used dramatic effects of light and dark to create a new sense of realism. Soon to become known as the “Baroque” style, artists competed to create increasingly powerful and expressive works using unusual perspectives and elaborate compositions. In this beautiful work Gentileschi displays a feminine sensitivity and a restraint lacking in many of her contemporaries. In her portrayal of this mysterious woman, she confirms her position as one of Italy’s great painters.

George Stubbs
Tiger
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George Stubbs born in Liverpool in 1724 had a passion for anatomy and nature. His guiding principle was to maintain a “truthfulness to nature” and he has been quoted as saying that his sole visit to Italy was to "to convince himself that nature was and is always superior to art whether Greek or Roman.” He spent many years studying the anatomy of humans, horses, dogs, and wild animals as seen here. This is one of three painted versions of a tiger.

Stubbs had been widely dismissed as simply a painter of animals for a small group of devoted patrons until Paul Mellon began to fervently collect his works in the late 1930s. In many ways Stubb’s was Mr. Mellon’s favorite artist. He collected almost 40 of Stubbs’ paintings, as well as prints, drawings and books of anatomical studies, and helped to restore Stubbs’s reputation as one of England’s most important artists.

Bacchiacca (Francesco d'Ubertini Verdi)
The Virgin and Child with the Young Saint John (ca. 1540s)
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While Francesco d’Ubertini, also known as Il Bacchiacca, was one of the leading artists in Florence in the early 16th century, he is not well known today primarily because professional jealousy prompted his contemporary Giorgio Vasari to purposefully omit a dedicated biography of Bacchiacca in his well-known book, Lives of the Artists. Nevertheless, Bacchiacca was responsible for major commissions and counted the Medici family among his primary patrons.

Bacchiacca did not limit himself to a single influence. In this work elements of a style of painting that became known as “Mannerism” are seen – exaggerated effects of color and composition and an eclectic variety of influences.. This mixing and selecting of widely differing sources is typical not only of mannerism, but also Bacchiacca himself, hence his nickname which comes from an Italian word that means to cull ripe fruits from a tree by beating it with a stick.

In this work the artist appears to has borrowed the setting from Leonardo da Vinci's Madonna of the Rocks, although the scale of the Madonna and her relief-like appearance draws from High Renaissance examples such as Raphael's late Madonnas. References to Michelangelo are found in the costume and hairstyle of the Virgin, in her pose, and in the pose of the Baptist. The overall coloring also shows a debt to Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling, while the whitish light is comparable to the work of another Florentine Mannerist painter, Agnolo Bronzino.

Peter Carl Fabergé
Peter the Great Egg (1903)
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The Peter the Great Egg was made under the supervision of the Peter Carl Fabergé in 1903, for the last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II and was created to celebrate the two-hundredth anniversary of the founding of St. Petersburg in 1703. Made in the Rococo style, it consists of red, green and yellow gold, platinum, rose-cut diamonds, rubies, enamel, rock crystal, and miniature watercolor portraits on ivory.

The paintings portray the "before" and "after" of St. Petersburg in 1703 and 1903. On one side the painting shows the extravagant Winter Palace, the official residence of Nicholas II two hundred years after the founding of St. Petersburg. On the reverse is a painting of a log cabin believed to be built by Peter the Great himself, representing the founding of St. Petersburg on the banks of the Neva River. On the sides of the egg are portraits of Peter the Great in 1703 and Nicholas II in 1903. Each of the miniatures is covered by rock crystal and the dates 1703 and 1903, worked in diamonds, appear on either side of the lid above the paintings of the log cabin and Winter Palace.

When the egg is opened, a mechanism within raises a miniature gold model of Peter the Great's monument of a horse on the Neva, resting on a base of sapphire.

Lokapala
Tang Dynasty (AD 600)
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This scary warrior is one of four guardians of the north, south, east, and west. He was made to accompany and guard a dead Chinese nobleman against evil spirits in the afterlife. Such tomb sculpture has a long tradition in China. Around 200 BC, the warlike Emperor Qin was buried with an army of over 7,000 life-sized figures of warriors, their horses, and chariots.

This sculpture was made during the Tang dynasty, from AD 618 to 906, a period of power and prosperity when the arts flourished. In addition to guardians such as this Lokapala, groups of lively animals—pigs, chickens, dogs, camels and horses—and musicians, grooms, dancers, court ladies and servants were sculpted to assist and entertain a powerful noble in the afterlife.

Like the most valued of the Tang tomb sculptures, this Lokapala is unglazed terra-cotta, painted over a thin coating of white clay mixed with water. Red and black flowers decorate his tunic and sleeves; and even after almost 1,400 years, traces of gold leaf still gleam on his breastplate and gloves. His raised arm once held a spear, perhaps to finish off the angry red demon he tramples. A phoenix, an imaginary bird that represents rebirth, springs from his helmet, though this energetic soldier doesn’t seem to need his help.

Indian Pavilion
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Imagine retreating to this pavilion to rest in a palace garden and enjoy cool breezes and fragrant flowers. Stone and marble pavilions such as this one were standard features in royal gardens and palace complexes of India during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. They were spaces where the ruler could assemble his court for state business or entertainment. They were also a place for private retreat, pleasure, and contemplation. Its white marble surfaces are carved with refined floral decoration, and a fountain basin rests in the middle of its intricately inlaid floor. Such pavilions frequently appear in later Indian miniature paintings and they are usually shown with exotically colored drapes and blinds. Stylistic comparisons indicate that the pavilion was created in the princely state of Bharatpur in north-west India, possibly by the royal family of Bharatpur, and so would have been located close to the most famous example of Indian garden architecture: the Taj Mahal.

Howdah
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This exotic object is a spectacular late 19th - early 20th-century Indian howdah, or seat placed on the back of an elephant. Spectacular silver-clad howdahs were popular with the Maharajas (Hindu kings) and Nawabs (Muslim kings) who ruled the small princely states into which British India was divided from the 18th to the 20th century. Such howdahs were used by an Indian monarch when he rode on an elephant in the lavish public processions that marked royal birthdays, coronations and other dynastic events. In these processions, the king clad in silk robes and glittering jewels sat in the howdah attended by servants holding flywhisks and a parasol, symbols of royalty. Throngs of the monarch's subjects cheered as he passed by them in a blaze of glory.

While some elements of this state howdah refer to ancient Indian culture, others are in varying degrees European. The floral decoration prominently featured here, for example, is the generic descendant of traditional Indian lotus ornament, but its realistic rendering is entirely European. Also Western is the use of a heraldic device (monogrammed cartouche flanked by rampant lions and crowned by a human-faced sun), which is ultimately based upon European coats-of-arms.

Howdahs are sometimes difficult to attribute to specific Indian princely states, but such is not the case with this howdah. Its coat-of-arms and the inscribed Latin motto tell us that this grand seat was made for the royal house of Sirguja (or Sarguja), a small Hindu kingdom of 6.089 square miles in east central India.

Moche
Jaguar (400-100 BC)
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This tiny golden jaguar represents one of the most powerful symbols in the ancient art of the Andes Mountains, in what is now Peru. There, people worshipped the wild cats in a variety of ways: as a rain god, a symbol of royalty, or as a link to the world of spirits. The creatures’ eyes were thought to be mirrors of the soul. Like the owl, which also hunts at night, jaguars are seen frequently in Moche art, often appearing as companions of priests and in scenes of sacrifice.

This hollow, crouching cat from the Moche culture in what is now northeastern Peru is typical of the region’s early metalwork from almost 2,400 years ago. It is made of separate pieces shaped from sheets of gold hammered over molds. The lower and upper body, tail, front legs, and ears were each made separately. Inserted at a later date, the green stones that glow from the jaguar’s eyes add to the feeling of menace. This is a cat ready to pounce at any moment.

Maya Vessel
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The Mayans were a very advanced culture and made technological advancements in almost all cultural and technological fields including architecture, math, and art. Mayan art typically mirrored the residents' daily activities and their society which often included depictions of royalty, religious practices and the development of the calendar. The scene on this funerary vessel depicts an episode from the Mayan creation story in which a young lord addresses a pair of gods seated on a throne.

Although the original purpose of this vessel is still unknown, it was almost certainly taken into the grave of an elite member of Maya society—to be filled with sustenance for the afterlife. The hieroglyphs along the top of the scene tell us that this particular vessel held a substance called “atole,” a mixture of cooked corn and water that varied in consistency from a grainy liquid to gruel.

Standing Figure of King Senkamanisken
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This royal statue of King Senkamanisken is one of three figures of the king found in the Great Temple of Amun in 1916. Senkamanisken was an heir of warrior-trader kings and during his 20 year reign, he enriched his heritage significantly. Responsible for the completion of three temples, he set a new pattern for pyramid interiors. He decreed three rooms inside rather than the single room Egyptians typically required. His innovation would prevail in the Sudan for a thousand years as more than seventy of his descendants followed his concept.