Gallery Of Art

Freer at 100 It was the first of the Smithsonian Institution's art galleries. And this year it's celebrating its centennial. The Freer Gallery of Art presents a daylong celebration Saturday. The museum was founded in 1906 by Detroit railroad-car manufacturer Charles Lang Freer, who donated his Asian art collection to the Smithsonian Institution's regents and donated money for the building in which to house the art. Today, the museum still houses an extensive collection of east Asian art. All day Saturday, visitors to the museum can take part in an Asian-themed 100th birthday celebration.

Philanthropist Robert E. Meyerhoff built seven galleries in a house with windows overlooking grazing horses on his northern Baltimore County farm to display a postmodern art collection that experts call one of the world's finest. Now he wants to give the public a chance to see the works by artists such as Roy Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns by opening a museum in the rural setting. "We don't want it in storage," Meyerhoff said of the collection, after a Baltimore County Council meeting yesterday during which lawmakers discussed a measure that would allow the museum to operate in an area designated for agriculture.

Earl Francis Hofmann, realist painter, teacherEarl Francis Hofmann, who painted and taught in Baltimore before moving to Southern Maryland, died Tuesday of cancer at St. Mary's Hospital in Leonardtown.A Mass of Christian burial for Mr. Hofmann, who was 64 and lived in Hollywood, will be offered at 10 a.m. today at St. Aloysius Roman Catholic Church in Leonardtown.He was one of a group of artists dubbed the Six Realists and opened a gallery of that name in 1961.He left Baltimore and a home in Bolton Hill in 1970 and served as artist-in-residence at St. Mary's College until the late 1970s, when he began teaching part-time at the Calvert County Branch of the Charles County Community College.

Paul Mellon, the patrician art collector who turned philanthropy into his personal art form, above all through his stewardship of the National Gallery of Art, died on Monday at his home in Upperville, Va. He was 91.Paul Mellon turned from his family's world of banking and business to become an inventive benefactor of the nation's cultural life. The Mellons' gifts to museums, libraries and other causes from parks to poetry to medicine have been estimated at nearly a billion dollars. The money has gone to save seashores and encourage scholars.

Although the notion of artist-as-rebel may be a cliche, English landscape painter John Constable spent an anxious decade desperately trying to gain admission to his country's prestigious Royal Academy. The son of a prosperous gentleman farmer from the provinces, Constable (1776-1837) frankly wanted to make a splash at the academy's annual 10-week exhibition in London. His goal was to marry and support a family - and he was happy to do so on the academy's conservative terms. CONSTABLE'S GREAT LANDSCAPES: THE SIX-FOOT PAINTINGS runs through Dec. 31 at the National Gallery of Art, Fourth Street and Constitution Avenue, Northwest, Washington, 202-737-4215 or nga.gov

Ansel Adams didn't invent the idea of the heroic American West, though he was certainly the 20th century's most persuasive photographic interpreter of it. The grand vistas of pristine wilderness that Adams recorded in his monumental landscapes of rugged mountain ranges and stands of virgin forest are among the most instantly recognizable images in all American art, and they made Adams famous even among people who knew little about photography or art....

Juried Show When the Columbia-based Artists' Gallery announced it would hold its first juried show, more than 130 artists from several states sent entries. Juror Michael Skalka, conservation administrator and coordinator of the Art Materials Collection and Study Center at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, chose 48 for the show. They include watercolors, pastels, oils, collages, photography and mixed media. The Artists' Gallery show opens Monday and runs through March 2. The gallery is at the American City Building, 10227 Wincopin Circle in Columbia.

A young man lying flat in his canoe locks a firm grip onto the antler of a deer, which barely has its head above the water's surface. Nearby, a hound dog paddles toward the boat. The action in the scene appears to suggest an attempt to save the deer's life -- or kill it. Neither possibility, however, bears out. In fact, American artist Winslow Homer (1836-1910) had another interpretation in mind when he captured the moment in his celebrated painting Hound and Hunter (1892). Hound and Hunter provides a vivid, if not unsettling, narrative view about wilderness life in late 19th-century America.

The place to be this summer is Washington, with all the fabulous exhibitions now in the museums, and those scheduled to open in the near future.The "Olmec Art of Ancient Mexico," opening today and running through Oct. 20 at the National Gallery of Art, promises to be one of the most important shows ever from that part of the world. Several of the pieces have never before left Mexico, and one of the monumental sculptures (15 of which are from Mexico's museums) had to be installed using a crane.