Gallery Of Art

Paul Cezanne, the French Post-Impressionist painter known as the father of modern art, was a proud, prickly and increasingly reclusive man whose genius went largely unrecognized for much of his life, only to be widely misunderstood when the world finally could no longer ignore it. His fame now is so great that it is almost impossible for us to view his art with fresh eyes - let alone through the eyes of his contemporaries of the late 1880s and 1890s....

Lecture and concert in D.C. In honor of the anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, the National Gallery of Art in Washington is presenting a lecture and concert that celebrate the works of African-American artists. At 2 p.m. today, visitors to the museum's East Building Auditorium can attend the slide lecture "Norman Lewis in Harlem: An Inquiry Into the Laws of Nature." The event features a talk by museum curator Ruth Fine on Lewis, an African-American artist, as well as a slide show of many of his paintings and works on paper.

Painter Sam Gilliam likes to remember his formative years during the early 1960s, shortly after he arrived in Washington from graduate school at the University of Louisville in Kentucky. "The people I hung out with were moving around the art scene trying to figure out how you get to the top," Gilliam recalled of the countless late-night discussions with painters, musicians, dancers and other artists in Washington's cafes and jazz clubs. "We all wanted to know how to be real artists." In 1968, Gilliam hit upon a solution that was as elegant as it was radical: He simply stopped stretching his abstract-expressionist-style canvases on traditional rectangular wooden frames and instead began draping them in loose folds from the wall or ceiling in ways that combined aspects of painting, sculpture and architecture.

From silk-screens by Andy Warhol at Washington's Corcoran Gallery of Art to color-drenched canvases by Monet at the Baltimore Museum of Art - the 2005-2006 season is packed with offerings for all types of art lovers. Among this year's most exciting events surely will be the Walters Art Museum's spectacular Palace of Wonders and its cornucopia of fabulous bling-bling, which goes on view Oct. 22. Paintings, sculpture, porcelains, gemstones, clocks, carpets, watches, swords and knickknacks by the cartload were the means by which aristocrats and mercantile princes of 17th-century Netherlands and Flanders trumpeted their good fortune and virtue.

Again and again - beginning in 1882, when he returned from Paris to his native Provence, until his death there in 1906 - Paul Cezanne painted the brooding form of Mont Sainte Victoire in rhythmic brushstrokes of shimmering intensity. As a young man, his great ambition had been "to make of Impressionism something solid and durable, like the art of the museums." In Provence, he accomplished that goal and, in the process, changed the course of European art. This is the achievement celebrated in Cezanne in Provence, the major retrospective marking the 100th anniversary of the artist's death that opens next year at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

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.

Roy Lichtenstein was one of the most important figures of the pop art movement of the 1960s. Lichtenstein's clever paintings, drawings and sculpture based on comic-book images taught an art world used to the high seriousness of abstract-expressionism that art could also be fun. So when the National Gallery of Art announced this month that the artist's family had donated more than a dozen of his drawings to the museum in memory of Jane Meyerhoff, the...

The family of Roy Lichtenstein has given the National Gallery of Art in Washington more than a dozen drawings by the late pop artist in memory of Jane Meyerhoff, the Baltimore collector who died last year after having promised, with her husband, Robert, to donate their important collection of late 20th-century art to the museum. All 13 of the drawings in the Lichtenstein family gift are directly related to 11 of the artist's paintings in the Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection, a renowned collection of postwar art. The Meyerhoffs began giving parts of their collection to the National Gallery in 1986.

GEORGE SAKKAL, 62, creates an unusual form of collage. Rather than pasting photographs and other images together to form a design, Sakkal goes a step further. He cuts magazine photographs into tiny pieces, so small they are unrecognizable; then he adds the pieces to a white acrylic-coated board using a gel as an adhesive, he said. The tiny images blend together to form landscapes that range from surrealist to serene, almost as if they had been painted. Sakkal started developing the technique in 1962, when he was a student at Texas A&M University, and perfected it during the course of 42 years, he said.

Jane Meyerhoff, a collector whose knowing eye led her, with her husband, Robert, to assemble one of the country's major collections of latter 20th-century art, died Saturday at Johns Hopkins Hospital after heart surgery. She was 80. When the Meyerhoffs announced in 1987 that they would donate their collection to the National Gallery of Art, it was called the institution's largest single gift -- estimated at more than $300 million -- after those from its founding benefactors, who included Andrew Mellon.