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  Home>Plan Your Visit>Tours, Guides, and Maps>Self-Guided Tours>East Building: Featured Selections (français)
      

      
      Search Visite du bâtiment est
 Utilisez votre smartphone pour découvrir une grande variété d’œuvres grâce aux commentaires des conservateurs de la National Gallery of Art. Allez à votre rythme en écoutant autant de commentaires que vous le souhaitez dans l’ordre que vous voulez. Pour obtenir des informations sur une œuvre, tapez le numéro du commentaire dans le cadre ci-dessous, cliquez sur « Go » et appuyez sur Play lorsque le commentaire apparait. Veillez à ne pas déranger les autres visiteurs et à mettre des écouteurs lorsque vous utilisez l’audioguide.
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 Stop 4
  A wood table is piled with stylized and abstracted objects, including a jug, lemons, a knife, guitar, newspaper, and a smoking pipe in this horizontal still life painting. The objects are made up of areas of mostly flat color and many are outlined in black, creating the impression that some shapes are two-dimensional and assembled almost like a collage. We look down onto the top of the table and at the front, where the grain of the wood is painted in tan against a lighter background. Concentric black and white circles make up the knob on the face of the table’s single drawer. There are two rows of objects on the table. Along the front, near the left corner of the table, the knife hangs with its blade slightly over the open drawer. A newspaper with the title “LE JOUR” rests next to the knife. Next to the newspaper are two yellow pieces of fruit, near the front right corner of the table. Behind the fruit, the right third of the pitcher is marine blue and the left two thirds is mostly straw yellow, with one round olive-green area near the handle. Next to the pitcher is a tobacco pipe, and, at the back left edge of the table, the guitar. The instrument rests on its side so the front of the soundboard faces the viewer, and the neck extends to our left. The instrument is bisected lengthwise into two halves that appear to be spliced together, and the edges and features of the halves are not symmetrical or aligned with each other. The bottom half of the guitar is painted a beige color, and is curved like a typical guitar body. The top half is painted black, and the contour of the instrument’s body rises into two pointed peaks instead of mirroring the rounded forms below. The sound hole is markedly smaller on the bottom half, and the two halves of the hole do not exactly line up. A rectangular form behind the table could be a screen. The left side is fern green, the right side black. Behind the screen is a wallpapered wall above wood paneling. The wallpaper is patterned with teardrop shapes, dots, and zigzagging lines in fawn brown against parchment white. The artist signed and dated the painting in the lower right corner, “G Braque 29.”
  *Still Life: Le Jour*, 1929
      
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Stop 5
  
  *Head of a Woman*, c.1911-1912
      
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Stop 6
  We look slightly down onto a crush of pedestrians, horse-drawn carriages, wagons, and streetcars enclosed by a row of densely spaced buildings and skyscrapers opposite us in this horizontal painting. The street in front of us is alive with action but the overall color palette is subdued with burgundy red, grays, and black, punctuated by bright spots of harvest yellow, shamrock green, apple red, and white. Most of the people wear long dark coats and black hats but a few in particular draw the eye. For instance, in a patch of sunlight in the lower right corner, three women wearing light blue, scarlet-red, or emerald-green dresses stand out from the crowd. The sunlight also highlights a white spot on the ground, probably snow, amid the crowd to our right. Beyond the band of people in the street close to us, more people fill in the space around carriages, wagons, and trolleys, and a large horse-drawn cart piled with large yellow blocks, perhaps hay, at the center of the composition. A little in the distance to our left, a few bare trees stand around a patch of white ground. Beyond that, in the top half of the painting, city buildings are blocked in with rectangles of muted red, gray, and tan. Shorter buildings, about six to ten stories high, cluster in front of the taller buildings that reach off the top edge of the painting. The band of skyscrapers is broken only by a gray patch of sky visible in a gap between the buildings to our right of center, along the top of the canvas. White smoke rises from a few chimneys and billboards and advertisements are painted onto the fronts of some of the buildings. The paint is loosely applied, so many of the people and objects are created with only a few swipes of the brush, which makes many of the details indistinct. The artist signed the work with pine-green paint near the lower left corner: “Geo Bellows.”
  *New York*, 1911
      
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Stop 7
  A buoy and a sailboat with three men and a woman tip at an angle on rolling aquamarine and azure-blue waves in this horizontal painting. The white wooden boat sails away from us toward the right side of the composition. Its unfurled sail is tinged with taupe and pale blue and attached to a pale wooden mast. The boat has a low cabin with round portholes on the side we can see. Two of the men are shirtless, tanned, and have their backs to us. One sits in the cockpit wearing a white hat with a short brim as he holds the tiller. The other man stands on the deck with his arms crossed. Beyond the standing man, the woman lies along the roof of the cabin, her head at about the height of the man’s chest. She is barefoot and lies on her stomach wearing long, blue pants and a watermelon-pink halter top and matching kerchief covering her hair. The third man stands to her right, his slender body angled toward us while holding onto the mast with one hand and rigging with the other. The woman and third man have noticeably pale skin. A buoy near the boat is battleship-gray with streaks of rust along its base and a copper-green bell inside. It floats just to the left of and tips toward the boat on a rising swell. The scene is lit by bright sunlight coming from the left side of the baby-blue sky with bands of feathery clouds, which takes up the top two-thirds of the composition. The artist signed the lower right, “EDWARD HOPPER.”
  *Ground Swell*, 1939
      
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Stop 11
  A group of three men, two children, and one woman gather in an empty, dusky rose-pink landscape under a blue, cloudy sky in this nearly square painting. Most of the people have muted, peachy skin, and the woman and the youngest boy have cream-white skin. The woman sits on the ground to our right, apart from the rest of the men and children. She wears a coral-red skirt, a beige shawl, and straw hat, and she looks into the distance to our right. The others stand in a loose semi-circle on the left half of the composition. A man wearing a multicolored, diamond-patterned costume stands with his back to us to the left. He looks to our right in profile and holds the hand of a little girl who also stands with her back to us. She wears a pink dress and white stockings, and her right hand rests on the tall handle of a white basket. A portly man wearing a scarlet-red jester’s costume and pointed hat stands opposite this pair, facing us to our right. Next to him to our right a young man wears a tan-colored leotard with a black bottom. He holds a barrel over his right shoulder and looks over to our right. The sixth person is the youngest boy, who wears a baggy blue and red outfit, and he looks toward the woman. The eyes of all the figures are deeply shadowed.
  *Family of Saltimbanques*, 1905
      
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Stop 14
  Two nude women, painted in vibrant coral peach and bubblegum pink, stand under a red umbrella in a landscape in this stylized, vertical painting. The scene is painted with areas of flat or streaked color with visible brushstrokes throughout. The women and umbrella take up most of the picture. The woman on our left stands facing our right almost in profile. Her skin is vivid peach. Slashes of red outline her breasts, groin, and legs. Her hair, eyes, and eyebrows are painted with black strokes. She stands on one leg and stretches the other in front of her to overlap the far foot of the other woman. The first woman hooks her arm through the elbow of the other, who stands facing us to our right. This second woman has vivid pink skin also outlined in red. Her face is a darker shade of pink, resembling a mask, and her eyes are parallel strokes of black and blue. Her left arm, on our right, hangs by her side, and she holds the umbrella with the other arm. She either wears a hat or her hair is painted with alternating bands of black, red, and brown, and there is a red flower or bow to one side. Black lines in the candy-red umbrella suggest a rib on the underside and the handle. Cobalt-blue branches of a tree above the women has blue and green leaves. The landscape beyond them is made up of bands of acid green, yellow, saturated blue, and cool green.
  *Two Girls under an Umbrella*, 1910
      
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Stop 15
  Black lines and one small, black triangular shape stand out against patches of color, in indigo and sky blue, pumpkin orange, butter yellow, emerald green, and ruby red, against a white background in this vertical, abstract painting. The paint seems thinly applied, resembling watercolor. Near the lower right corner, the black shape is roughly triangular and has five curving, parallel lines emanating from the bottom. Given the title of this painting, Improvisation 31, Sea Battle, the black lines could represent tall masts and outlines of sails amid areas of vibrant color that make up a boat and water around it.
  *Improvisation 31 (Sea Battle)*, 1913
      
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Stop 16
  Carved from a slab of white marble, the top surface of this sculpture is covered with shallow, cuplike and deep rectangular depressions of various sizes. We look slightly down onto the slab in this photograph. The surface is divided into three vertical sections, which are defined by incised lines. The cuplike depressions are in the sections to the left and right. Two tiny, carved, dark wooden objects, like game pieces, stand upright in a cup with one the left and one to the right. Each piece is flat with a symmetrical design and a point at the bottom that inserts into the cup. The left piece has a disk flanked by triangular protrusions with a clover shape at top. The second piece has four stacked, small circles, and a U-shaped form to suggest the outline of a person with raised arms. Three smaller but deep rectangular cavities are carved into the middle section, and each one has a lid. Two lids sit askew on the top surface of the board near their respective openings, and inside are additional wooden pieces. A blank, rectangular section outlined with lightly inscised lines in the lower right is carved with reversed script letters that read, “on ne joue plus.” The entire surface has beveled edges, so it sits on a stepped base.
  *No More Play*, 1931-1932
      
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Stop 17
  This free-standing sculpture is a French window with a teal-colored frame and black, leather-lined glass panes standing on a flat, shallow base. Each door is made up of four, vertically stacked, equally sized panes. The doors are hinged on a narrow frame and open with small, clear knobs placed next to the second pane down from the top. The doors are slightly ajar. Black writing in capital block letters on the top surface of the base is legible in this photograph. It reads, “FRESH WIDOW COPYRIGHT ROSE SELAVY 1920.”
  *Fresh Widow*, original 1920, fabricated 1964
      
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Stop 18
  
  *Bird in Space*, 1927
      
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Stop 19
  This abstract, geometric painting has been tipped on one corner to create a diamond form rather than a square. The surface of the canvas is crisscrossed by an irregular grid of black lines running vertically and horizontally like offset ladders. The black lines create squares and rectangles of different sizes, and the width of the lines vary slightly. One complete square sits at the center of the composition and is painted white. Other rectangles are incomplete, their corners sliced by the edge of the canvas, and each is a different shade of white with hints of pale blue and gray. The black grid creates triangular forms where it meets the angled edge of the canvas in some places, and some of these are filled with flat areas of color. A tomato-red triangle is placed to the left of the top center point, and a vibrant yellow triangle is to the left of the lower center point. A black triangle is next to it at the bottom center, and a cobalt-blue triangle is situated just below the right point. The painting is signed with the artist’s initials at the lower center: “PM.”
  *Tableau No. IV; Lozenge Composition with Red, Gray, Blue, Yellow, and Black*, c. 1924/1925
      
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Stop 20
  Tall, narrow, black building fronts fill this abstracted, horizontal painting. Partitions separating the buildings extend above the rooflines, and those, along with low domes atop some of the buildings, brush the top edge of the canvas. The narrow band of sky between the flat rooflines and the top of the composition is filled with cream-white paint, applied heavily in thick strokes. The buildings are painted with wide, horizontal strokes of black paint. The outlines of doors, windows, and the brick partitions between the buildings were incised into wet paint to delineate those features. Some of the outlines are also streaked with cobalt blue, butter yellow, brick red, and plum purple. Six people with oversized, round, peach-colored heads on spindly black bodies look out at us from windows across the composition. Cartoon-like eyes, noses, and smiling mouths are incised into wet paint. Along the bottom level, the buildings are numbered 78, 80, 82, and 84. Signs, also incised in wet, black paint to reveal white outlines, appear over the doors. The leftmost building reads “OPTICIEN” above “Leroy.” The next store is “PARFUMS,” then “MODES,” “Coiffeur,” “JOURNEAX,” “PRIMEURS,” and “BAR.” Under “PRIMEURS,” a sign on the store front reads “FRUITS ET LEGUMES.” Two people walk along the street, at the bottom of the canvas. One is to our left of center and stands facing us, smiling. The other is to our right, also smiling as he walks to our left in profile.
  *Façades d'immeubles (Building Façades)*, 1946
      
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Stop 22
  Densely spaced lines and splatters in black, white, pale salmon pink, teal, and steel gray crisscross a rectangular cream-colored canvas in this abstract horizontal painting. The lines move in every direction. Most are straight but some curve slightly. The density eases a bit near the edges. Two sets of ghostly white handprints are visible at the upper corners. The artist signed and dated the painting in black paint in the lower left corner: “Jackson Pollock ’50.”
  *Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist)*, 1950
      
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Stop 29
  Two black bands span the height of this vertical canvas against a field of white mottled with shades of ivory, bone, and parchment in this abstract painting. A narrow, solid black stripe lines the left edge of the canvas, like the spine of a book. About a quarter of the way in from the right edge, black paint swirls and wafts like smoke on either side of a narrow white stripe the same color as the background. The artist signed and dated the painting in black paint in the lower right corner of the canvas: “Barnett Newman 1958.”
  *First Station*, 1958
      
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Stop 33
  
  *Mountains and Sea*, 1952
      
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