Cornelia Homburg, Anabelle Kienle
Joseph J. Rishel, Jennifer A. Thompson

Vincent van Gogh’s profound love of nature has often been taken for granted but has rarely been studied in detail. While he has long been admired for his dazzling use of intense colour and expressive brushwork, it is his innovative representation of nature that makes him a truly modern artist and is the focus of Van Gogh: Up Close. This exhibition, which has been organized by the National Gallery of Canada and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, concentrates on Van Gogh’s French period, from 1886 to 1890, and highlights how he conveyed his intense response to the natural world – whether this was a landscape, a still life, or the rendering of a single blade of grass – through a number of different, and often radical compositional strategies.

Softcover | 290 pages
Publication Date: 2012

Diana Nemiroff

From obstacles of bureaucracy to veiled challenges to women in powerful positions, Women at the Helm paints a rich picture of what it takes to lead a major art institution. In her latest book, author and art historian Diana Nemiroff explores a transformative thirty-year period in the history of the National Gallery of Canada through the careers of its first three women directors (Jean Sutherland Boggs, Hsio-yen Shih, and Shirley L. Thomson), detailing each of their unique triumphs and tribulations.

Paperback | 552 pages
85 photos, colour insert
19 x 24 cm (7.5 x 9.5 in)

Lynne Cooke

This transformative exhibition explores how abstract art and woven textiles have intertwined over the past hundred years.

In the 20th century, textiles were often considered lesser – as applied art, women’s work, or domestic craft. Woven Histories challenges the hierarchies that have separated textiles from fine arts. Putting into dialogue some 130 works by more than 45 creators from across generations and continents, the exhibition explores the contributions weaving and related techniques have made to abstraction, modernism’s pre-eminent art form.

See a variety of textile techniques including weaving, knitting, netting, knotting and felting. Learn about the wide-ranging reasons artists from Anni Albers to Rosemarie Trockel and Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians/Cherokee Nation) have engaged with this art form. Some seek to effect social change; others address political issues. Engaging with textiles as subject, material and technique, still others revitalize abstraction’s formal conventions or critique its patriarchal history and gendered identity.

Follow this hidden thread of art history to discover the work of creators who were once marginalized for their gender, race or class.

Hardcover
24 x 28 cm (9.5 x 11 in.)
Publication date: 2024

The exhibition is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, in collaboration with the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York.