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In Plain Sight: The National Gallery x The Lonely Palette

Episode 2: Listen Closer

Tamar: Hi, I'm Tamar.

Visitor: Hi.

Tamar: I am a podcaster working for the museum right now. So what brings you to the museum today?

Visitor: Yeah, well, Amy and I have sort of been speeding through. I think some of this, uh, historic art painted by presumably old white men is less interesting, I think. I just prefer, you know, at least in the contemporary areas, you're more likely to get a variety of voices where, you know, we're walking through here and we're just peeking in the galleries and it's like, oh, families or dogs or, you know, whatever. And it feels they're from different times, but it feels rather, uh, similar and same-y?

Visitor: Most of these are really boring to me. I'm like, oh, great, it's got on a horse. Raphael was in that other section, um, a really creepy baby Jesus.

Tamar: Why did you seek out a place like this?

Visitor: I think, um, it's sort of the history of it, the sort of, um, ability to interact with the way people thought and saw things. Going back hundreds of years. Art is how people conveyed ideas and feelings, um, historically. And therefore it can be quite sort of moving and also just really interesting, I think.

Visitor: But I'm also really aware that all the art that I see represented here is mostly American and European. And who decided that that was the best art from that time? You know what I'm saying?

Tamar VO: I've been interviewing people in art museums for the better part of a decade. I try to be unassuming, or at least as unassuming as someone can be with a microphone in their hand. Because the truth is, visitors scare easy. I mean, wouldn't you? For most people, just walking around an art museum on any given day, talking on the spot about art isn't so different from talking on the spot about string theory. That is, until you give visitors permission to speak about these artworks freely and make them understand that these artworks have something to say to them in return.

I'm Tamar Avishai, the host of The Lonely Palette podcast and a visiting storyteller at the National Gallery of Art. And this is In Plain Sight. In these three episodes, we're going to explore this idea - what does it mean to open yourself up to an art museum, one artwork or conversation at a time? And how the tools to do this have been here for you all along, literally in plain sight, just waiting for you.

In episode one, we talked to various museum staff about preconceived notions of art that visitors bring with them into an art museum and how their jobs are to meet visitors where they're at and encourage them to go further. To look longer.

Today we're going to focus on what that longer looking reveals. Amazingly, looking leads to, in a sense, hearing. Hearing the stories that a painting can tell. And so, how then can you put yourself in the best possible position to receive that story? How do you listen to what a painting is saying to you?

Today we're going to start in the National Gallery of Art's West Building. The National Gallery is actually the National Galleries. That is, their collection is split between two buildings and a sculpture garden. If you're meeting someone here, make sure you specify where, preferably in writing. The West Building feels a lot more like the kind of traditional art museum that people can be so impressed by, and also intimidated by, before they even get to the art inside. It's a giant, dignified neoclassical structure that houses all the older works. All those paintings and ornate frames you can move from Byzantine icons to the Italian Renaissance, and from there to 17th century Dutch, Flemish, Baroque, Romanticism, Neoclassicism. And in the course of a long walk through the building from here to there, you've effectively passed through centuries. For some visitors, this is why they come to an art museum.

 

Visitor: I quite like when a gallery is laid out sort of like these are where you can actually do a bit of history and art. So someone who's not a massive art person, but is a big history person, you can see how the styles and the topics change through time and the styles as well. So I don't know, I think that's sort of an interesting blend of sort of how the art changes as sort of reflects how society changes or focuses change and things, and that's always sort of interesting.

Tamar VO: But as you heard at the top of the episode, it's not always as good for someone who's looking to have his hair blown back. Come to the 17th century Dutch gallery, for example. And it's, you know, those men in hats, or landscapes of cows. You know those paintings are priceless, but you don't know what makes them invaluable to you. So let's find out. Let's make these paintings worth their salt. Step one is to stop. Step two is to look. Really look, for a while. So I stopped some visitors and I asked them to look. Really look. And for them to tell me what they saw. No wrong answers.

 

Visitor 1: Okay. Uh, it is about seven or eight cows. Bulls? Bulls. The seven or eight bulls.

Visitor 2: I see a lot of cows, many of which are sitting down, which in Vermont means it's going to rain, but it doesn't look like it's going to rain from the clouds.

Visitor 1: Um, and they're kind of lazing around by the water side. I don't know how far they are, perspective-wise. There's a boat in the water and there's some birds flying overhead.

Visitor 2: There's a bunch of geese. I think they're probably going north because of the grass.

Visitor 1: And you could see some sunbeam coming out, like breaking through on a what looks like a bunch of clouds. And there is a man on a horse, uh, talking to two. What? Look like fishermen?

Visitor 2: I don't know, they look like pilgrims or something. These two guys over here, and they're talking to maybe the farmer.

Tamar: Yeah. That's pretty much the long and short of it. Cows.

Visitor 2: Cows.

Tamar VO: The third step is to think about what it makes you think about.

Visitor 1: I mean, obviously you think about like, beef. Because I guess it's hard for me as like a red-blooded American man to look at pictures of, of bulls and not be like, man, that's a good steak in there somewhere. So that's one thing. But the sun and like the positioning and the way the bulls are like sitting next to the water, it's like it feels pretty optimistic. There's something about it. And especially because of the way they depicted the sunbeams breaking through, which is crazy that they did this on canvas because I don't I don't even understand how they made my eyes realize what that is by painting it a certain way. I could see the brushstrokes. I could see that they're like lines, but also when I'm looking at it a certain way, it looks like the sunlight breaking through the clouds. And because of that, it gives a sense of optimism, I think.

 

Tamar VO: And now we can hit up step four. Bring in an expert.

Betsy: I'm Betsy Weissman. I am the curator and head of the Department of Northern European Paintings, and I've worked at the National Gallery of Art since 2019.

Tamar VO: The painting we're looking at is the mid-17th century Netherlandish landscape painter Aelbert Cuyp's River Landscape With Cows from around 1645. But, you know, you might have already gathered that. He painted a lot of cows. Cows were important.

Betsy: You know, as livestock, as dairy producers. That was a really important component of their economy. So that's what this painting is about to me. But then the provenance of this, the history of the painting before it came to the National Gallery, adds another layer to that.

Tamar VO: Hold on to your cheeseburgers.

Betsy: The painting was given to the gallery in 1986 by the descendants of a Czechoslovakian family, the Petscheks, who had owned this picture in the early part of the 20th century. They lived in the area that was annexed by Hitler, and as this was unfolding, the family realized that as Jews, they and their possessions and their factories were under serious threat. So they took strategic steps to safeguard some of the paintings that and other works of art that the family owned. And in the case of this painting, which was a favorite within the family. They hired a friend who was a painter her to carefully paint over this painting with a kind of not really great painting that-

Tamar: Not worth stealing.

Betsy: No. Absolutely not. That would slip past, um, undetected. And they also had painted an exact copy of this painting, which they hung in the house. They were able to smuggle this painting out with the, uh, mediocre thing on top of it. They were able to smuggle it out of the country and then bring it with them as they escaped across Europe, through France, and ultimately they were able to get on a boat to Brazil. And from Brazil-

Tamar: Man, these cows have been around.

Betsy: They have definitely been around. They look like they're very peaceful. Just...absolutely stuck in one place but know they've been around after a few months in Brazil. Uh, Frank Petschek and his family then were able to get to New York and at that point had the mediocre over painting removed and were able to enjoy this, uh, painting by Cuyp in their apartment in New York until Frank and his wife, Janina, both passed away in the 1970s, and 80s and their daughters, uh, took the decision to give this painting to the National Gallery and really to the nation as a way of thanks and acknowledgement, um, for the United States history as a place where people can find refuge and safety.

Tamar: I have so many questions.

Betsy: Great. Happy to try and answer them.

Tamar: Um, you say that there was a copy. A very good copy of this painting that was made as kind of, um, a misdirect. Right. Um, this is kind of a kind of a tangential philosophical question, but why is that painting less valuable? What what makes the original and the copy in your mind so different? If it's ultimately, you know, this the same painting?

Betsy: Um, interestingly, the copy was in fact confiscated by the Nazis. And when it was catalogued, uh, at that time in, I forget the exact date, let's say 1939. Um, it was noted as it being inferior and a copy. So, you know, even at the time they're recognized. Oh, this is not great. But they didn't suspect that it was not the painting that the paychecks had collected. You know, they just assumed that they had purchased a painting that wasn't wonderful.

Tamar: You know what I'm struck by and why I picked this painting, why we picked this painting is because it's beautiful. You know, if you if you like cows, it's it's as beautiful a painting of cows as I think I've ever seen, you know? And it certainly takes me, you know, to, to country drives in rolling hilltops in the summer. And that incredible feeling like you talked about the light more than anything. You know that there's something so exquisite about a beautiful landscape scene, but this is a very easy painting to walk by. You must see people walk by it.

Betsy: All the time. All the time.

Tamar: And they have no idea what a wild ride this painting has been on.

Betsy: Right. And there are paintings, you know, paintings like this. You could just walk by. But if somebody said, I'm going to park you here in front of this painting for 15 minutes, look at it.

Tamar VO: Step two!

Betsy: And when you start looking at things over an extended period of time, as, as you know, you start to see things. The clouds in the sky are painted with a very loose touch. And, you know, it's as if the breeze that's driving the clouds along is also driving his brush at the same speed, and I just want to stand in the gallery and grab people and say, did you notice this? Did you notice that this cow has a different personality to that cow?

Tamar: And I love thinking about the value of this painting on its own, even without its, its, you know, madcap, incredible story. You know, the combination of both, the combination of the painting in its moment of creation, the, you know, the skill level of the artist, that is what, you know, kind of makes it still, you know, timeless and the history of the moment being represented and of the object itself. This is what this is what makes somebody want to be an art historian, I think.

Betsy: Absolutely.

Tamar VO: Curators are natural born storytellers. They have to be. It's their job to harness the story of the painting and deliver it to you, the visitor. But something we don't always get to hear about are the stories of the curators themselves.

Betsy: And here I'm going to betray my age. I remember when the World's Fair was in New York. I went with my parents, and they had on display Michelangelo's Pieta, a special loan from the Vatican. And in order to make sure that people could see this, they had a moving sidewalk in front of it. So, you know, my parents and my sister and I get on this moving sidewalk and they're all like-

Tamar: Just as Michelangelo intended.

Betsy: -zooming past. And I'm, you know, that big? And I kept walking backwards so that I could keep looking at this thing, which I, I so vividly remember, like just being entranced by the whiteness of this. And like the I, it just seem. I don't know, like a fairy tale castle from Disneyland was just this vision of of beauty. And, you know, I'm walking backwards. My parents are, you know, a half mile on going, shouldn't we come here with two children? Wait, what? Wait, what? Oh my God, where is she? So I think that was an early, um, immersion into, you know, just how how you can be transfixed by an artistic creation.

Tamar VO: If you ever find yourself talking to a curator, you know, in an elevator or something, a good rule of thumb is to never ask them what their favorite painting is. It's like asking a chef what his favorite food is. The longer and deeper you get into this profession, the more you are trained to see the artworks not as individual objects, but as part of a rich tapestry of movements that build on one another, that play off each other, that push back against each other. Picking one painting is like taking a complex French sauce and saying, well, onions, I guess?

That said, every curator has their first before the years of academic training, when they too might have just been a kid walking around an art museum and finding themselves inexplicably drawn to one artwork over another. And when you get a curator to admit that to belay down from the ivory tower and remember the little match that lit the fire that got them into this work in the first place. That's when the magic happens.

Emily: My name is Emily Pegues. I'm assistant curator of sculpture and decorative arts, and I'm going to show you my favorite painting that's in there. This is the painting that made me want to be an art historian.

Um, it's The Rest on the Flight into Egypt by the Netherlandish painter, the Bruges painter Gerard David. And it was made in the early 16th century. And I just love it. I love the size of it. It's very small. So it's just you and it. It's not a big thing taking up a whole wall. There's a nice contrast between the high ceilings with their skylight and the stone facings of the wall, which are quite, um. It's a big space. It feels sort of grand. And then you've got the intimacy of this picture, which is sized for just you. Maybe one of your friends could stand beside you and look at it, but any more than two or three people and it's a crowd. And I love the details. He's taken this biblical story from the desert, from Egypt, and he set it in a Netherlandish landscape, which is sort of familiar to me. I'm either those trees or trees. I recognize. The the blue haze of the mountains reminds me of the Blue Ridge Mountains where I come from.

Tamar VO: Seriously, wouldn't you ever hear a curator relate so intimately to a painting? It's so beautiful.

Emily: I love the babies fat, chubby little feet and the way his little toes are curling up. And anyone who's ever held a niece or nephew on their lap recognizes those little fat feet. And the baby is playing with the grapes. There are things about this picture that made me want to know more. One of those was this wonderful detail of the basket, this beautifully woven basket. It's got a handle. It's got patterns woven into the straw and a little latch. And I so badly wanted to know why is this basket here and what's inside it. Like, if you could open it up, what would you find? I love the donkey. Donkeys are very hard to paint and you sometimes see really bad donkeys. But this is a very good donkey. His ears are good.

Tamar: What makes them so hard to paint?

Emily: I don't know, but you see a lot of really goofy donkeys throughout art history. But David has done a really nice donkey, and he's in the back there, just very calmly eating his, um, eating his grass with his saddle. But there's something about the composition. There's something about it just has a harmony to it. And I suppose composition is a word that now that I'm a trained art historian, because I've gone into the field with this, I understand. But forgetting that I just love how it looks. I love the color. I love the calmness.

Tamar: So when you say it's what made you want to become an art historian, what does that mean to you? I mean, what did this feel like it was kind of unlocking for you?

Emily: It was unlocking questions. I remember when I finally saw some more of Gerard David's paintings, and there's one with the basket and the baskets open, and you can finally see what was inside. That was exciting. So for me, it was about questions. It was a starting point, a starting point of beauty. A starting point of thinking. This is something I could look at and look at and look at and not get tired of looking at. And I think that question of how is something made is a question that anybody can think about in their own life. You think about process, you think about creativity. And that gets back to what the original human thing is, the human hand of it all the individual stories. We start to have questions and you realize, oh, I can go and learn about this. Someone has thought about this. I can talk to people who've thought about this. I can go look at other pictures. I can go into archives. Then you realize you've got something that can feed you for the rest of your life as a career. Questions and the search for answers, for the questions and the appreciation of beauty, and then wanting to share it with other people just like we are doing right now, to go look at it closely together.

 

Tamar VO: Maybe there is something extraordinary about the West Building that you wouldn't see at first glance. Yes, there are men on horses and creepy baby Jesuses. And yes, the canon isn't nearly as diverse as we in 2025 would have hoped it would be. But you can't dismiss the privilege we experience and the poignancy of sharing these ancient stories with one another and being able to move through time like this.

Sarita: I go to museums and I'm crying for no reason, and I don't even know what I like. I don't know how to talk about it. You know, I am a I'm a chemistry and, you know,  zoology student.

Tamar VO: This is a visitor named Sarita.

Sarita: I plan to go to a museum. I'm not generally randomly stepping into it. And then I am looking at some quiet and peace, and then I like. Usually I'd like to start not with the most prized piece that has where I like to go to the oldest section that it has, and I like to keep looking at the dates. And the older it is, the more peaceful it makes me. And I kind of keep sinking and sinking, not sinking as an emotionally, but like timewise, I feel like I'm going back and back. And then I see this has been there for hundreds years, like long before my great grandparents were there. You know, initially it's like that, and before that it goes older and older and somehow it is like an echo. But I feel like I want to go back in time through museum.

Tamar VO: In our next episode, the last in our series, we cross the street again to the modern and contemporary art of the National Gallery's East Building. In that sleek, geometric building that's clad in pink Tennessee marble, we'll discover works made in the last hundred years, full of paint spatters and twisted slabs of metal that can mesmerize you. Or leave you scratching your head wondering, how is this art?

In Plain Sight was written and produced by me, Tamar Avishai. The senior editor is Annie Yi. Our executive producer is Isabella Bulkeley. The music is by Blue Dot Sessions, and you can see all the images at www.nga.gov/inplainsight or at www.thelonelypalette.com. We'll see you next time.