National Gallery

The rivalry between the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art, though gentlemanly and professional, has been heating up inexorably since the National Gallery became more visible with the opening of its East Building in 1978. Both institutions want to be perceived by the museum-going public as the country's premier showcase for high art, and they compete for this distinction through the exhibitions they mount. Lately the competition has become one of superlatives, to see who can stage the most grandiose and sumptuous spectacles.

The Philadelphia architectural firm of Venturi, Rauch & Scott Brown has been selected from a field of six finalists to design a long-delayed addition to the National Gallery of Art on London's Trafalgar Square. The announcement was made yesterday by Jacob Rothschild, chairman of the gallery's trustees, at a news conference in London. "You are looking at the happiest architect in the world - and the most privileged one," said Robert Venturi, who had flown to London Thursday.

Besides being St. Patrick's Day, today is the National Gallery of Art's 50th birthday. It was on this day in 1941, a time when most of Europe's cultural capitals were occupied or besieged by German armies, that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt dedicated the nascent national picture collection in Washington "to a living past, and to a greater and more richly living future. " Roosevelt used the occasion to affirm a need to preserve "the freedom of the human spirit," an obvious reference to the fact that Nazism and fascism had smothered true creativity in Europe.

In a city that often seems to be a vast machine for the processing of tourists, the original building of the National Gallery of Art seems a miraculous survival of a more civilized age. Its generous hallways, its varied and well-finished galleries, its dramatic rotunda - and especially its two glass-roofed garden courts, with their gurgling fountains and comfortable chairs - make the building, now known as the West Wing, seem a sanctuary for...

A delightful van Gogh exhibition opened at the National Gallery of Art on Sunday, but anyone who lives beyond comfortable commuting distance of downtown Washington will have to put out some effort to see it, without any guarantee that the effort will pay off. Admission to the show, which comes from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, requires a special dated and timed pass. All the advance passes for the full run, through Jan. 3, were claimed by Sept. 11, more than three weeks before the show opened.

The new Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery here - designed by the Philadelphia architecture firm Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates - had its official royal opening by Queen Elizabeth II yesterday. But it may have been the royal critique by her son the Prince of Wales that really mattered. The royal opening was a private affair, primarily for those who were involved in the construction of the building. The queen, who wore a green print dress that clashed both with the Renaissance art on display and her own violet Renaissance hat, unveiled an inscription that marks the day of the opening.

Seventeen major paintings by Cezanne, van Gogh, Picasso, Matisse and other masters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries have been bequeathed to the National Gallery of Art and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Yale Art Gallery in New Haven by a prominent New York socialite who died last week. The gifts - valued at more than $300 million - were donated by Betsey Cushing Roosevelt Whitney, widow of millionaire businessman John Hay "Jock" Whitney, who died in 1982.

Tom Bostelle, 83, of Pocopson, a painter and sculptor, died Feb. 17 at his home and studio. He had been ill with emphysema. Mr. Bostelle shared with the Wyeth family and other Brandywine Valley artists an intimacy with the local landscape, but he generally painted only its bones in dense lines and abstract forms. His expressionistic work included barn-door-size monoprints, black metal sculptures, and works he called shadow paintings, because they resembled flat, wavy shadows cast against a wall.

Herbert Vogel, 89, a retired New York postal worker who, with his wife, Dorothy, created one of the world's most unlikely - and most significant - collections of modern art, then bequeathed much of it to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, died Sunday at a nursing home in New York City. His death was confirmed by Anabeth Guthrie, a spokeswoman for the National Gallery. The cause of death was not immediately disclosed. In 1962, when Mr. Vogel and Dorothy Hoffman were married, they went to Washington on their honeymoon and spent several days visiting the National Gallery and other museums.

Bill Scott, a 31-year-old Philadelphia painter, has just made a big splash at the National Gallery of Art in Washington - not as an artist, but in the improbable role of an exhibition curator. Scott is one of two guest curators for the Berthe Morisot retrospective that opened at the gallery early last month. The other, also a Philadelphian, is art historian Suzanne G. Lindsay. A hierarchal institution such as the National Gallery normally wouldn't ask someone such as Scott - who isn't even a college graduate, let alone an art historian - to take an active role in a major exhibition.

Kim Sajet, president and chief executive of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania since 2007, has been tapped to be director of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, the society announced Tuesday. The Australian-born Sajet, 47, who came to the historical society from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where she was a vice president, will become the sixth director of the gallery, established by Congress in 1962 as a unit of the Smithsonian Institution. "I'm really excited," she said in an interview.

Herbert Vogel, 89, a retired New York postal worker who, with his wife, Dorothy, created one of the world's most unlikely - and most significant - collections of modern art, then bequeathed much of it to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, died Sunday at a nursing home in New York City. His death was confirmed by Anabeth Guthrie, a spokeswoman for the National Gallery. The cause of death was not immediately disclosed. In 1962, when Mr. Vogel and Dorothy Hoffman were married, they went to Washington on their honeymoon and spent several days visiting the National Gallery and other museums.

The moment you enter "Van Gogh Up Close" at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the exhibition tells you that it's something special, one of those uncommon revelations of artistic soul that once seen, can never be forgotten. The trigger is a small painting of several sunflower heads, brilliant yellow against an azure background. Sunflowers are Vincent van Gogh's painterly signature, so why does this image, lent by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, make such a powerful impact? It even overshadows a much larger, and more typical, still life of sunflowers in a vase that hangs within arm's length.

That the Philadelphia Museum of Art is hosting a major van Gogh exhibition - it opens Wednesday - would be no mystery to the devoted Japanese pilgrims who bear ancestral ashes halfway across the world to commingle them with the earth of Vincent van Gogh's grave north of Paris. Nor would it be difficult to understand for the Russians who pour vodka onto the dark red soil of the same spot. The thousands from all over the world who travel to Auvers-sur-Oise, where van Gogh is buried next to his brother Theo, would understand.

To embrace the art of ideas, a collector has to be able to think creatively, consider alternatives, and remain open to the experimental and the unexpected. This Dorothy and Herbert Vogel have achieved far beyond the norm for close to half a century. The Vogel collection of nearly 4,000 works of contemporary art covers significant developments beginning in the 1960s and is remarkable not only for its breadth and adventurousness but also because it was largely financed by Herbert's salary as a postal clerk.

When Adrian Martinez was 9, he went to the National Gallery near his home in Washington and got scared stiff. He went into a room and chanced on a small painting he had not seen in other visits, The Death of St. Anthony, by the Italian painter Stefano di Giovanni, better known simply as Sassetta (circa 1390-1450). "I got a case of the vapors," he said as he stood recently in his dining room in Downingtown, recalling that day in 1958. "My face turned red - very scary - and I ran out of the room, feeling light-headed.

Mayor Street wants to strengthen Philadelphia's historic preservation law to try to prevent the city's valuable pieces of art from finding new homes elsewhere. Significant works would be put on a registry and subjected to "appropriate review and consideration before they can be altered or removed from the city," Street said during his weekly radio address Saturday. "Certain things are irreplaceable in the hearts and souls of our citizens," Street said. "Someday somebody will look back and wonder, 'What were they thinking?

Thomas Eakins' masterpiece The Gross Clinic - an iconic painting that is irrevocably identified with Philadelphia, where it was painted more than 125 years ago - is poised for sale by Thomas Jefferson University for a record $68 million to a partnership of the National Gallery of Art in Washington and a new museum planned by Wal-Mart heirs in Arkansas. The university's board of trustees approved details of the sale late yesterday, virtually assuring a controversial departure for what many see as the city's greatest and most emblematic work of art - an enormous canvas depicting a Jefferson surgical amphitheater in bloody mid-operation.

The exhibit "Treasures From the La Salle University Art Museum" at the Travis Gallery in Bucks County is an opportunity to see and inspect many of the artworks La Salle has been collecting since the mid-1960s. This first sizable off-campus showcasing of 33 items from the La Salle Art Museum at 19th and Olney in Philadelphia, established in 1976, makes the story of that art-collecting odyssey by a university palpable. Something of that effort and era of the project's prime mover and guiding spirit, Brother Daniel Burke, then the La Salle president and now the museum's director, can be felt here.

Tom Bostelle, 83, of Pocopson, a painter and sculptor, died Feb. 17 at his home and studio. He had been ill with emphysema. Mr. Bostelle shared with the Wyeth family and other Brandywine Valley artists an intimacy with the local landscape, but he generally painted only its bones in dense lines and abstract forms. His expressionistic work included barn-door-size monoprints, black metal sculptures, and works he called shadow paintings, because they resembled flat, wavy shadows cast against a wall.