The Robert & Jane Meyerhoff Collection: Selected Works

The story of post-World War II modern art is on display at the National Gallery of Art (to 5/2), and it is a story writ large. Covering abstract expression, color field, pop, minimalist, and contemporary art from 1950s-2000s - assembled by Robert Meyerhoff and his late wife Jane - the exhibit of 126 works (paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures) pretty much says it all about the focus of art in capping the American Century.

If the exhibit is a capsule of the art and artists of the period, it is also a statement of these collectors' vision.

The Meyerhoffs built their collection around six artists: Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Brice Marden, Frank Stella, and Robert Rauschenberg. According to the curator, Harry Cooper, the Meyerhoffs dispensed with an art advisor and selected what appealed to them. The got to know the works inside out and the artists as well, purchasing the works directly from their creators. They also made a point of acquiring the sketches and models that formed the larger, original compositions. This exhibit serves as an entrée into the creative process and will be a boon to later art historians.

The show itself is organized around 10 themes: Scrape, Concentricity, Line, Gesture, Art on Art, Drip, Stripe to Zip, Figure or Ground, Monochrome, and Picture the Frame. There's a minimum of curatorial input - no notes or instructive placards - and the organization seems a very post-modernist and playful commentary, with a variety of quotes (My favorite by T.S. Eliot, "Immature poets borrow, mature poets steal") to anchor each room. You'll find that many of the works don't quite match the theme. But that's okay: they'll stretch your viewpoint, if not your imagination to accommodate them.

These museum -sized pieces quickly fill up the top-two floors of the venerable East Wing Galleries (How many great shows we've seen here over the years!), forcing the overflow into several levels of mezzanine or lobby space, where you'll find Lichtenstein's Bedroom at Arles (a Van Gogh send-up) and a wry Claes Oldenberg called Soft Drainpipe which will leave little to the imagination (This is Not a Drainpipe!).

The Meyerhoffs private collection was last on view here in 1996, and you'll see (as I did) many of these works for the first time. Among the gems are a number of original Jasper Johns collage oils later commemorated in limited editions of various media. There's a Jackson Pollack (1953) which appears figuratively entitled Primitive. A room devoted to Frank Stella Playschool-like prototypes - Take 2 - looks to be a series of maquettes for large scale works. There are lots of energetic action paintings (Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline), a bold portrait of Josephine Baker (Grace Hartigan), a stunning Hans Hofmann (Autumn Gold) which greets you at the entrance, plenty of delightful Lichtensteins, and faux primitive Jean Dubuffets to ponder - some in detail, others to take in quickly at a glance. Boomers and their elders won't need their reading glasses for much of this show.

These works are a portion of the Meyerhoffs collection of about 300 works of art, presently hanging in their Baltimore area home and galleries. The NGA has plans to establish an off-campus facility there in the coming years to showcase the Meyerhoff's most generous donation to the art-loving public and the nation. If these outsized and ambitious pieces (What a confident Age!) are any indication of what is in store, the center of the modern art world, which was once New York City, will relocate to the Baltimore-Washington area.