National Gallery of Art 



Earl A. Powell III, Director 



The National Gallery of Art serves the United States in a na- 

 tional role by preserving, collecting, exhibiting, and fostering 

 the understanding of works of art at the highest possible 

 museum and scholarly standards. 



The gallery's exhibition season began with "Olmec Art of 

 Ancient Mexico," a panoramic overview of the achievements 

 of Mexico's oldest civilization, which flourished from 1200 

 B.C. to A.D. 300. Other exhibitions included a survey of the 

 French master of light and shadow, Georges de la Tour (1593- 

 1652); drawings by Michelangelo and other artists he influ- 

 enced from the collection of Queen Elizabeth II; an extensive 

 selection from the world's greatest collection of Chinese art in 

 "Splendors of Imperial China: Treasures from the National 

 Palace Museum"; rarely glimpsed narrative paintings and 

 portraits in "The Victorians: British Painting in the Reign of 

 Queen Victoria, 1837-1901"; early works of the fertile and 

 precocious genius Pablo Picasso, from age II to his invention 

 of cubism; and a groundbreaking exhibition of ancient 

 Angkor and Cambodian sculpture from the museum of 

 Phnom Penh, the national collection of Asiatic art in Paris, 

 and other international museums. 



The Education Division developed materials for the gallery's 

 World Wide Web site, created a hypercard component of the 

 American art videodisc, and digitized works of art for the up- 

 coming videodisc on European art. The division served an 

 audience of 29.7 million through lectures, tours, symposia, 

 academic programs, school tours and teacher training, and the 

 loan of educational materials on art and culture. Working 

 with the education staff, Maryland Public Television 

 produced a one-hour interactive electronic field trip from the 

 Picasso exhibition. The program was broadcast live on seven 

 public television stations and seen by more than 40,000 stu- 

 dents in Maryland and the District of Columbia. 



Purchases for the gallery's collections are made possible by 

 funds donated by private citizens. Among the paintings ac- 

 quired this year were an early Winslow Homer depiction of a 

 quiet moment during the Civil War, Home, Sweet Home; 

 The Miraculous Draft of Fishes by the 16th-century Venetian 

 artist Jacopo Bassano; a large work by French cubist Francis 

 Picabia, The Procession, Seville; a late-i8th-cencury water- 

 color landscape by German artist Johann Georg von Dillis; 

 and the unworn and unreworked copperplate for Rembrandt's 

 etching Abraham Entertaining the Angels. 



Gifts to the collection included a gouache by Picasso of The 

 Death of Harlequin, with an oil sketch on the reverse, from 

 Paul Mellon; 40 works by Alexander Calder from Klaus Perls, 

 the artist's dealer in the United States; a painting by the 16th- 

 century Italian artist Cariani and an oil sketch by Rubens, 

 both bequeathed by Lore Heinemann; 18 sheets (some double- 

 sided) of drawings by Winslow Homer from the Civil War- 



given by Dr. Edmund Zalinski II, a descendant of the Civil 

 War major who received them from the artist; a 1929 

 photograph, Shadows of the Eiffel Tower, by the Hungarian 

 photographer Andre Kertesz from the Andre and Elizabeth 

 Kertesz Foundation; and five photographs by the innovative 

 photographer Harold Edgerton from the Harold and Esther 

 Edgerton Family Foundation. A gift of more than 230 contem- 

 porary prints was received from Crown Point Press, one of the 

 leading print publishing workshops in the United States, and 

 its founder Kathan Brown. 



The newly restored plaster memorial to Colonel Robert 

 Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th Regiment by Augus- 

 tus Saint-Gaudens was unveiled in a new installation in the 

 West Building. The 18-foot-wide sculpture is on long-term 

 loan from the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site in Cornish, 

 New Hampshire. The bronze cast of the memorial stands on 

 Boston Common and is considered one of this country's 

 greatest sculptural monuments. 



Reading Is Fundamental, Inc. 



Lynda Johnson Robb, Chairman 

 William E. Trueheart, President and CEO 



Reading Is Fundamental, Inc. (RIF) is the largest children's 

 literacy organization in the United States. Since it was 

 founded by the late Margaret McNamara in 1966, RIF has 

 served millions of America's young people with more than 174 

 million books. 



RIF addresses one of the most serious problems facing the 

 nation today — the fact that alarming numbers of children are 

 growing up without learning to read. RIF gives local citizens 

 a chance to do something about this problem by drawing on 

 two American traditions — community self-help and volun- 

 teerism. In 1997 the volunteer services of some 219,000 local 

 citizens enabled RIF to serve more than 3.7 million children 

 at 17,055 sites in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and 

 the U.S. offshore territories of Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, 

 and Guam. 



RIF reaches young people in all kinds of settings — schools, 

 libraries, day-care centers, Head Start and Even Start 

 programs, migrant worker camps, housing developments, 

 libraries, Boys and Girls Clubs, schools for children with dis- 

 abilities, juvenile detention centers, and hospitals and clinics. 

 RIF is also a source of books and reading activities for 

 youngsters from dozens of Native American Tribes, including 

 Native Alaskan young people and Pacific Island children in 

 Guam and Hawaii. 



In 1997 the American Institute of Philanthropy once again 

 gave RIF an A+ rating and ranked it as one of the nation's top 

 10 charities. And for the second year, Parenting magazine cited 



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