mances; nurtures new works and supports artists through its 

 producing, commissioning, and training programs; and serves 

 the nation as a leader in arts education. 



Immediately following its successful tour of Europe in 

 October 1997, the Kennedy Centet's National Symphony 

 Otchestra and Music Director Leonard Slatkin opened the 

 newly renovated Kennedy Center Concert Hall, praised na- 

 tionally and internationally for its accessibility and acouscics. 

 The second season under Slatkin's leadership was highlighted 

 by several festivals, including a Russian Festival under the 

 direction of NSO Conductot Laureate Mstislav Rostropovich 

 and a Latin-Caribbean Festival. Alabama was the site of the 

 sixth American Residency, where the otchestra spent 10 days 

 doing 15 concerts and 150 educational outreach events. The 

 tegular concert schedule concluded with the highest season 

 sales in 20 years. 



African Odyssey continued for a second season with a year- 

 long celebration of music, dance, and theater of the African 

 Diaspora and featured the El Warsha Theatre of Egypt, the 

 National Theater Guild of Uganda, and the Song and Dance 

 Company of Mozambique. Nationwide, "Africa Fete," a 

 celebration of African music touted 17 cities. Black traditions 

 in modern dance were presented for the first time in the 

 United States on Kennedy Center stages with 16 classical works 

 by African American choreographers that will culminate in a 

 television seties to celebrate the new millennium. 



The Kennedy Centet Amencan Dancing series was con- 

 ceived as a five-year retrospective exploring American modern 

 dance. In the spring of 1998, the Kennedy Centet and the 

 American Dance Festival announced a new commissioning 

 project to create new works for modem dance and jazz music, 

 supported by the Doris Duke Foundation with additional 

 support from the National Endowment for the Arts. 



A highlight of the year was the center's unprecedented 

 monthlong residency of the Royal Shakespeare Company in 

 five productions in June. Preserving the American musical 

 theater tradition is one of the Kennedy Center's most impor- 

 tant missions. In July, the center explored the extraordinary 

 work that forms the basis of this essentially American art 

 fotm in che Kennedy Center's Words and Music series, a trio 

 of concert presentations of musicals from America's theatet 

 past. Faith Prince and Alan Campbell starred in Belli Are Ring- 

 ing; Dorian Harewood, Stephanie Mills, Larry Storch, and 

 Reginald Vel Johnson starred in Purlie: and James Brennan 

 and Sally Ann Howes starred in Where's Charley? 



The festival "Art of the State: Israel at 50," which featured 

 three American premieres, included Batsheva Dance Com- 

 pany, Israel's leading contemporary dance troupe, in a perfor- 

 mance of Anaphase, and Kibbutz Modem Dance Company, 

 which shed light on memories of the Holocaust with its Aide 

 Menwire. Cameri Theater of Tel Aviv was represented by Rina 

 Yershalmi's Va Yomer, Va Yelech, a theatrical presentation of the 

 first five books of the Old Testament. Gesher Theatre's City 

 was a haunting portrait of Jewish Odessa at the time of the 

 Russian Revolution. Two of Israel's leading chamber music en- 



sembles, the Hubermann Quartet, and Jerusalem String Quar- 

 tet also appeared. 



In a continuing effort to make the performing arts available 

 to everyone, Chairman James A. Johnson and President 

 Lawrence J. Wilker inaugurated the Millennium Stage on 

 Capitol Hill, ptesenting lunch-hour concerts on Tuesdays and 

 Thursdays throughout the summer; but all year long the cen- 

 ter continued its free daily 6 p.m. concerts on the Millennium 

 Stage. 



National Gallery of Art 



Earl A. Powell 111, Director 



The National Gallery of An serves the nation by preserving, 

 collecting, exhibiting, and fostering the understanding of 

 wotks of art at the highest possible museum and scholarly 

 standards. 



One of the gallery's most exciting and provocative exhibi- 

 tion years included celebrations of the birth centennials of two 

 contemporary artists, sculptor Alexander Calder and Dutch 

 ptintmaker M.C. Escher, the first U.S. exhibition of paintings 

 by Italian Renaissance master Lorenzo Lotto (ca. 148c— 

 1556/57); the first museum exhibition to examine Edgar 

 Degas s lifelong fascination with the theme of the horse and 

 racing subjects; an exhibition of wotks by Edouard Manet, 

 Claude Monet, and othet artists who lived in late-nineteenth- 

 century Paris in the district surrounding the Gare Saint- 

 Lazare; the first comprehensive American retrospective in 20 

 years of the work of Mark Rothko; and a small exhibition in 

 the Dutch Cabinet Galleries devoted to seventeenth<entury 

 collectot's cabinets. 



Purchases for the gallery's collections are made possible by 

 funds donated by private citizens. Several northern European 

 paintings were acquired this year: a member of the Haarlem 

 civic guard in full regalia painted by seventeenth-century 

 portraitist Johannes Cornelisz Verspronck; a Dutch coastal 

 scene by seventeenth -century marine artist Simon de Vlieger, 

 and a vibrant fifteenth-century triptych depicting The Raising 

 of the Cross by an anonymous Nuremberg artist. Other acquisi- 

 tions included a small open-air landscape by early-nineteenth- 

 century French artist Lancelot-Theodore Turpin de Crisse; an 

 impression of Andrea Mantegna's engraving of The Virgin and 

 Child; the gallery's first drawing by Han Holbein the 

 Younger, a design for a piece of jewelry depicting the tempta- 

 tion of Tantalus; and fout rare photographs by twentieth-cen- 

 tury American artist Charles Sheeler. 



The photography collection continued to be enhanced 

 through gifts and purchases of wotks by Berenice Abbott, 

 Eugene Atget, Ilse Bing, Brassai, Horace Bristol, Harry Cal- 

 lahan, Roger Fenton, Charles-Victor Hugo, Locte Jacobi, 

 Andre Kertesz, Richard Misrach. Humbert de Molard, Aaron 



90 



