East Building - National Gallery of Art [antikvár]

The idea of the East Building really goes back to Andrew Mellon. When the originál gallery-the West Building as we now call it-was completed in 1941, the collection that he gave fiiled only five of its 135 galleries. Yet his vision of the future was such that, though he was giving a building larger than the National Gallery in London, he made it a condition of his gift that the adjoining trapezoidal plot to the east be reserved for a future addition to the Gallery. His was an extraordinary leap of the imagination very like that of George Washington and Major L'Enfant when they envisioned a great world capital rising from the muddy site of Tiber Creek. Only thirty years later, to everyone's suprise, through the gifts and bequests of public-spirited citizens, and without compromise as to quality, the collections had outgrown the originál building. Furthermore, there was inadequate space for temporary exhibitions of the size and importance appropriate to a national gallery, since the originál building was modeled so closely after its counterpart in London that no space was planned for this purpose, and the only areas that we could use were entirely too restrictive. Because the Gallery's permanent collections are limited to painting, sculpture, and graphic art of the West from the late Middle Ages to the present, we needed, through our temporary exhibition program, to reach out into the many important areas beyond the scope of our own collections to give our visitors insights into the arts of other cultures and other ages throughout time and throughout the globe.