Shock of the News

September 23, 2012 – January 27, 2013
East Building, Mezzanine and Upper Level, Northwest

This exhibition is no longer on view at the National Gallery.

Overview: In 1909 F. T. Marinetti’s futurist manifesto appeared on the front page of Le Figaro, and less than four years later Pablo Picasso incorporated a fragment of real newspaper into a work of art. The modern mass-media newspaper had colonized fine art. The exhibition examines the many manifestations of the "newspaper phenomenon" from 1909 to 2009, a century during which major artists engaged in a vibrant and multifaceted relationship with the printed news by co-opting, mimicking, defusing, memorializing, and rewriting newspapers. Shock of the News presents works by more than 60 European and American artists, including Marinetti, Picasso, Georges Braque, Man Ray, Hannah Höch, John Heartfield, Kurt Schwitters, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Dieter Roth, Laurie Anderson, Sarah Charlesworth, Adrian Piper, and Robert Gober.

Organization: Organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Sponsor: The exhibition is supported by The Leonard and Evelyn Lauder Foundation. It is also supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

Attendance: 82,899

Catalog: Shock of the News, by Judith Brodie et al. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2012.