National Gallery of Art: The “I Don’t Art” Art Tour｜United States

Meet your guide at the National Gallery of Art and skip the academic playbook. Go straight to what actually makes art stick: the people, the surrounding circumstances, and the stories behind the work.

Start with Ginevra de’ Benci—the only Da Vinci in the Americas—and unpack not the brushstrokes or dense art techniques, but how Ginevra’s poetry influenced her portrait and the super secret mission that even got her here.

From there, the art world starts to feel more personable. Learn about the explosive fallout between Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin that leaves us with one of the most famous injuries in art history and the calculated social maneuvering of Elaine de Kooning that helped position her husband Willem where it mattered most. These aren’t side stories, they’re the reason the art even exists at all.

Since the beginning of mankind, humans have expressed ourselves through art, desperate to convey their emotions when the spoken word was simply not enough. Once you know how to interpret these big emotions, everything changes. And once you see it, you won’t be able to unsee it.