| |
Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night at MOMA
Van Gogh
and the Colors of the Night, which opened at MOMA on Sept. 21st
and runs through January 5th, is a small, neatly
organized exhibition that unfortunately is inaccurately titled.
Before my visit to the show, my mental tally of van
Gogh’s catalogue raisonné
told me that it would be difficult to come up with enough
night-time scenes to fill a single gallery.
Clearly MOMA had the same problem, so they include
interiors that imply the night, and scenes with the sun low in
the sky. That’s
stretching the point, but as it gives us a chance to see works
by van Gogh, not frequently displayed in New York, who cares?
If it’s van Gogh, it’s going to get a crowd.
His
pictures are immediately accessible, his colors, always intense,
are expressive or attractive even when they are unnaturalistic.
Yet, unbeknownst to many, van Gogh was more than a
vulnerable, misunderstood artist who applied thick and
measurable strokes of paint.
Part of his interior life, his ideas about death, about
resurrection and rejuvenation, about the nobility of working on
the land, and thoughts about the cycle of life, are laid out in
pictorial metaphors. His
early work shows that he did not invent a pictorial language out
of whole cloth but was distinctly
influenced by the dominant mid-century French landscape school
at Barbizon, and a seminal artist of the previous decade,
Jean-François Millet, to say nothing of the seventeenth-century
paintings of his historical Landsmännen, Rembrandt and Ruisdael.
With all
of that in mind, move to your right as you enter the first of
the four galleries in this exhibition, and look for Toward
Evening (1885) from the Centraal Museum in Utrecht.
This small dark canvas uses a few techniques from
Ruisdael’s landscapes, such as the receding lines of trees and
the distant light to draw you into the scene, but the obscurity
and the indefinite depiction of the single figure looks very
much like a Barbizon School landscape by Theodore Rousseau, for
example.
He uses
the same light in the painting of his family’s house when they
lived in Nuenen. The Parsonage at Nuenen at Dusk (1885) from a private collection on
loan to a small regional museum in the Netherlands, is less
poetic than Toward Evening
and the description of light reflected on the path seems
impossible and un-naturalistic given the position of the sun in
the background. Van
Gogh’s time at Nuenen was an unhappy period in his life.
He came back to his parents when he had failed as a
preacher, and he had to hear the criticism of his father despite
the probable support of his artistic mother.
Not surprisingly, there is no life at this parsonage, no
light, no human warmth.
The nightfall here may well be symbolic of oncoming
death.
But on
the opposite wall you will find Sunset
at Montmartre (1887) painted soon after his arrival in Paris
when he experienced a spiritual as well as an artistic
awakening. Among the
colors are joyful shades of blue and a red- orange-yellow ball
of a sun that sinks under the horizon through a haze of
industrial pollution spread over the outskirts of Paris.
More dusk than nighttime, this tiny easy-to-transport
canvas must have provided van Gogh the opportunity of direct
observation of nature in his newly adopted country.
He has accepted a new vision, one that includes bright
colors. His palette
has arrived in the land of the Impressionists but his brush
stroke is still disguised.
By the
time he paints Landscape
at Twilight (1890) from the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, he
has created his own approach to the application of paint, using
short strokes of impasto. Here
he concentrates more on how we see sunlight as it comes from
behind the trees, sunlight as it is blocked out by the
buildings. Not
really dusk, this is a landscape that makes note of nature on a
summer evening.
The way
this exhibition is arranged, the second theme is Peasant Life,
which shows us that van Gogh was fascinated by the peasant.
Like Millet he saw the peasant as close to Nature and
grand in stature; he paints unattractive people who by their
work and function were close to God. The early painting of the Potato
Eaters (1885) from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam poses a
family of peasants around a table at mealtime.
This could be a pre-dawn meal as easily as night-time
supper. The interior
is lit by a kerosene lamp that barely gives enough light to show
some portion of the room. He
must have studied the individual figures before he arranged them
around the table and set them carefully behind the picture
plane. He
deliberately chose to use a foreground figure in repoussoir, seen from the back and silhouetted because of the
centralized source of light. Thus he uses light to help define
space and, purposefully, to obscure space. This is probably van
Gogh’s earliest depiction of artificial light, a visual trope
he will use throughout his oeuvre,
for example, see Night
(after Millet) (1889) in this exhibition.
On the
opposite side of the small partition is The
Cottage (1885). Moving
back in time and place, we see van Gogh still in his dark mode.
It is almost a companion piece to The
Priory at Nugenen but this is more carefully composed.
The house is turned so the corner nearly faces us.
That way we can see the full three-dimensionality of the
building. The figure
in the doorway seems almost incidental but it cannot be
accidental that he makes note of the flame of light at the
window, there near the center of the canvas.
Does he mean for us to focus on the light, on the
habitation of this house? It
is so unlike the Priory.
The next
theme takes us to Sowers and Wheatfields, which should have been
subtitled The Sun at the Horizen, for there you will find
several such examples. The
Sower (after Millet) (1888) is a large picture with the sun
staring at us at the top of the canvas like a miner’s light in
daylight. The
radiating rays of sunlight have obliterated the sky.
We stare into the light and are blinded to anything else
in the heavens. Van
Gogh no longer paints the sun as a red-orange ball of circular
paint but as a flattened yellow disk with radiating streams of
light that appear as activated protons that pulsate away from
the center.
Finally,
with Poetry of the Night: the Town, we are greeted by a fully
developed night scene in The
Starry Night (1888) Musee d’Orsay.
The scene seems filled with points of light: the diffuse
and unfocused twinkling stars in the night sky and then the land
lights and their mirrored reflections in the water.
All these points of light illuminate the darkness of the
night and make the wharf in the foreground navigable for the
walking couple. The
1870s was the decade of the electric incandescent light when
cities all over Europe were illuminated by these ultra-bright
lights. Perhaps the
bright lights of Arles are the result of this new phenomenon.
How miraculous it must have seemed.
Here too
are two night scenes of Arlesian interiors, one of a dance hall
and the other a café with a billiard table.
The light appears to be quite different in these scenes.
Globes of light are suspended from the ceiling and
protrude from the front of the balcony boxes that project over
the dance floor. The
dim yellow interior suns cast a yellow light on the faces of the
dancers in the night club. In
The Night Café (1888) the wicked kerosene lanterns put out
an uneven radiant light that vibrates in light waves sent out
from the center of illumination under the glass shades.
This is a different kind of light, unfocused as if
through a myopic eye.
Missing
from this room is the artist’s Café
at Arles (September, 1888) in the Kroller-Muller Museum in
Otterloo. By all
rights a key image in any study of his colors of night, its
absence is unfortunate. The
Café at Arles once
again contrasts man-made artificial light (here it illuminates
an awning covered terrace), the light in the house interiors,
and the starlight in the heavenly firmament.
But on the wall over the glass case, we do have a drawing
from the Dallas Museum. Unlike
most van Gogh drawings, done after his paintings, this is a
preparatory study made in situ, in pencil, and then worked over
in ink. Instead of
working alla prima, he
must have considered this a complex composition that he wanted
to get just right. A colored small scale copy of the painting is
in the glass case next to a September 1888 letter to Theo, in
which he discusses the picture.
In the
last room, the section entitled Poetry of Night: The Country,
MOMA shows us another picture from the van Gogh Museum in
Amsterdam, Gauguin’s
Chair (1888). Gauguin’s
absence is like the riderless horse in a funeral cortege.
We look at the image and are forced to focus on what’s
missing. We remember
and we see the void.
There are
two lights in this picture, the light in the room coming from
the sconce on the wall, and the burning candle on the seat of
the chair. Yet
neither show any real effect on the objects near them.
We see purple shadow obediently adhering to the legs of
the chair but nowhere is there a cast shadow, not the books, not
the chair have sufficient substance to block the light.
They are phantoms just like Gauguin.
I’ve
just skimmed the surface but I hope I can encourage you to go
see the show. Go
early in the day and preferably with a membership card.
If you’re a member, you skip the line of people with
the 30-minute timed tickets.
That line forms outside the exhibition on the second
floor. Just show
your member’s card and you can go in immediately. MOMA
does want people to become members, and it’s got to be
arm-twisting and persuasive when you see card-carrying members
cut in front of you.
The Museum of Modern Art
(212) 708-9400
11 West 53 Street,
between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York, NY 10019-5497
Museum Hours
Saturday 10:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.
Sunday 10:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.
Monday 10:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.
Tuesday closed
Wednesday 10:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.
Thursday 10:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.
Friday 10:30 a.m.–8:00 p.m.
Please note: If you plan to see the exhibition Van
Gogh and the Colors of the Night (September 21,
2008–January 5, 2009), be aware that gallery occupancy is
limited and timed entry may be necessary to visit those
galleries. Members and accompanying guests are not
required to obtain timed tickets.
|
| |
The new Nineteenth Century Painting Galleries at the Met
The new
nineteenth-century art galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of
Art seem to have received universal accolades from the critics.
The galleries are greatly expanded and we now get to see
many long-closeted works of nineteenth-century painting.
For example, we now discover that the Met owns thirty-two
Corots, all displayed in one of the larger galleries.
Courbet also gets his own gallery with ten paintings, no
doubt soon to be part of the landmark exhibition arriving in
March.
But when I first
visited these newly installed rooms I admit to feeling lost.
All the accustomed spaces were reconfigured, almost none
of the paintings were in the same place and by the tenth room I
was completely befuddled; nothing made sense any more. Have I become so set in my ways that I cannot see the wisdom
of this new installation?
In point of fact, the installation is well thought out
and brilliantly conceived given the need to keep the Annenberg
collection in tact, as well as to accommodate the curatorial
decision to incorporate American expatriate painting, and an
example of late nineteenth-century interior design.
All of this is only clear once you have in hand the floor
plan for the galleries, available at the information desk on the
ground floor and in the Great Hall.
Only then can you see how far you can go in a
straight-line chronology and when it is that you have to start
to double back on your trail.
Without the floor plan you can easily glide from Courbet
to Bonnard to Picasso without so much as a glance at Manet or
Cezanne.
Let me suggest a way to decipher the new lay-out,
a path you may be able to follow on the floor plan that I
have scanned onto the site.
I hope this will help to ease the potential confusion
because you should visit these galleries and be able to enjoy
this wonderful collection.
A
glance at the floor plan shows that there are three entries to
the galleries, chosen as if there are three approaches to the
art of this era: one through Neo-classicism and Romanticism (the
line versus color dichotomy), one through Academicism, and the
third that jumps directly into Impressionism where most of the
public seems happiest to begin (and often, to end).
My
inclination is to go towards Ingres and Delacroix and proceed to
the back of the galleries, turn right and move unerringly
towards Courbet at the center.
You can continue in the Realist vein with Fin-de-Siècle
art, but now you need to back up into the Courbet gallery and
exit through a different doorway into American Painting.
This is where a visitor’s progress becomes less clear.
In places where you need to double back on yourself, I
have suggested routes A and B (thus 10A is Fin-de-Siècle and
10B is American Painting while 12A is Bouguerreau/Cabanal and
12B Degas and Manet).
A
brief walk-through will permit me to share with you, some of the
paintings that are new to me and may also be unfamiliar to you.
Let’s begin in the first gallery, dedicated to
Delacroix and Ingres, where you will find the former’s
painting of The Abduction of Rebecca, full of the
movement, color, and passion of this scene of rape.
It hangs next to a charming, brilliantly controlled, and
intimate, rendering of Delacroix’s dear “aunt”
Madame Henri François Riesener.
By her glance, less formal than Ingres’ husband and
wife portraits on the other side of the room, Delacroix has made
her speak to us.
This
is also in contrast to the portrait of the Comtesse de la Tour-Maubourg
by Théodore Chassériau, a student of Ingres, that hangs next
to the entryway. The
student has deviated ever so slightly from the master in his use
of some painterly passages but the veil of psychological
distance seems in tact.
The
next gallery is filled with new arrivals, among them a small
jewel-like William Blake painting of Gabriel appearing to
Zacharias. The
room seems a chronological hodge-podge covering the entire
nineteenth century. But,
no matter, it’s nice to see the pre-Raphaelites get their due,
and what a treat to see two Constable oil sketches next to the
familiar Salisbury Cathedral.
The
third room on this trajectory is filled with Corots that attest
to the undying popularity of realist landscape.
Almost hidden in a corner are two small nudes (in
landscapes, of course). Small
enough to be hidden at home too, these depictions of the
reclining and available female form, could be sold for the
private enjoyment of the male patron.
In
the fourth room, avoiding the term Orientalism, the Met has
grouped paintings of the “European Vision of North Africa”.
Most are of the picture post-card type, the interior of a
mosque, a street scene in Smyrna, a man and woman in what would
be considered exotic dress.
This was a popular theme for the nineteenth-century
connoisseur.
Following on this are three small rooms of oil sketches
that deserve your attention but probably not during your first
visit through the new installation.
Then you come to a small room with some important
examples of Barbizon painting: six Millets and four Daumiers
hang here, where the Met has juxtaposed two small secular
pictures of a mother and child almost asking you to compare the
way the two artists approach a similar subject.
The
next gallery is a much larger room filled with Courbets and home
to the large Bonheur painting of The Horse Fair.
This room is the turning point in the journey towards the
second half of the century and as you already know I suggest
continuing straight ahead into the gallery for Fin-de-Siècle
art where you will find some wonderful images of high society in
London and Paris and some landscapes that, (perhaps no one will
notice) don’t really belong here but for their dates of
1880’s and 1905.
Double
back through the Courbet gallery and move into the room of
paintings by American expats (Sargent, Whistler) and the
French-trained Eakins. Five
of the seven paintings are full-length standing portraits. Perhaps they were chosen to relate to the full-length
non-portrait Manets in the next gallery, to which they make an
interesting comparison.
A small detour here will take you to the Wisteria Room,
an Art Nouveau interior acquired by the museum some forty years
ago, but which I never remember on exhibition.
You will probably think that the room is stunning,
particularly if you have an appreciation for that curvilinear,
organically oriented art.
Your
course has now taken you to the level of the second entryway to
the galleries and you should really go out into the sculpture
gallery that runs the length of the nineteenth century
installation. Here
you will find the stalwarts of the then current, and accepted,
style of academic Salon painting at mid-century.
The history paintings of Puvis de Chavannes, that are
small-scale finished studies for his large scale public
commissions, and the noble peasants of Bastien-Lepage applauded
for their technical display. It is after you look at them and at
the Cabanal and the Winterhalters that you have a context for
the Degas and Manet paintings in the large gallery (12B).
Equally important are the three galleries with Degas’
paintings, pastels, and sculpture as well as other examples of
pastel painting in the late century.
All
of this has prepared you for the Annenberg Collection, nine
galleries that focus on the new art of the second half of the
century, the developing interest in light, in modern subject
matter, in a new technique for applying paint on canvas.
There are no real surprises here but now that there is
room to hang all these works, you are struck by the depth of the
collection and the intelligence of the collector’s choices.
At
the far corner of the installation are three galleries that take
the visitor to the end of the nineteenth century: the paintings
of Bonnard and Vuillard, a collection of Symbolist painters
(from Klimt to Maurice Denis) and finally Matisse and Picasso to
lead you, through a fire-wall (is this symbolic?), into the galleries dedicated to
Modern Art.
It is
an exhilarating permanent exhibition and, once deciphered, a joy
to behold. You can
visit parts or, given a couple of hours, the whole, and either
way be assured of seeing exemplary examples of
nineteenth-century European art.
You just need a floor plan and you’ll be fine.
J.M.W.Turner as seen by Simon Schama: a different perspective
The essay by Simon Schama
in the Sept. 24, 2007 issue of The New Yorker demonstrates the difference
between an historian and an art historian.
Or perhaps, it is the difference between that historian and this art historian. Fortunately, the article is subtitled
“Turner and the drama of history” or I could be even more critical of Mr.
Schama’s analysis of Turner’s work.
The premise of the essay seems to
be that, overwhelmed by the modernity of Turner’s technique, we have lost sight
of his subject matter. Certainly no
serious student of Turner’s work has lost that focus. The artist himself won’t permit it. He constantly attached lines of text, of poetry (his and others)
to the walls next to his pictures. He
was determined, above all, to make “landscape into art”, to use the title of
Kenneth Clark’s writings on the subject.
By hook or by crook he would raise the lowly landscape to the pinnacle
upon which sat history painting. How
can we forget?
Schama the historian notes that the
young Turner “tramped the countryside sketching or painting in watercolors”
when art historians like Ian Warrell hold that Turner did not work in
watercolors en pleine aire.
Schama says that Turner traveled relentlessly (Rome, Venice, France, the
Alps) yet “…the ultimate subject was always the history of Britain…” Well, yes, but don’t leave us there without
an example to support this broad generalization. Some broad generalizations, like this one, happen to be true but
for if you don’t make the reasons clear they come off like so much
hyperbole. We need to be told that a
painting of Venice, or a depiction of ancient Rome, is meant to be related to
the history of England.
Our essayist also discusses what he
cites as Turner’s painting of “The Battle of Trafalgar”. Does Schama know that Turner painted more
than one canvas with the subject of the battle of Trafalgar? Citing the full title would distinguish The
Battle of Trafalgar, as Seen from the Mizen Starboard Shrouds of the Victory
from The Battle of Trafalgar, 21 October 1805. If you know both images you might surmise that Schama is
discussing the first picture, the one that focuses less on the battle and more
on the death of Admiral Nelson. But, if
he means to discuss Turner in the context of history painting, why doesn’t
Schama talk about Turner’s use of Benjamin West’s picture of The Death of
Nelson? And for that matter let’s
mention, in the context of Shama’s drama of history, how both artists conflated
Nelson’s mortal wound on the deck and his death below decks.
In his discussion of Turner’s more
generalized disasters, shipwrecks and the like, Schama posits that the artist’s
painting of figures was not incompetent as charged by some, but “a
self-conscious repudiation of the classical tradition”. That seems an exaggeration for an artist who
painted classical temples with such attention to detail. Has Shama never heard of staffage,
those stock figures added for the animation of landscape paintings. Claude Lorraine used them, the Dutch used
them, and Turner uses them throughout his oeuvre.
It is true that, in his day, Turner
was criticized for being too rough and lacking a refined manner, of painting
with strokes that were not well calibrated, that were too broad and
sweeping. Perhaps Schama means to
imitate the artist’s style. But that
would be too clever by far. Try as I
might, I do not understand what Schama is doing. Is he discussing the art, or the history, or Turner’s use of
history? The essay is such a jumble,
that just as with the paintings, the subject can get lost in the bravura
technique. The difference is that
Turner is arresting and Turner always makes sense.
Art in
New York - Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum
Is
Feminist still a curse word?
Do we avow that women are equal to men?
Will the ERA finally pass when it’s renamed the
Women’s Equality Amendment?
All of this unsettled business remains when, over the
horizon, riding into town to give forum to women’s issues (as
expressed by artistic means) comes Elizabeth A. Sackler the
benefactor of the new Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn
Museum. To judge by the audience, and
at least one of the panelists, at a Feminist Art symposium at
the end of March, her gift is not without its detractors.
Perhaps some people just have trouble taking a gift
horse.
Others find that it is due time
that the art of women had a venue.
But,
the establishment of the center does raise some provocative
issues, without evident response.
- Is
there A Feminist Art?
- Can
feminist art have a place in the white-male institution call
a museum?
- Is
feminist art only painted by women?
- Can
this art become part of the art historical dialogue?
- Does
it want to be part of that dialogue?
While
these questions come to mind, it soon becomes obvious that we
are not going to get an answer; no received wisdom is
forthcoming. On the
other hand, it seems essential, and almost obvious, that we
begin a dialogue. That’s
exactly what happens in the newly installed exhibition on the
fourth floor of the Brooklyn Museum.
The
permanent anchor of the Center for Feminist Art is Judy
Chicago’s The
Dinner Party (1974-79). The
huge triangular table, baronial (or I should say baronessial) in
dimension, was first exhibited here in 1980, in the course of
its inaugural tour. Now
it has a home here, it’s own space, dramatic lighting, and an
impressive didactic lead-in.
Like
works of the medieval and Renaissance periods, the content of
this work bears equal importance with its style.
The message of woman’s importance is repeated with each
place setting, dedicated to a woman whom, we eventually realize,
has been mostly ignored. History
is written by the victors and men have done the writing.
Judy Chicago makes that plain to see and she uses
women’s work to do it.
The
whole piece depends on work traditionally associated with women,
from the basic idea of a dinner party (an event most frequently
orchestrated and produced by women) to the woven banners,
the embroidered tablecloth to the decorated pottery
of each place setting. This
is a huge collaborative effort “dedicated’ to 1,038 real and
mythic women. My
hope is that it will be visited by boys and men too.
The
exhibitions in the other galleries, outside of this
installation, are meant to be temporary shows that pertain to
feminist art. In
this opening installation there is a large gallery given over to
Women Ceramicists. It’s
a wonderful, if too succinct, survey of workers in clay.
Among the Native American tribes the greatest, most
innovative potters have been the women.
The scope of their work is barely hinted at here with a
mere two cases of work on exhibit.
Be sure to look for Helen Shupla’s large, black-glazed
melon bowl. It’s
a knock-out, as is the Betty Woodman piece, her Still-Life Vase
#10 from 1990. The
Woodman retrospective at the Met in 2006 was one of the
highlights of the exhibition year.
The
larger exhibition is “Global Feminisms; international feminist
art at the turn of the century”.
It is set out almost in contra-distinction to the Dinner
Party as if to show that we’ve come a long way baby.
The works are divided into four topical themes: Life
Cycles, Identities, Politics and Emotions.
This is not a romp.
These are sobering works that you will find convey strong
messages through powerful imagery.
The
ones you will remember are the ones that are the strongest.
I’m still horrified by the video of the beautiful
female torso as it is mutilated by barbed wire formed into a
hula hoop and twirled around a pair of slender hips.
Ouch. It’s worse than the medieval flagellants because it’s
here and it’s now. You
will also remember the photo of the young Arab boy that is
really a self-portrait of the artist as a young man, brazenly
provocative and erotic.
You’ll
also become aware that some of this seems very self-indulgent,
self-reverential. Maybe the old cliché is true and if we don’t love
ourselves nobody will love us.
Is that what women want?
It’s
a show definitely worth seeing.
There’s one caveat however.
The museum has installed audio recordings accessible by
cell-phone. You
just dial the given phone number, enter the key code, and you
hear information that pertains to the exhibition or to a
particular piece on view. It’s
a fine idea but the commentary is either a reiteration of the
didactic label on the wall, or a statement by the artist that is
not at all helpful in understanding the work.
I gave up after three tries.
The technology is great but there has to be a more
edifying dialogue available to make it worth our while.
Just
the idea of a Center for Feminist Art is superb and what the
Brooklyn Museum has given us in this opening foray is terrific.
You’ve got to go see for yourself but go early or go
during the week. It’s
already crowded on week-ends.
Brooklyn
Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn
Hrs: Wed-Fri
10-5; Sat/Sun 11-6
Sugg.
Contribution $8, 62 and older $4
Eastern
Parkway stop on the West Side IRT- 2 or 3 trains.
Return to Home Page
|
