Working Pictures

Wednesday, August 05, 2015

Silenus and the Infant Bacchus Take a Selfie

Williamstown, Massachusetts

With thanks to Christophe Veyrier and The Clark.

We drove up to see the hugely enlarged Clark museum today for my birthday. What a lovely present.

The Van Gogh show is fantastic, if you are able to go to far Northwestern MA in the next weeks while these shows are up, don't miss it. As you move through the galleries you are first amazed at the raw talent of the young Van Gogh. Then you watch him explore, seeming almost to invent individual painting styles for specific subjects painted the same year. Then you watch him go mad. Suddenly the hospital pictures, and later, come into focus as the work of a consummate artist who suddenly finds himself permanently on LSD.

The other special show is the actual Whistler's Mother, along with two rooms of Whistler's drawings and prints. Seeing Whistler's Mother in person is a trip. The painting is mesmerizing, but you get to notice little things like the framed print on the wall above her, which is a tour de force—not only does it read like an etching, but you can tell that it is framed under glass...