Van Gogh @ the MoMA

here's Peter Schjeldahl's quick review of Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night showing at the MoMA September 21, 2008–January 5, 2009. if you weren't pumped enough for the exhibition already, the delectable bite of van gogh peter offers will surely do the trick (i love the last line).

The Night Stuff by Peter Schjeldahl September 29, 2008 (via The New Yorker)

Poignantly inferior paintings surprise in “Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night,” an instructive little show in new, cozy galleries at MOMA. (Good luck squeezing in.) There are masterpieces, too—“The Starry Night,” “The Night Café,” “Gauguin’s Chair,” and the indelibly weird “The Potato Eaters”—as well as wonderful drawings (none better, in all of art, than “Café Terrace at Night”). But at issue is the distraught ambition of a late-blooming, fragile man, seen in efforts to express the character of the world at sundown and after dark. Early tonal platitudes give way to forced imitations of Millet and other misfires. (“The Stevedores in Arles” anticipates nothing so much as strip-mall paintings on velvet.) Van Gogh did the improbable, winning by trying too hard—banging into limits that disintegrated, as profound inventions of linear rhythm and color harmony transfigured dicey motifs. The delirious “Starry Night” and the hellish “Night Café” attain serenity in their realization, cruising at an altitude of talent beyond imagining.

Posted by Madame Lamb on Monday, September 29, 2008 at 5:00 AM