Art I'm Seeing #43

After admiring the snow covered trees and full of anticipation over the cancellation of school today, I drove into D.C. and paid a visit to the Corcoran Gallery of Art. They are currently featuring an exhibition of paintings from the National Museum Wales in the U.K. The show is called "Turner to Cezanne: Masterpieces from the Davies Collection". The Davies were a pair of wealthy sisters who never married and instead gave into their love of art by collecting it: a Welsh Cone Sister thing if you will (The Cone collection was amassed by two sisters similarly possessed and his house at the Baltimore Museum of Art).

Among the works on display are several by Turner, Daumier, and Millet. There are a couple by Manet, Monet, Renoir and Cezanne. Altogether works by 30 different artists are included in the space of 3 ample galleries. My first impressions include a couple of stand out works and a couple of gentle, lovely works. I'll start with the gentle, lovely works. The small collection of Turner watercolors are luminous and perfectly understated in just that way that demonstrates what a master of that medium he was, even as it foreshadows the impressionist works to follow. There is a Bonnard of a little villa with a garden. Not an in your face painting by any means, but a just right example of his palette and the way he organizes a composition to feature the architecture and flora while loosing a person or two within the mix as if they were but a ghost, a spirit both present and somehow without the moment.

The two standouts were by Millet and Van Gogh. The Millet was entitled "The Gust Of Wind" and featured a tree being ripped apart and nearly from the ground by the "gust". Seemingly beneath it stands a man whose back if bowed against the wind and still appears to nearly be stretched out of his own skin by the force. Beyond him the far horizon forms a tent of light like a bubble over him: almost a forcefield of divine protection. Talk about your romance with the sublime! The work was so electric it was like Viagra for my inner artist.

And then there was this amazing Van Gogh.
It was painted very near to the artist's suicide. It's title is simply "Rain Auvers." It is not his last painting, but it references that work with both it's inclusion of the wheat fields and more specifically the black birds. The moment I saw them, I knew it was from that final early summer when Vincent was newly freed from the asylum, painting manically, and moving inextricably toward his self-inflicted demise. Had I not even held my knowledge of the artist so that these associations were evoked like the very air around me, I do believe I would have still understood the growing melancholy that was rising in Van Gogh's heart like the crow crossing the hedgerow in the rain.

This work has never before been exhibited in the United States. To see it is worth the price of admission alone. Having seen it, I will return to see it again. The exhibition is open to the public through April 25th; however, the Corocoran is closed on both Monday's and Tuesday's as you plan your visit.

And as a sort of "p.s." there were also a few honorable mentions worth mentioning! "Castle Gandolfo, Dancing Tyrolean Shepherds by Lake Albano," by Corot, "Winter: The Faggot Gatherers" by Millet, and "Innocents and Card Sharpers" by Meissonier. Three more reasons to return!