Smithsonian.com

From the exhibition Zen Mind/Zen Brush: Japanese Ink Paintings from the Gitter-Yelen Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

To get ready for the fall season, I found out what is coming down the pike at two museums that have been really great to visit in the past year or so. Let the slugfest begin.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston has four shows headlining their fall roster. The first is an exhibition of Assyrian art traveling from the British Museum. Yes, a slow start, but they follow that up with a look at the career of celebrity photographer Yousuf Karsh, who shot everyone from Albert Einstein to Audrey Hepburn to the Kennedys. The third act is a small show of Japanese ink paintings, which looks a lot more interesting than it sounds. Rachel Whiteread runs the last leg of the race. The last show of the season is devoted to her most recent work, Place (Village), which is an installation of handmade dollhouses.

The Brooklyn Museum of Art starts with an exhibition of four short films from Jesper Just. Their second show pulls together 40 works from the museum’s growing contemporary collection, specifically pieces that were made after 2000 and resonate with the museum’s rich ethnic and artistic locale. After that, the last stop of an international tour of the work of Gilbert & George arrives. This could be the sleeper, as there are 80 or so stellar works in this retrospective. The final exhibition brings together feminist works that comment on the “house”—whether the historically male-dominated museum or the home as the principal domain of women.

Put side by side like this, I’m torn about which venue comes out on top. And choosing a winner before actually seeing any of the shows is probably foolhardily premature. But I’m ready and willing to take bets.

Vincent van Gogh struggled with so many things—mental illness, addiction, (ahem) lady problems—but at least he may have enjoyed his work. I saw The Starry Night in person at the Yale University Art Gallery last weekend. I stood there staring at the thick swirls of paint that make up the sky above Saint-Remy with the shadowy green cypress tree in the foreground, and all I could think was how much fun that it must have been to paint that scene. A little bit soothing, a little bit hypnotic, but mostly just fun to do, dragging a brush through the slick paint and seeing it ooze and furl.

Sometimes the struggle to create art overshadows the sensory pleasure that goes along with sculpting, painting, performing or installing a work. We never really talk or ask about the enjoyable side of it. Probably because it makes a serious work seem not-so-serious, but imagining van Gogh getting just a tiny bit of pure pleasure or fun out of painting certainly makes his sad run of luck in life seem a little less so.

Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, Saint-Rémy, June 1889. Oil on canvas. The Museum of Modern Art, Aquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest, 1941

The installation of five totem poles by artist Tatiana Echeverri Fernandez. One of the totems was recently destroyed by a visitor at the Royal Academy.

The line between exhibition space and viewer space is sometimes clear and sometimes not. It is clear when there are security guards at the ready, telling you to move back if you step too near a sculpture. I’ve had many a motion sensor beep me away when I’ve leaned in too far while looking at a painting. Works can be behind plexi; on podiums; or cordoned off. These are all clear ways for them, the show makers, to let us, the visitors, know where we stand, literally. But some curators reject putting up barriers between artwork and visitor. And I can respect that, even applaud it, because I’m down with the whole “art should be experienced without filters or physical barriers” thing. But sometimes that can totally backfire, and I would not want to be the one holding the bag when things go terribly wrong.

Last week at the Royal Academy in London, a visitor at the Summer Exhibition stumbled into a group of sculptures by Costa Rican artist Tatiana Echeverri Fernandez and sent one of them—a piece that exhibition organizer and artist Tracey Emin called one of the stars of the show—tumbling to the floor, where it shattered into hundreds of pieces. So as much as I appreciate the opportunity to get close to works, I really think that next time, Tracey, you should save us clumsy viewers the nightmarishly awful guilt of being responsible for wrecking a really expensive sculpture by just putting it in a case.

Isidre Nonell, La Paloma, 1904

When you think about Spanish modernism, a few superstars come to mind (Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali, maybe Joan Miro) and tend to blot out all the rest. So during a recent trip to Spain I was completely floored and delighted to find so many other 20th-century Spanish artists that I knew nothing about.

Isidre Nonell was a Catalonian artist with a distinctive style. He used muted yet colorful tones, and applied paint almost as if he were working with chisel and stone, leaving regular, textured lines of pigment on the canvas. His portraits of destitute, weary women and children, often gypsies, alienated the conservative Barcelonan society that he worked and lived in, but provide a harrowing view of the so-called untouchables at the turn of the twentieth century.

Another artist I couldn’t get enough of was Joaquim Mir. His landscapes were really exceptional due to his use of searing colors and unusual vantage points. Pau Gargallo, a sculptor, was a standout too. His use of iron was innovative, uniting a strong sense of movement and energy with heightened detail within a piece.