“Like Breath on Glass: Whistler,
Inness and the Art of Painting Softly”
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown.
June 22–October 19, 2008
Over the years, the Clark Art Institute has been home to many marvelous exhibitions that have not only delighted viewers but have also illuminated little-explored aspects of art, often altering and enhancing our understanding of an artist and his times. I think, for example, of the exhibitions the Clark devoted to the late landscapes of Turner, to Renoir in Algeria, and to the work of the Viennese architect Josef Hoffmann. And I remember especially the fascinating look at Degas’s Petite Danseuse and the seamy demimonde of the Paris ballet. No one who saw that exhibition will be able to regard that forlorn young girl as a sweet ingénue from the Impressionist confectionary any longer.
“Like Breath on Glass: Whistler, Inness and the Art of Painting Softly” is a worthy successor to those perception-altering exhibitions. Its main purpose is to explore what happened in American art during the brief interval after the decline of the Hudson River School and before the beginning of the modern era. As the curator Marc Simpson explains in his introduction to the cataogue, the exhibition “constructs a brief history of the vague, the suggested, and the ineffable” in American painting from 1870 to 1920. The title of the project is a paraphrase from James McNeill Whistler who, in Venice in 1880, said: “Paint should not be applied thick. It should be like a