βLike Breath on Glass: Whistler,
Inness and the Art of Painting Softlyβ
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown.
June 22βOctober 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 Degasβs 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 ingΓ©nue from the Impressionist confectionary any longer.
βLike Breath on Glass: Whistler, Inness and the Art of Painting Softlyβ 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 βconstructs a brief history of the vague, the suggested, and the ineffableβ 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: βPaint should not be applied thick. It should be like a