New Exhibits Offer New Perspectives on War, Rivers, Van Gogh

Painted With Words: Vincent van Gogh’s Letters to Émile Bernard

We know Vincent van Gogh’s signature from the lower right-hand corner of his colorful and emotive oil paintings. It is thrilling to see the large underlined “Vincent” once again, but this time in a different context: at the bottom of a letter to a fellow painter. Painted With Words: Vincent van Gogh’s Letters to Émile Bernard at the Morgan Library & Museum features van Gogh’s paintings, drawings, and watercolors alongside dozens of letters he wrote to the young French artist Émile Bernard between 1887 and 1889.

In his letters, van Gogh gives artistic praise, criticism, and advice to his younger colleague—and one can see responses to this criticism and advice in Bernard’s work, which is also displayed. But more interesting are the preparatory sketches and studies van Gogh sent to his friend, and his accounts of his personal struggles in art and life. These letters provide a particularly intriguing look at the troubled artist’s work by displaying his mental and creative processes alongside each other. Van Gogh’s painting is decidedly psychological, and these letters allow for greater understanding of his oeuvre by giving a glimpse inside his psyche.

In addition, this show features a series of van Gogh canvases that are being exhibited in New York for the first time in a number of years. As beautiful as Sunflowers and Starry Night are, it is refreshing to see something new, like the colorful but vaguely ominous Olive Trees (1889) from the National Gallery of Scotland.

This Is War! Robert Capa at Work

An American soldier lies crumpled in a doorway. His right arm is twisted awkwardly above his head while his left hand clutches his chest. There is a pool of dark yet silvery liquid next to him. This is a black and white photograph, so it takes a second to realize it is pool of blood on the parquet floor. Hungarian-born photojournalist Robert Capa took this photograph—”American soldier killed by German snipers, Leipzig, Germany”—on April 18, 1945, just three weeks before victory in Europe was declared. While the narrative of the photograph is tragic and striking, the ability of the image to bring the viewer so close to the ramifications of war is even more intriguing.

Capa’s war photographs—taken between the mid-1930s and the early 1950s—alternately immerse the viewer in the chaos and eerie serenity of battle and its aftermath.

There are out-of-focus photos from the Allied landings in Normandy on D-Day. Blurred shapes—that could be soldiers, corpses, or just debris—inhabit blurred landscapes. The fuzziness of the photos makes it seem as if everything is moving very fast, your sight has been impaired by smoke and terror, or both. In stark contrast to the D-Day pictures is a series of photos of refugees from the Spanish Civil War. These images are crystal clear—one can see in perfect detail every worried wrinkle and every dark look of a people trapped in limbo.

The power of these photos stems from Capa’s immersion in the events he was shooting. He braved machine guns, mortar fire, and air strikes to bring accurate portrayals of war to the general public. This proximity to war is responsible for both his success and his downfall—he was killed by a land mine in 1954 while covering the French Indochina War. While Capa died tragically, he left behind what are probably the most powerful, gut-wrenching, and intimate pictures of war you will ever see.

—Diana Greenwald

New York Modern

Manhattan’s skyscrapers may seem big and imposing today, but during the early 20th century, architects envisioned a landscape with even more monolithic mega-structures. “New York Modern” at The Skyscraper Museum, curated by Columbia Professor Carol Willis, takes a look at this period in the city’s history, when throbbing optimism was challenged by the urban problems that inevitably come with rapid growth. The show presents a collection of architectural and popular material, including drawings, publications, and films that trace the era’s grandiose dreams for the future American metropolis. Much attention is devoted to the personalities whose ideas at the time shaped the public imagination for decades to come, and whose visions were literally up in the clouds. The thought of airplanes taxiing atop office towers and sky bridges sprawling high above ground gives the show a refreshing element of whimsy. While many of these dreams never materialized, it’s fascinating to see how they continue to shape our designs for the future.

Ellsworth Kelly: The Rivers

The color canvases for which Ellsworth Kelly is best known leave much to the imagination—staring into an expanse of flat orange is not necessarily the most exhilarating experience. But the same cannot be said of the prints and wall sculptures featured in “Ellsworth Kelly: The Rivers,” now on display at Gemini G.E.L. at Joni Moisant Weyl. While still abstract in their directional gashes of black ink, these lithographs are visually stimulating and even seem to dance. They bring to mind the layers of a canyon, television static, fuzzy scraps of an ultrasound image, and, of course, rivers. In fact, in “States of the River, 2005,” a set of eight prints, Kelly names each image after a major river, as if assigning a unique signature to the Amazon, the Hudson, and the Yangtze. Far from being flat and faceless, these prints—like the rivers themselves—have character aplenty, each one defined by varying degrees of flow and turbulence.

—John Ng