D
denisejhoward
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When you go to an art exhibit or museum, do you ever get up close to the artworks to really explore the details or the techniques? If not, why not? It’s your big chance to answer the big questions “How did they do that?” and “What have I been missing when I see this in a book or online?”
The experience
Last week after the CPSA convention, my husband and I did some sightseeing in Washington, D.C. The art museums we went to were the Phillips Collection, the Hirshhorn, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM).
The SAAM has a few colossal paintings up to 20 feet or so wide! Three in particular caught my attention: “Manifest Destiny” by Alexis Rockman, “The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone” by Thomas Moran, and “Among the Sierra Nevada, California” by Albert Bierstadt. There’s no denying that size has an initial impact, at least when viewing in real life.
“Manifest Destiny” was painted in 2024 so it was new to me. It had a room almost to itself, except for another large painting on an adjoining wall, “The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone”, completed in 1901 by Thomas Moran. The juxtaposition was undoubtedly intentional by the curator. Moran, one of the “Hudson River School” painters, depicted an inspiring landscape of grand natural beauty and light, while Rockman depicted a distant dystopian future in which an abandoned city has drowned in a rising, polluted ocean. Moran was trying to entice easterners to the West, in the days before color photography. “Manifest destiny” was the early 1800s belief that the expansion of the United States from coast to coast was inevitable and justified. Rockman has a very different idea about our manifest destiny!
I took the opportunity to look at Moran’s brushwork and colors up close–something you can’t do from color plates in a book. It was looser than I expected from seeing it in art books. Then, I confess, I spent much more time looking at the scenes-within-scenes in Rockman’s painting. There was a seat in the middle of the room, inviting visitors to sit and look for awhile, so I did. I took photos of the whole painting from way back, and photos of particular details from up close–like, two feet away. Back and forth I went, taking in the scenes and pondering their significance; I must’ve stayed for half an hour.
Here’s the thing: in all the time I was doing this, there were many other visitors, but not one of them came within eight feet of either painting!
Elsewhere in the SAAM is an even more spectacular Hudson River School painting, “Among the Sierra Nevada, California”, painted in 1868 by Albert Bierstadt. Bierstadt is one of my favorite artists. Many landscape paintings are just “meh” to me, but he somehow made them almost a religious experience. This painting is 10 feet wide and 6 feet high, without the beefy frame. It was such a tour de force in its day that it was an exhibit unto itself. As the wall text next to it says:
“Among the Sierra Nevada, California” has its own small “room” with curtains drawn to the side so you can feel like it’s just been revealed. There’s a plush bench a few feet in front of it that invites visitors to linger. I spent nearly an hour with this painting! I went back and forth, up close and far away, wishing there was a ladder so I could examine the mountain peaks and clouds up high. I had a conversation with a fellow admirer visiting from Switzerland. The more I looked, the more details I found: reflections off elk antlers; tiny wildflower blossoms; rocks underwater; exposed tree roots. There’s even a little fish in the lake next to a boulder, that you can only spot if you’re within about three feet. This huge masterpiece is like 20 smaller masterpieces in one, because everywhere you look there’s a scene that could stand on its own as a composition. Bierstadt took no shortcuts. The light and color in it keep your eyes engaged wherever you look. That he made this before color photography existed is mind-boggling.
Here’s the thing (again): in that hour, the only other visitors that went up close to it–within, say, four feet–were ones to whom I spoke up and said “You have to go up close to see the details!” All the rest stayed back at the threshold to the room.
The observation
This got me to thinking back on how often I’ve seen this happen in festivals, exhibits and museums. Most visitors seem to have a certain distance at which they stand to view art: the distance at which they can take in the entire artwork, or maybe even several artworks, at a glance. If it’s a small painting, say, 8″x10″, they might stand five feet away. If it’s wall-sized, they might stand fifteen feet away.
My theory is that we’re so accustomed to seeing artwork in print in magazines, books, or online, where the image is always at the size where we can see it all at once, that even when we have the opportunity to see it at full scale in real life, we subconsciously put ourselves to the distance for that same relative size. Some psychologist should do a study on this!
What makes this distance-keeping unfortunate is the visitor misses the unique opportunity to learn and observe things that a plate in a book or a web page can never reveal. In those, the greatly-reduced scale makes everything seem more precise, clean, and sharply defined. Small details, brushstrokes, errors, corrections, shortcuts, and subtleties of light and color are lost. It’s like the difference between seeing the Earth from 30,000 feet vs. driving across the country!
Look at all those people standing waaaaay back from the artworks! They’re not seeing any details or learning anything.
The difference it makes
If you’re mindful of this when you visit an artwork in real life for the first time, your experience can completely change your opinion of it! This has happened to me several times. Most recently, it was when I saw Renoir’s “Luncheon of the Boating Party” in real life for the first time at the Phillips Collection during this same trip. I’ve never been much of a Renoir fan, and I didn’t know I’d see this painting until there it was. I was able to stand within inches of it and see the individual brushstrokes of color. It almost glows with its own light. It seems “alive” compared to other Impressionist paintings in the same room. It’s far more impressive in real life than in any print medium or online. Now I get it!
I also wonder if the distance-holding is why more people don’t like or understand the Color-Feld paintings of the mid-20th century. They stand back and see a rectangle filled with color and shake their heads and say “I don’t get modern art”. Color-Field artists intended for you to stand close, very close to the painting so that your entire field of vision is filled with color, so the color can work its emotional effect on you. Being enveloped by bright orange will affect you differently than deep purple.
And that in turn makes me wonder if that’s why Mark Rothko, who was one of these Color-Field painters, requested that the room that was built for his three paintings in the Phillips Collection be quite small and have subdued light–so that you can’t stand back, you have no choice but to have an intimate experience with his colors. (Sorry, I don’t have photos of this because photography was not allowed in that room.) He is known for saying:
I’ve digressed a bit, but I hope your takeaway from all this is to consider getting closer to artworks when you have the chance. Sure, sometimes there’s a line on the floor or a rope or a guard who may ask you to step back a bit, but that’s only because they’re wary of people who might try to touch the work. Take the time to get in there and look around for details and figure out how it was made and why it looks that way. You’ll be glad you did!
That’s how to do it!
The experience
Last week after the CPSA convention, my husband and I did some sightseeing in Washington, D.C. The art museums we went to were the Phillips Collection, the Hirshhorn, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM).
The SAAM has a few colossal paintings up to 20 feet or so wide! Three in particular caught my attention: “Manifest Destiny” by Alexis Rockman, “The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone” by Thomas Moran, and “Among the Sierra Nevada, California” by Albert Bierstadt. There’s no denying that size has an initial impact, at least when viewing in real life.
“Manifest Destiny” was painted in 2024 so it was new to me. It had a room almost to itself, except for another large painting on an adjoining wall, “The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone”, completed in 1901 by Thomas Moran. The juxtaposition was undoubtedly intentional by the curator. Moran, one of the “Hudson River School” painters, depicted an inspiring landscape of grand natural beauty and light, while Rockman depicted a distant dystopian future in which an abandoned city has drowned in a rising, polluted ocean. Moran was trying to entice easterners to the West, in the days before color photography. “Manifest destiny” was the early 1800s belief that the expansion of the United States from coast to coast was inevitable and justified. Rockman has a very different idea about our manifest destiny!
I took the opportunity to look at Moran’s brushwork and colors up close–something you can’t do from color plates in a book. It was looser than I expected from seeing it in art books. Then, I confess, I spent much more time looking at the scenes-within-scenes in Rockman’s painting. There was a seat in the middle of the room, inviting visitors to sit and look for awhile, so I did. I took photos of the whole painting from way back, and photos of particular details from up close–like, two feet away. Back and forth I went, taking in the scenes and pondering their significance; I must’ve stayed for half an hour.
Here’s the thing: in all the time I was doing this, there were many other visitors, but not one of them came within eight feet of either painting!
Elsewhere in the SAAM is an even more spectacular Hudson River School painting, “Among the Sierra Nevada, California”, painted in 1868 by Albert Bierstadt. Bierstadt is one of my favorite artists. Many landscape paintings are just “meh” to me, but he somehow made them almost a religious experience. This painting is 10 feet wide and 6 feet high, without the beefy frame. It was such a tour de force in its day that it was an exhibit unto itself. As the wall text next to it says:
“Among the Sierra Nevada, California” has its own small “room” with curtains drawn to the side so you can feel like it’s just been revealed. There’s a plush bench a few feet in front of it that invites visitors to linger. I spent nearly an hour with this painting! I went back and forth, up close and far away, wishing there was a ladder so I could examine the mountain peaks and clouds up high. I had a conversation with a fellow admirer visiting from Switzerland. The more I looked, the more details I found: reflections off elk antlers; tiny wildflower blossoms; rocks underwater; exposed tree roots. There’s even a little fish in the lake next to a boulder, that you can only spot if you’re within about three feet. This huge masterpiece is like 20 smaller masterpieces in one, because everywhere you look there’s a scene that could stand on its own as a composition. Bierstadt took no shortcuts. The light and color in it keep your eyes engaged wherever you look. That he made this before color photography existed is mind-boggling.
Here’s the thing (again): in that hour, the only other visitors that went up close to it–within, say, four feet–were ones to whom I spoke up and said “You have to go up close to see the details!” All the rest stayed back at the threshold to the room.
The observation
This got me to thinking back on how often I’ve seen this happen in festivals, exhibits and museums. Most visitors seem to have a certain distance at which they stand to view art: the distance at which they can take in the entire artwork, or maybe even several artworks, at a glance. If it’s a small painting, say, 8″x10″, they might stand five feet away. If it’s wall-sized, they might stand fifteen feet away.
My theory is that we’re so accustomed to seeing artwork in print in magazines, books, or online, where the image is always at the size where we can see it all at once, that even when we have the opportunity to see it at full scale in real life, we subconsciously put ourselves to the distance for that same relative size. Some psychologist should do a study on this!
What makes this distance-keeping unfortunate is the visitor misses the unique opportunity to learn and observe things that a plate in a book or a web page can never reveal. In those, the greatly-reduced scale makes everything seem more precise, clean, and sharply defined. Small details, brushstrokes, errors, corrections, shortcuts, and subtleties of light and color are lost. It’s like the difference between seeing the Earth from 30,000 feet vs. driving across the country!
Look at all those people standing waaaaay back from the artworks! They’re not seeing any details or learning anything.
The difference it makes
If you’re mindful of this when you visit an artwork in real life for the first time, your experience can completely change your opinion of it! This has happened to me several times. Most recently, it was when I saw Renoir’s “Luncheon of the Boating Party” in real life for the first time at the Phillips Collection during this same trip. I’ve never been much of a Renoir fan, and I didn’t know I’d see this painting until there it was. I was able to stand within inches of it and see the individual brushstrokes of color. It almost glows with its own light. It seems “alive” compared to other Impressionist paintings in the same room. It’s far more impressive in real life than in any print medium or online. Now I get it!
I also wonder if the distance-holding is why more people don’t like or understand the Color-Feld paintings of the mid-20th century. They stand back and see a rectangle filled with color and shake their heads and say “I don’t get modern art”. Color-Field artists intended for you to stand close, very close to the painting so that your entire field of vision is filled with color, so the color can work its emotional effect on you. Being enveloped by bright orange will affect you differently than deep purple.
And that in turn makes me wonder if that’s why Mark Rothko, who was one of these Color-Field painters, requested that the room that was built for his three paintings in the Phillips Collection be quite small and have subdued light–so that you can’t stand back, you have no choice but to have an intimate experience with his colors. (Sorry, I don’t have photos of this because photography was not allowed in that room.) He is known for saying:
I’ve digressed a bit, but I hope your takeaway from all this is to consider getting closer to artworks when you have the chance. Sure, sometimes there’s a line on the floor or a rope or a guard who may ask you to step back a bit, but that’s only because they’re wary of people who might try to touch the work. Take the time to get in there and look around for details and figure out how it was made and why it looks that way. You’ll be glad you did!
That’s how to do it!