After seeing the Miró show, I headed down to the second floor to take in the blockbuster “Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night.”  It’s worth becoming a member of MoMA for this show just so you can avoid the timed-ticket entry and the associated very long lines: just flash your membership card and you can proceed straight into the galleries without any delay.

The show focuses on Van Gogh’s longstanding interest in the night: landscapes at dusk, nighttime interiors, and star-light night skies.  It includes, of course, the museum’s super-famous “Starry Night”:  fortunately, if you’ve been to MoMA often you’ve seen this painting a million times and can skip the huge crowds here.  There are several “Sower” paintings where peasants work the fields as the sun sets in the background.  The Potato Eaters is here and it’s nice to see it in person instead of in your art history books (all of them!).

The Dance Hall in Arles is a Gauguin-like interior full of dancers and is noteworthy for its surprisingly flat forms and lacking the signature broken brushstroke of most of Van Gogh’s other work.  In The Night Cafe, Van Gogh tries “to express the terrible human passions with the red and the green”.

In a show full of knockout paintings, the “star” is the other Starry Night (“…Over the Rhone”), a gorgeous scene of a couple strolling in the foreground, the town of Arles shimmering in the distance, and reflections of the town and the stars in the sky flickering over the water of the Rhone.

My only complaint about this show is that it’s so crowded, even with the timed entry tickets.  Worse, large crowds loiter around the paintings with audio explanations, audioguide glued to the ear, oblivious to the space and people around them.  My suggestion is that you go and just look at the paintings as much as you can and read the text or listen to the audio from MoMA’s excellent online exhibition ahead of time.  But most of all, be sure not to miss this show!

Pipilotti Rist: Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters)
In MoMA’s large atrium, there’s a site-specific installation by artist Pipilotti Rist.  I remember being entranced by Rist’s video / sculpture installations in Chelsea a few years ago.  The video component of the present piece is projected up against the walls of the atrium while the center of the space contains round cushioned benches for viewers to lie back on.  People are encouraged to make themselves comfortable, to get to know others around them, and to take off their shoes before stepping onto the light colored carpet!

The Printed Picture
In another show that I had to hurry through but will have to revisit (it’s up through June 1, 2009), MoMA documents the history of multiple-copy image prints (the exhibition coincides with the publication of the book The Printed Picture).  In a nifty curatorial strategy, examples of dozens of different kinds of prints are exhibited along the walls of the gallery, many of them coupled with 50x magnifications that let you easily see what’s going on at a very low level on the paper (e.g., you can quickly see the difference between halftone screen patterns and stochastic screen patterns).  There’s an awful lot to look at here, so this show might be best enjoyed in detail through the book.

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