‘American Artists Visions of Night’ At Yale Gallery

NEW HAVEN — Through January 14, Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG) is offering “To Know The Dark: American Artists’ Visions of Night,” a special exhibition in the museum’s third floor gallery space.

The exhibition, which opened in mid-August, explores that evocative period from dusk to dawn in the works of 19th and 20th Century American artists, among them Robert Adams, Oscar Bluemner, Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, and Yvonne Jacquette. It includes 25 works in a range of media, drawn primarily from the gallery’s permanent collection while also including several recent acquisitions and “Moonlight” (circa 1880), a painting by the visionary artist Ralph Albert Blakelock on loan from a private collection. The work’s delirious green glow and patterned effects of dark foliage silhouetted against water and sky on a moonlit night can be viewed as a haunting portrait of the artist’s own emotional landscape as much as a depiction of a specific place.

Artists’ visions of night — offering intimations of suspense, mystery, romance, fantasy, fear, despair, and hope — are as much psychological explorations of the mind as they are transcriptions of the external world. Accompanied by quotations from literature, including the poem by Wendell Berry that provides the title for this show, the exhibition invites visitors to consider how night has been variously interpreted in images and words.

“To Know the Dark” was organized Helen A. Cooper, the Holcombe T. Green curator, and Robin Jaffee Frank, the Alice and Allan Kaplan senior associate curator of American paintings and sculpture.

“Artists and writers have been inspired – and occasionally haunted – by the night since the dawn of history,” said Jock Reynolds, the Henry J. Heinz director of YUAG. “This special exhibition is a wonderful way to reintroduce some of the gallery’s well-known highlights and less familiar works in a new context.”

Organized thematically, the exhibition reveals the variety of ways American artists have interpreted night both literally and metaphorically. From city streets and moonlit landscapes to hallucinatory visions and nocturnal scenes of soldiers in battle and at rest, the range of subjects and styles stimulate a broad spectrum of responses.

“Artists’ visions of night — offering intimations of suspense, mystery, romance, fantasy, fear, despair, and hope — are as much psychological explorations of the mind as they are transcriptions of the external world,” said Ms Frank.

On view for the first time are several significant recent acquisitions, including Oscar Bluemner’s watercolor “The Lamp of Sleep” (1927), depicting a snowy landscape illuminated by a full moon; Yvonne Jacquette’s “New York Harbor Composite” (2003), a woodcut composed of views taken from the 37th and 81st floors of the World Trade Center; and Robert Adams’s eerie photograph of suburban housing from his “Denver, Our Homes” series.

These new works are being exhibited in the rich context of extraordinary paintings from YUAG’s collection by Winslow Homer, Albert Bierstadt, and Edward Hopper, as well as seldom exhibited works on paper — such as Childe Hassam’s nearly abstract pastel “Evening Star” (1891) and Georgia O’Keeffe’s glowing 1916 watercolor of the same name.

Throughout the exhibition, quotations from literature, including the poem by Wendell Berry that provides the title “To Know the Dark,” invite visitors to consider how night has been variously interpreted in images and words.

Exhibition talks will take place on Wednesdays, October 25 and November 8, at 12:20 pm. These a free, and reservations are not needed.

The museum is at 1111 Chapel Street, at the corner of High Street. Admission is always free. YUAG is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 am until 5 pm (Thursday until 8 pm, September through June), and Sunday from 1 to 6 pm. Call 203-432-0600 or visit ArtGallery.Yale.edu.