Finding an angle at which to view Van Gogh's Starry Night here yesterday presented a challenge. Partly the lighting may have been responsible, the spot overhead trained on it a few amps too bright. The tessellated layers of paint for the water surface that carried the light thrown from the houses around the shore of the bay stabbed at the eyes.
Receiving that wide arena of night was not easy. Getting to it with all the cameras trained was very difficult.
On the return for a second viewing after a break a tall chap tried a dozen shots from close in front. Prior to that he had given it some distance. (One poor patron hadn't given himself enough time for so many pictures; he raced around for a click of each, and one of the accompanying note. At home when he had more time he was going to look properly.)
The cobalt blue of Starry Night, the entirety of sky and water drawn together, presented an action spectacular of the inner mind.
Again there was a single star adrift of the moon here last night. All the art patrons at the National Museum of Singapore would have traveled overseas. But on their travels had they ever been outside a large city? Had they ever seen the night sky strewn with stars?
Perhaps on their nature excursions: the penguins at Phillip Island back home, a safari zoo outside city limits. (In order to compare with their own, which in the advertising was judged world best.) Climbing or skiing alps.
Could the memories help with Starry Night?
Everything was odd in the transposition here of language, art, culture, advertising, architecture, colonial era justice system and governance. You name it.
A Winslow Homer night (Summer Night) was placed on the wall adjacent to the Van Gogh—the sole Van Gogh in the show. (In the shop attached to the museum they sold many other repro postcards.) The wrapped dancers in the foreground of Homer’s painting didn't make it a less daunting and forbidding nightscape. Van G.’s night on the other hand was exhilarating.
A feather-light diaphanous azure blue worn by Degas' dancers was perfect for supple, youthful bodies that rose from the boards into the realm of air. A marvellous frieze of a painting in its graded planes from the figures on the stairs to those within the room and by the windows. You couldn't help mimicking the postures, shifting the weight with the figures before you. A beautiful, not large painting.
Monet's wife Camille, first healthy and full in figure reclined on a sofa in a moment of abstraction (Meditation); then on the opposite wall painted a few short years afterward, a woman in mountainous shrouds buried in a hollow and half-way to formless oblivion already.
A striking pairing.
Seurat's dying aunt—the note said she was dead already—hung nearby. The old woman's head lay heavily on the heaped pillows, the weight off her shoulder given from the angle of the bed-side vigil. Again the whorled lines of the pencil suggested rapid loss of form and identity.
Frightening to behold both of these paintings. At no stage did the cameras get in the way in that dark corner.
Other signature Monet water scenes were included, Cezanne's rocks and card-players, Renoir's pink chestnut trees that shimmered before the eyes. First inside the entrance, the dreamy, sensuous Ingres woman transformed by her state was a wonderful, inviting opening to the survey.
Impressionists from the Musee D'Orsay. $11 — with the sweetest, most attentive, charming and warm attendants, turnstile men and baggage ladies imaginable. Close cousins of the other delightful people at the hawker stalls and elsewhere in this city-country.
The tour guides’ Dutch and French it sounded like—cooler northern climate voices and visages—seemed to have nothing in common with the spirit of the artists.
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