Van Gogh at MoMA

Living in a city with a powerful museum culture has oodles of upsides and one major downside: lots of people want to see the things you want to see when you want to see them. Case in point: MoMA's eagerly anticipated Van Gogh and the Colors of Night exhibition. From what we could see, the show features a pared down selection of maybe 16 smallish works in which the painter explored darkness, stars, the landscape, peasants, and the interplay of cafe light on nearby cobblestones. His ultimate people-pleaser, The Starry Night (1889), is there, of course, but we were particularly taken with his letters to his brother Theo, most of which feature quick sketches (we're suckers for displays of process and method). We also spent a while looking at The Starry Night over the Rhone (1888), focusing on its thick glossy brushstrokes, which resemble nothing so much as stars themselves, until, that is, the crowd moved us somewhere else.

Photo: thanks