Timed Entry to Exhibitions: Welcome to Your Special Crowd

 Welcome to Your Special Crowd:

Timed Entry in Exhibitions

 

What is the point of timed entry to exhibitions? It cannot be to lessen crowds: experience all to clearly gives the lie to that hypothesis.

Good at Hands: Hans Hals

 Good at Hands: Frans Hals

 

The Laughing Cavalier by Frans Hals (1582-1666) is a paradigm of the immediately approachable in classical painting: the Mona Lisa of the unsubtle chuckle.

The Hals exhibition at the National Gallery confirms his talent for smiling faces. They are everywhere: exuberant, tender, confident, self-satisfied. 

Van Gogh Self Portraits

 Van Gogh Self Portraits

 

My overwhelming feeling was of sadness. Here was such a bold and innovative artist, destined to influence C20 painters like none other. Here was such a depressed, unhappy, and desperate young man. Genius may have been flowing through Van Gogh’s brush, but it was no solace.