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The Night Shift
by Paul Bass | Aug 22, 2006 6:36 pm
(2) Comments | Commenting has been closed | E-mail the Author
Posted to: Arts
Helen A. Cooper(pictured) never forgot the way the moon looked in a painting she saw 25 years ago in a woman’s home. She eventually found a way to bring the painting temporarily to New Haven—and design a soul-stirring new exhibition around it.
The exhibit is called “To Know The Dark: American Artists’ Visions of Night.” It opened Tuesday at the Yale Art Gallery. It combines writers’ musings on night with some 20 nocturnal-themed pictures from the museum’s permanent collection, plus the loaned painting that so moved Cooper: Ralph Albert Blakelock’s 1880 Moonlight. Cooper and Robin Jaffee Frank, a curator and senior associate curator at the gallery, described the exhibition’s genesis and underlying themes at an opening-day press preview.
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The exhibition captures the range of emotions and sensations associated with the dusk-to-dawn hours—in the museum’s words, the night’s “mystery, romance, fantasy, fear, despair and hope.” A single painting can evoke such contradictory feelings. So Frank noted in pointing to Peter Hurd’s Enemy Night Action Over The Midlands No. 2 (Late Twilight on the Night of July 23rd 1942).
Upon initial viewing, from a distance, the painting shows the beauty of night. When you look at it from close up, and read what it’s about, awe turns to dread. What looks like a celestial light display turns out to be flares sent by Germans as part of their largest bombardment of the English midlands. “There are many layers,” remarked Frank, “to the night.”
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The exhibition spans not just the moods, but the different settings of the night—not just pastoral scenes, but a wall’s worth of urban landscapes like Yvonne Jacquette’s 2003 woodcut New York Harbor Composite.
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The quotations from writers, reproduced in pale silvery gray letters high against the exhibition room’s charcoal black walls, serve as stars illuminating the eye-level paintings below. The quotations weren’t intended to illustrate any one painting; still, the viewer inevitably makes connections. Directly above Edward Hopper’s 1945 Rooms for Tourists echo these words from Langston Hughes, evoking in both painting and poem the quiet energy that accompanies nightfall, when the soul, freed from noise and artifice and blinders, escapes into a wild search for meaning and fulfillment: “And the night becomes/ Still as a whispering heartland.” It is merciful evening in that room, even while daylight blares outside the museum’s walls.
p(clear). 
Cooper had a story to tell about the painting that so transfixed her, about the artist’s own night. The critics panned Blakelock when he painted this in 1880. He layered the paint, mixed oils with “unconventional” materials, failed to dry all the paint properly. An almost 3-D (at the time) portrait emerged; its “nervous energy,” “crispness of leaves,” and overall mystical, emotional view of nature deviated from the “finished, refined look” expected in the “elegant” late 19th century American Renaissance. The critics were vicious toward Blakelock, absolutely “stinging.” Distraught over the criticism, and over his inability to support his nine children, Blakelock suffered a mental breakdown. His genius was widely recognized only after his death, of course.
After Helen Cooper saw the painting in the apartment of an art collector during her days as a graduate student, she couldn’t get it out of her mind. She was still thinking about it 23 years later when she met the collector’s daughter. Whatever happened to that painting? she asked the daughter. It turned out the daughter had inherited it. Cooper saw it again—and determined to find a way to get it to New Haven, at least for a visit. Two years later, she did. In such distinguished company, Blakelock’s painting has found a proper, if belated, position of honor.
