Top Five Top Ten

A roundup of art-related top lists for 2009:

1) Artnet's picks for most important art-world stories
2) Top art books, per the Daily Beast
3) Jerry Saltz's favorite art of the year (some not safe for work)
4) Time's favorite exhibitions
5) Top ten auction sales (interesting: 7 of the ten are modern era/contemporary)

Happy new year!

Homage to a winter painting

John Twachtman painted winter as well as anyone ever did (other American artists who aced the subject are here). His Winter, in the Phillips Collection, is a particularly nice example of snow, ice, and gray sky. Twachtman's snow scenes are justifiably famous among historians of American art; their broad expanses of whites and grays, their careful brushwork that emphasizes the paintings' surfaces, and their indistinct details read today as nearly proto-modern. It's not hard to find a harbinger of Robert Ryman in these pale landscapes.

But of course Twachtman wasn't painting in the late nineteenth century with abstraction of the 1960s and 1970s in mind. Instead, these paintings stand as terrific examples of Impressionist and Tonalist experiments with light and color (which is why Duncan Philips was such a fan). Twachtman evokes chill in the best possible way. Brr!

My favorite painting of the day

Is John Vanderlyn's awesomely scaled panoramic view of Versailles, from 1818-19. The painting--all 165 feet of it--was originally installed in a building designed for it in lower Manhattan. Visitors entered the Rotunda and vicariously experienced the palace and gardens; the canvas circled around them to dramatic effect. Vanderlyn painted not only contemporary European notables (Czar Alexander I, the king of Prussia) among the figures in the scene, but also included himself.

The Met has installed the painting in a fabulously-lit circular space tucked away in the American Wing, if you'd like a visit. In the meantime, a video of museum director Tom Cambell talking to the press in front of Versailles is here, on Culture Grrl's blog.