Lines and Shadows
Zimmerli exhibition shines a light on artists in love with the night
Sunday, January 30, 2005
BY DAN BISCHOFF Star-Ledger Staff

You can find a few depictions of the night at all periods of art history, but the peculiar emotional meaning of the dark does not come into its own until the 19th century -- not until artificial lighting and urban night life, interestingly enough, had become almost universal.

We in America invented electric lighting, the biggest advance in night living since Prometheus, so "The Color of Night," now at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum in New Brunswick, has an importance peculiar to us and our own art history.

"The Color of Night" is an exhibition of prints -- mostly etchings, but some lithos and screen prints, too -- that looks at how American artists over the past 150 years or so have rendered the night. It's not such a simple thing to do, certainly not as simple as merely darkening the image, like the cheap '50s Hollywood movies that made night effects by adding filters to the lens (through which you could often make out shadows cast by the sun).

The night has long been a subjectival subset in art, a specialty you bring out for a little value-added amazement. Raphael wowed Pope Julius II with his fresco of St. Peter in his dungeon awakened by the angel's beam of artificial light. The 17th-century le Nain brothers in France made light effects their stock-in-trade. The 17th-century Dutch broadcast their abilities at depicting "torch light parades and candlelit service" as a mark of the sophistication and range of a studio's effects, to let you know they were a one-stop-shopping-place for artistic ability.

Chronologically, "The Color of Night" begins with an early print by J.M.A. Whistler of an empty village street ("Street at Saverne," 1858). Whistler was famous for his versions of dusk and for printing his plates with a wash of loose ink still on the surface, to suggest atmospheric tones. "The Color of Night" then follows, for a time, the Whistlerian line through American art with wonderful prints by Jospeh Pennell (1857-1926), who followed Whistler to England and then returned to New York to found the printmaking department of the Art Students League. There is a wonderful Pennell etching here of a London bar at night, seen from above ("London Night, Whiskey and Tea," 1909). The white paper that suggests light pours onto the sidewalk in an otherwise darkened city square drawing your gaze like a shout.

Back in New York, Pennell taught the long-lived Martin Lewis (1861-1962), who ultimately took over the printmaking department at the league. Lewis is the reigning print master of the American 20th century, his prices and his reputation soaring over the past 10 years or so, and for very good reason, as the five prints here make clear.

Lewis is a particular master of the night. The velvety blacks of his aquatinted prints are darker than any black made up by benday dots or rubbed charcoal; great dark slabs of inky density that loom over the paper like a weight. There is a print here ("Which Way?," 1932) of a big sedan on a snow-covered road that is a marvel -- the startling white of the paper forming headlit snow banks against the halftones of the night sky, while the ghostly, snow-laden branches of a tree rise above the absorbent blackness of the car. In such utter contrasts there is a coldness like a winter's night.

There are scans on the accidental Surrealism of the American night throughout this show, like Lewis' depiction of two men on a nighttime street throwing shadows that reach to the top of a tall building behind them ("Ha'nted," 1932). We even have the last print Lewis ever pulled ("At the Wall," 1953), showing three girls on a New York City street at dusk, lost in a conversation that the anonymous sleepy office girls of his famous etchings from the '30s would never have started.

Lewis is the subtle prophet of alienation in the urban dark, whose lyrical realism hides an acute sense of the night. But "The Color of Night" is not restricted to Lewis and his pre-World War II predecessors, the scratchy, romanticized etchings of Edward Hopper and John Sloan. The show takes us through today, with prints that mine the halogen-lit contemporary city for its own idiosyncratic sense of the dark.

There is Sarah Brayer's sugarlift etching of the Brooklyn Bridge ("City Pearls," 1986) at night, a marvelously atmospheric print that is almost like a painting. Daniel Hauben's view of the El at 125th Street ("Evening Rain," 1998), like a strobe-lit snake in a canyon of tall buildings perforated by lit windows (and a lone "Liquors" sign), is a wonder of colored reflections, even capturing the glitter of puddles on concrete.

April Gornick's "Moon & Three Rocks" (1993) is a beach scene that looks like the 19th-century visionary painter Albert Pinkham Ryder on OxyContin, with its fulvid sky making the waves glow in almost daylit brightness. There is a Vija Celmins five-color lithograph of galaxies, one of her brilliant essays in hyper-realism that cannot be really judged by the amateur (who without a Hubble knows what a butter-pat square of the night sky looks like, really?). New York artist Helen Gerardia's stencil-print "Moonlight," printed in two shades of blue, is the only work that approaches hard-edged abstraction, but it, too, is curiously evocative of changeable night.

William Blake once said that brilliance is not a product of certain colors but of "where you put the lights and darks," and the same could be said of depicting the night. Naturally, the metaphors are endless -- the dark is everywhere, but only rare brilliance makes it apparent.
Many prints are basically black in appearance, but only a few depict the night. Of those that do, their true subject, always, is the romance that night brings.

Or should bring, anyhow.

ART - The Color of Night
Where: Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, 71 Hamilton St., New Brunswick
When: Through July 31. 10 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays; noon-5 p.m. Saturdays-Sundays
How much: Adults $3. Call (732) 932-7237 or visit www.zimmerlimuseum.rutgers.edu