Other years, the last hurrah would have been a beach, the fair, maybe Bumbershoot. This year, there was one destination left, the only place I had to go before Labor Day brought the curtain down on summer.
I wasn’t the only one, far from it. In the shadow of the 48-foot steel Hammering Man, my sons and a friend and I joined the line snaking toward the entrance of the Seattle Art Museum.
After a 40-minute wait Sunday, it was as thrilling as I’d hoped, a chance to see what I never thought I would. Face to face with Vincent van Gogh, actually one of his many self-portraits, I was an ocean and a century away from the idle chat in the line outside.
Painted in Paris in 1887, the portrait spoke with the intense stare of wary eyes. To hundreds in Seattle on a summer day, it spoke of being human.
About 230,000 visitors have seen “Van Gogh to Mondrian: Modern Art from the Kroller-Muller Museum” since the exhibit opened in late May, said Erika Lindsay, a Seattle Art Museum spokeswoman.
Lindsay put into words the power I feel in the presence of art treasures. I’m not particularly well-traveled. But after college, with one undergraduate art history course under my belt, I talked my mother into going to England and Ireland.
One of the great surprises of my life was coming out of an elevator at the Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery in London, rounding a corner, and seeing the indescribable light and colors of Impressionist master Claude Monet.
“Part of it is that history the paintings have themselves, they are a piece of history,” Lindsay said. “People can say ‘I’ve seen it,’ just like dignitaries and kings and queens have.”
With reproductions, “you don’t get the sense of an artist’s hand,” she said. “The globs of paint, especially with van Gogh, show the passion he put into his work. People are taken by the drawings. They didn’t know he was such a good draftsman.”
The SAM exhibit is built on the collection of art patron Helene Kroller-Muller, wife of a Dutch shipping magnate. In the early 20th century, she and her husband amassed the largest privately owned collection of van Gogh pieces, and works by Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, Georges Seurat and other masters.
Several luminous examples of Seurat’s pointillist style, which uses tiny dots of color to create a scene, greet visitors to the Seattle exhibit.
Labor Day weekend was my last chance to see these 75 wondrous works from the Kroller-Muller Museum in Otterlo, The Netherlands.
But there’s still time, especially for night owls. The Seattle Art Museum will close the show Sunday after a 39-hour marathon beginning at 9 a.m. Saturday and lasting through the night and the next day.
The museum hosted a similar all-night event for an Impressionists show in 1999. “People definitely come at 3 or 4 in the morning,” Lindsay said. “We had die-hard parents with their kids in pajamas. Van Gogh has that sort of buzz in the community right now.”
There was buzz enough Sunday for a Dutch painter dead 114 years to draw a crowd despite heavy competition, from Husky football to the musical stew of Bumbershoot.
On my 5-year-old’s bedroom wall, sharing space with posters of Spider-Man and The Wiggles, is a new addition, a postcard of van Gogh.
Art appreciation? Hope so. Right now, my little boy calls him “Old Man Go.”
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