Exhibit of the week: The Darker Side of Light: Arts of Privacy, 1850–1900

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Through Jan. 18, 2010

This intimate exhibition of prints, etchings, and small sculptures “very definitely caters to mature audiences,” said Michael O’Sullivan in The Washington Post. Packed into three small rooms at the National Gallery of Art, these 100 or so works feature “male and female nudity, sensuality, violence, and drug use.” Albert Besnard’s dark etchings depict shadowy scenes of rape, opium addiction, and suicide. Two François-Nicolas Chifflart works gruesomely depict an 1865 cholera epidemic in Paris. Eugène Carrière’s Sleep—“an 1890 lithograph of a woman laying her head in weariness upon her folded hands”— simply seems otherworldly. Juxtaposing fantastic visions with dark depictions of the everyday, this collection provides a “wonderfully perverse—yet surprisingly mesmerizing”—peek into the late 19th-century mind.

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One look at these shadowy visions and “you’ll never think of the 19th century the same way again,” said Karen Wilkin in The Wall Street Journal. Most museum­goers today associate that era with the “light-filled scenes” of the impressionists, which could not be more different. This compact but daring exhibit “challenges the dominance of impressionism’s cheerful world of public spectacle” by emphasizing psychological depths and melancholy moods. Some artists’ styles are familiar, such as Edvard Munch’s “predatory women and Odilon Redon’s hallucinatory inventions.” But several of the most compelling works are surprises from lesser known artists. Fernand Khnopff’s conté crayon drawing of a canal lingers “like an imperfectly remembered dream,” while Louis-Ernest Barrias gives one “kinky” sculpture the seemingly innocuous title Nature Unveiling Herself Before Science. “For sheer oddness, it’s hard to beat.” Yet it’s the precocious protosurrealist Max Klinger who is the true “star of the show.”

The prints from Klinger’s “Glove” series turn out to be “some of the most haunting” works in the entire exhibit, said Chris Klimek in The Washington Examiner. “Inspired by a dream he had in 1878 of pursuing a woman’s elbow-length glove,” they tell an absurd but involving story that seems plucked directly from the artist’s subconscious. “When the glove is snatched away by a dragon-like creature—well, better if you just go see it.” Another interesting point this exhibition makes is that even artists we traditionally associate with impressionism, such as Edgar Degas and Mary Cassatt, had their darker sides. Their intimate scenes of private reverie are as “mournful and psychologically intense” as any work here.