Peripatetically, briefly yet fulsomely

In Roberta Smith's review of the "Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night" show at the Museum of Modern Art (NYTimes, 9/19/2008), there is some unfortunate unintended humor of the "I don't think that word means what you think it means" variety. Fulsome does not mean wordy in a nice way. It means to fawn, to express admiration in an excessively suave or ingratiating fashion. I read further and didn't see any references to excessive praise or insincerity, and she seemed to admire the show, so I'm guessing she meant to use a synonym for complete or comprehensive.

I am surprised that this sort of thing made it past the editors at the New York Times. The thing is also full of mixed metaphors and awkwardly worded imagery. She's got Van Gogh pitting his colors against one another in a visual drama, egging on clashes, and I'm still not sure what about the show is peripatetic. (Does she mean that Van Gogh traveled extensively to find stuff to paint? Does she mean you have to walk around a bunch of different of rooms to see it, presumably in all its brief yet fulsome glory? Perhaps the museum needed a lot of room for all that dramatic clashing and egging.)

She's got the night very busy as well, since it's challenging, stirring, expanding, and keeping him close, as well as harboring and bringing relief. I'm getting dizzy. I am not sure what a fully articulated painting surface is, but it doesn't sound like it would hold paint very well. By page two, the imagery is uncomfortably heaving and thrashing too violently for me. Maybe that's a statement about the nature of Van Gogh's paintings, but I'm not sufficiently caffeinated this morning to want to rummage for the Dramamine.

A t-shirt slogan, "Writing about painting is like dancing about architecture," comes to mind here. It's difficult to write coherently about art, as this article illustrates. The slide show of the work that accompanies the article is astonishing.