August 27, 1993
Art critic Roberta Smith profiled Highlights from the Vassar College Art Gallery, a wide-ranging exhibition at the IBM Gallery of Science and Art in New York City, in the The New York Times, writing, “From the start of the exhibition, the highlights, or at least the points of interest, come fast and furious.” The show, she said, “roams across the map of Western art history, touching on ancient Greece, the Renaissance north and south, 16th-century and 17th-century paintings of the Dutch, Flemish, Venetian and French schools.”
“But the star of the show’s American landscape section” Smith said, “is George Inness’s ‘Valley of the Shadow of Death’ of 1867. A large and dark, nearly monochromatic painting in which deep browns and blues barely signify earth and sky and the white-robed figure of Christ is small enough to be missed at first glance, this painting has the plainness abstraction that takes the breath away. The painting lends one of the world’s oldest stories an aura of diffuse, ecumenical mysticism, while being in its own right remarkably ahead of its time.”
The paintings were in New York City for much of the summer, and the exhibit closed on September 11th in time for the paintings’ return to the campus and the opening of the new Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center in November.