Art Review: Matthew Wong, Savant of the Beautiful: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

In 2018 I visited friends in Dallas and spent some time at the Dallas Museum of Art. The DMA’s a hit-or-miss place. The exhibition on view was about Paris circa 1900 and from the museum’s permanent collection. Not exactly inspired, and a hackneyed topic, so I visited its contemporary-art gallery and saw Matthew Wong’s The West, purchased by the museum in 2017 at the Dallas Art Fair. A group of donors — certainly inspired — contributed money to the DMA, restricting it to the purchase of new art at the fair each year. It’s the grandest art fair between the East and West Coasts and a glittering cultural event in a city that has mastered the fine art of glitter. Dallas people know how to support the arts.

And divinely inspired was the curator and director who acquired The West. Wong, a Chinese-Canadian artist I didn’t know well, was born in 1985 and had just acquired a New York dealer at the time of that art fair. The West is a fantasy landscape but with two raw, rough hills made from walnut-brown and black-brown strokes of dense paint. A near faceless and abstract figure in white looks out into a flat, sienna-brown field dabbed with hundreds of black dots. There are two abstract trees, possibly cottonwoods. A narrow road leads from the figure in white through the field. It disappears in the distance as it meets one of the hills, flattening as it recedes, and a vast sky between black and cobalt with countless dots signifying stars.

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Brian T. Allen

Brian T. Allen is National Review’s art critic.

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In 2018 I visited friends in Dallas and spent some time at the Dallas Museum of Art. The DMA’s a hit-or-miss place. The exhibition on view was about Paris circa 1900 and from the museum’s permanent collection. Not exactly inspired, and a hackneyed topic, so I visited its contemporary-art gallery and saw Matthew Wong’s The West, purchased by the museum in 2017 at the Dallas Art Fair. A group of donors — certainly inspired — contributed money to the DMA, restricting it to the purchase of new art at the fair each year. It’s the grandest art fair between the East and West Coasts and a glittering cultural event in a city that has mastered the fine art of glitter. Dallas people know how to support the arts.

And divinely inspired was the curator and director who acquired The West. Wong, a Chinese-Canadian artist I didn’t know well, was born in 1985 and had just acquired a New York dealer at the time of that art fair. The West is a fantasy landscape but with two raw, rough hills made from walnut-brown and black-brown strokes of dense paint. A near faceless and abstract figure in white looks out into a flat, sienna-brown field dabbed with hundreds of black dots. There are two abstract trees, possibly cottonwoods. A narrow road leads from the figure in white through the field. It disappears in the distance as it meets one of the hills, flattening as it recedes, and a vast sky between black and cobalt with countless dots signifying stars.