Hung by subject rather than chronologically, it asks one to join in figuring out who copied whom. Sympathetically arranged and lighted, the works include some amazing rarities. For the first time in my memory, the Frick collection lent something. No one can help but be touched by the beauty and fervor of La Tour's night. Perhaps the show will even create a few connoisseurs.
Postmodernism teaches one to fill in the silences.
One sees better now the individuality of artists and works, the world in which they traveled, the genres they never abandoned, and the breakdown of meaning they made so poignant and perplexing. Still, for a couple of afternoons this year down in Washington, I had no trouble growing nostalgic for modernist tastes. In the gleaming shadows of Vermeer and La Tour, silence literally is golden.