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In the last room of a retrospective, you always think of death. These two exhibitions — Claude Monet and David Park, in adjacent museums in Fort Worth — were no exception, but it was as a duet that the two shows sung me the saddest requiem.
Both artists completed their most ambitious and monumental work near the end of their lives. The shows’ penultimate rooms showcase this ambition, plunging me into oceanic visions: Monet’s lake-sized processions of lilies and Park’s brushstroke-sculpted, nearly life-size bathers.
Then, in the last rooms, the works shrink to painfully modest proportions — as if to bow before the exit, to stoop before the final gate.
Park, diagnosed with terminal cancer in 1959, was forced to abandon oil paints in favor of gouache (a type of opaque watercolor). In this humble medium, he did what he had always done: painted from memory. The musician in a crimson vibration of gladness. The quiet moment with a cup of coffee. The proud mother raising her child towards the distant future. One day and painting at a time, he conjured each of his favorite things in miniature — then let…
