Those clouds are ridiculous. This oil is from 1871-75.
  • Those clouds are ridiculous. This oil is from 1871-75.
A new round of special exhibitions opens today at Seattle Art Museum for your holiday-weekend pleasure. They are about landscape—as if offering you landscapes indoors were going to draw Seattleites away from the (promised) sun. Ha! Being art in the summer is a fool's game. But SAM is trying anyway, and I'll write more about that effort later.

See the ghost stack?
  • See the ghost stack?
Right off the bat, though, you should know that in SAM's big new 19th-century landscape-painting show, Beauty and Bounty, there are three paintings by my favorite 19th-century American painter, Martin Johnson Heade. He's always included in the Hudson River School, but he's not one of them. He's not really a romantic, he's something weirder, with a killer sense of humor, a friend to misfits like Rousseau. (I have written about his gremlin joke painting before!)

Heade's haystacks in this show are the opposite of the super-serious Monet haystacks to come. These haystacks have cowlicks. And when Heade erases one, he leaves its ghost behind rather than giving you a seamless surface of illusion. The man is just a good time.

Cowlick!
  • Cowlick!