NEW HAVEN.- To Know the Dark: American Artists’ Visions of Night, opening at the Yale University Art Gallery on August 22, 2006, explores that evocative period from dusk to dawn in the works of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American artists, including Robert Adams, Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Yvonne Jacquette, among others. Presenting twenty-five works in a range of media, primarily drawn from the Gallery’s permanent collection, the exhibition includes several notable recent acquisitions and Moonlight (ca. 1880), a magnificent painting by visionary artist Ralph Albert Blakelock, on loan from a private collection.

To Know the Dark is organized by Helen A. Cooper, the Holcombe T. Green Curator, and Robin Jaffee Frank, the Alice and Allan Kaplan Senior Associate Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture.

Jock Reynolds, the Henry J. Heinz II Director of the Yale University Art Gallery states, “Artists and writers have been inspired—and occasionally haunted—by the night since the dawn of history. This special exhibition is a wonderful way to reintroduce some of the Gallery’s well-known highlights and less familiar works in a new context. We are also delighted with the opportunity to debut several recent acquisitions which further enrich the collection’s offerings to Gallery visitors and students.”

Organized thematically, the exhibition reveals the variety of ways these American artists have interpreted night both literally and metaphorically. From city streets and moonlit landscapes to hallucinatory visions and nocturnal scenes of soldiers in battle and at rest, the range of subjects and styles stimulate a broad spectrum of responses. Ms. Frank states, “Artists’ visions of night—offering intimations of suspense, mystery, romance, fantasy, fear, despair, and hope—are as much psychological explorations of the mind as they are transcriptions of the external world.”

Among the highlights is Blakelock’s Moonlight, whose delirious green glow and patterned effects of dark foliage silhouetted against water and sky on a moonlit night can be viewed as a haunting portrait of the artist’s own emotional landscape as much as a depiction of a specific place.

Also on view for the first time at the Gallery are several significant recent acquisitions, including Oscar Bluemner’s watercolor The Lamp of Sleep (1927), depicting a snowy landscape illuminated by a full moon, Yvonne Jacquette’s New York Harbor Composite (2003), a woodcut composed of views taken from the thirty-seventh and eighty-first floors of the World Trade Center, and Robert Adams’s eerie photograph of suburban housing from his Denver, Our Homes series.

These new works will be exhibited in the rich context of extraordinary paintings from the Gallery’s collection by Winslow Homer, Albert Bierstadt, and Edward Hopper, as well as seldom exhibited works on paper—such as Childe Hassam’s nearly abstract pastel Evening Star (1891) and Georgia O’Keeffe’s glowing 1916 watercolor of the same name.

Throughout the exhibition, quotations from literature, including the poem by Wendell Berry that provides the title “To Know the Dark,” invite visitors to consider how night has been variously interpreted in images and words.