Arranging objects in a gallery so that they communicate with each other (and with the visitor caught in their crosstalk) can take many forms. A unified color scheme among the individual vitrines can do it, as can a monochrome or gold color to the objects themselves, or a similarity in shape. The above pairing of paintings in Berlin's Alte Nationalgalerie highlights the similarly rosy tone of both pieces, but in an especially cunning way. The lefthand painting, August Kopisch's Pontine Marshes at Sunset, depicts a red sun sinking over the crimson wetlands like an ember. It smolders in the dome of clouds above it, a furnace between the eerie lunar landscape and the jaundiced sky. Lengthening toward the right, the red oval seems to cast its light upon the next wall—where it falls upon the straggling family painted by Eduard Magnus in his Return of the Palikares. The low sun cloaking this scene in pink lies just off the canvas to the left, allowing us to imagine that it might be the very same sun that sets over the Pontine marshes. Not only the warm color, then, connects the paintings, but the very light source itself; it calls for the two pieces to be looked at together, dynamically.
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