Going to LACMA’s Van Gogh Show? Better Bring a Periscope

What a pleasure it was to open The Times and see the Van Gogh masterpiece “The Harvest” so beautifully reproduced (“Portrait of the Artist at Work,” by Christopher Knight, Jan. 18). It is one of the few major Van Gogh works that I have never seen in person. That includes, unfortunately, Sunday, when I attended the opening of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s “Van Gogh’s Van Goghs.”

What I saw instead of art was a cattle call of human beings herded together in rooms probably meant to hold 50 or 60. In one room, I counted 300 comatose souls standing in front of one painting or another while the earphones no fashionable “art lover” is ever without these days droned on and on and on. There is no club, jazz joint or hip-hop happening where such overcrowding would be allowed. Safety is safety.

I saw a few minor paintings and a brush stroke or two over the heads of short people here and there but could not get within five feet of “The Harvest.” I’d sure like to see it sometime.

JOANNA LEE, Los Angeles

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Too bad Van Gogh didn’t stick around long enough to learn from the art critics what he was really trying to say in his paintings.

JOSEPH DENKER, Studio City

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Maybe LACMA will take all their “Van Gogh” profits and install their own online ticketing service. Eliminate the Ticketmaster middle man and pass the savings onto the art-loving consumer.

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GEORGE SEPETJIAN, Fresno

The wonderful Van Gogh exhibition is indeed a coup for LACMA. But it is a traveling show whose masterpieces are the property of another museum in a distant city. They will come and go, but the permanent collection remains. In our excitement over this exhibition, we should not overlook the problems LACMA has faced in building its permanent collection over the years.

As we all know, Arthur Gilbert has taken his magnificent collection far, far beyond the reach of most Angelenos, preferring to display it in London. Maybe for their next coup, the directors of LACMA could prevail upon him to re-loan at least a few of the micro-mosaics that over the decades came to be identified with LACMA. That would be a sweet consolation.

JAMES VAN SCOYOC, Los Angeles