Van Gogh’s still lifes are never still. Heightened color and visceral drawing wrestle, interweave, and beautifully assault us. We ride the Dutchman’s writhing brushstrokes, which heave us as if on roiling seas, shower us like fireworks. Van Gogh knew the punch his pictures packed. “You will receive a big still life of potatoes,” he wrote to his brother, Theo, in 1885, going on to explain how he tried to get palpable mass, body, “to express the material in such a way that they become heavy, solid lumps—which would hurt you if they were thrown at you, for instance.” READ ON

The gray tones in Julie Mehretu’s paintings pack more of a punch than most artists’ entire palettes. They’re never idle or neutral; often they crackle with heat. Even when relegated to the background they seem like the raw material from which color is made. When Mehretu called a series of paintings “Grey Area,” the title didn’t suggest ambiguity so much as coiled potential. READ ON

If you want to get hifalutin about it, his full handle, complete with title, is Sir Michael Edward Lindsay-Hogg, fifth Baronet—an impressive mouthful. Known to us more modestly as Michael Lindsay-Hogg, he made his imprint as a film-and-stage director who placed himself at the service of the material, however volatile and unruly, and let the action breathe within the frame. READ ON