Painting softly.(Current and coming)(Like Breath on Glass: Whistler, Inness, and the Art of Paint ing Softly, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts )(Glass of the Alchemists: Lead Crystal-Gold Ruby, 1650-1750, Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York)(Houdon at the Louvre: Master-works of the Enlightenment, High Museum of Art, Atlanta )(Calendar)

James McNeill Whistler once said: "Paint should not be applied thick. It should be like breath on the surface of a pane of glass." His metaphor is the basis of a provocative exhibition that opens this month at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Organized by Marc Simpson, it includes forty exquisite works by Whistler, George Inness, John Henry Twachtman, Edward Steichen, and others whose paintings seem less like hand-made things than thoughts or visions breathed upon the canvas. As Inness's son once wrote of his father's late works: "These are not pictures; they are art. They are done with art, not paint."

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In both American and European Painting, the turn of the twentieth century is generally thought of as an era of virtuosic brushwork, when touch and surface became almost as important as the subject depicted. But for the artists who painted "softly," as Simpson describes it, the aim was to remove oneself as intermediary between the work and the viewer. For Inness, a devoted Swedenborgian, painting was a means to suggest spiritual truths. For Whistler, the motive was to achieve a pictorial truth that was a testament to art, a beauty that transcended time and place. For such contemporaries as William Merritt Chase and John Singer Sargent who worked in the style only briefly, it was a way to pay homage to the Whistlerian sensibility.

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After Inness died in 1894, and Whistler in 1903, some artists of the younger generation continued to paint in a similar manner. Steichen, for example, during the period he was making important American pictorialist photographs, experimented with painting techniques that denied any sense of visible brushwork. Inspired by symbolist poets of the day, he later recalled: "I'd become greatly moved by an idea of an experience. I remember, for example, how [Maurice] Maeterlinck's essay 'Silence' stirred me, how I went out to paint pictures of night and silence in that mood." As the paintings in this exhibition demonstrate, by removing the trace of their own hand, the artists created quiet, evocative paintings that continue to invite contemplation and meditation.

Also opening at the Clark this month is the Stone Hill Center, with new exhibition spaces and a conservation center designed by the Japanese architect Tadao Ando.

Like Breath on Glass: Whistler, Inness, and the Art of Paint ing Softly * Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts * June 22 to October 19 * Stone Hill Center opens June 22 * www.clarkart.edu