My original exhibition featured Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’ Grande Odalisque and Lucian Freud’s Night Portrait, Face Down. Through the exhibition I hoped to challenge our fear of expressing the true emotions we feel toward art works. It’s better that we call out the ugly as ugly, the beautiful as beautiful. Only then can we see the truth each works tries to tell us. Masking ugliness with beauty can be dangerous because often times ugliness demonstrates truth better than beauty can. By adding Vermeer’s The Milkmaid to the pair, I wanted to further emphasize this point. Vermeer’s penchant for realistic capture of mundane everyday scenes enlightens us to the value of perceiving and expressing life as life is. Though the milkmaid is neither a nymph nor a queen, she captivates our gaze. Though her body is neither exaggerated nor distorted, she demonstrates the tangible reality within which she resides. The idea behind the exhibition isn’t to impose a hierarchy between the different approaches by the artists, namely that realism triumphs aestheticizing or brutalizing brushstrokes. Each of these approaches are just as valid as the other. What is important, however, is to recognize them for what they are. Realize that the Grande Odalisque is a fantastic, Orientalized work. Acknowledge that the Night Portrait is not particularly pleasing to the eye. Only through such unflinching gaze can we fully appreciate the narrative each painting tells us.