Washington DC’s Renwick Gallery has hung paintings in the way of old – stacked one atop another, cheek by jowl. “They knew how to blow minds back then. And their trick still works. Paintings palpitate inches apart, in skylit orgies of imagery that revives the now-forgotten aesthetics of the sublime, in particular the sublime of being overwhelmed and transported by sheer mass: by Niagara Falls, by world’s fairs or by molding-encrusted public rooms crammed with oil paintings — everything that the puritans of modernism would oppose.”