'Van Gogh Up Close' at the Art Museum (1st review)

"Van Gogh Up Close" greets visitors with one of the artist's most iconographic works: the Sunflowers of 1888 (or 1889). Just to the left of it hangs A Pair of Boots, painted in 1887. The gap between the two, at first glance, seems immense.

One is a drab, earnest, thoroughly working-class figure. Even Van Gogh's artist friends couldn't quite out why he would bother to paint a "portrait" of his own boots.

The other is an acceptable piece of genre painting. It wasn't Van Gogh's first floral study, and it wouldn't be the last.

But let's get back to the boots. Why?

Well, for one thing, they were close at hand. For another, Van Gogh was, in many ways, the most plebeian of artists. He lived among the people, thought of himself as a man of the people, and would have understood the importance of a sturdy pair of work boots.

(If you're in any doubt about the importance of good boots, re-read the portion of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles that deals with the theft of her boots by a Christian do-gooder.)

So for Van Gogh, a pair of boots was as worthy a subject as a bouquet of sunflowers or irises.

Though he probably never heard of Zen, "Van Gogh Up Close" reveals the Dutch master as a very Zen artist. He's as interested in grass growing in a field as he is in a starry night sky, the face of an aged peasant or, yes, a pair of old boots. I don't usually quote from museum signage, but this passage in the exhibition seemed too good to pass up: "For Van Gogh, the blade of grass became a metaphor for living simply and observing the surrounding world with thoughtful attention."

Laying on the paint

"Thoughtful attention." The phrase suggests meditation, and I suspect that a certain amount of meditation was transpiring in the artist's mind. For Van Gogh, painting a piece like Grasses and Butterflies was likely akin to translating a poem from one language into another.

The first portion of "Van Gogh Up Close" is given over to floral pieces. Since the images themselves are fairly simple— flowers in pots or vases— this grouping allows us to pay closer attention to the artist's brushwork.

Van Gogh lays paint on so thickly in places that you half expect it to slide off of the canvas. Bowl with Zinnias and Other Flowers is almost three-dimensional in effect.

Flirting with Pointillism

After the gallery given over to his floral studies, we proceed to Van Gogh's landscapes. Outskirts of Paris: Road with a Peasant Shouldering a Spade was a product of Van Gogh's brief flirtation with a variety of Impressionism called Pointillism.

He was drawn to the notion of painting in dots of pure color because doing so promised luminous atmospheric effects, but the laborious technique seems not to have appealed to him. In any case, by the time he arrived in Arles, Pointillism was pretty much forgotten. The painting itself is colorful but flat, lacking the inner energy that animates the artist's best work.

Edge of Wheatfield and Poppies reveals another, longer-lived and more fruitful influence— that of Japanese art. With its delicate, almost pinking brushstrokes and calligraphic feel, it's a most atypical Van Gogh and reveals him as more than a mere master of the palette knife.

God's-eye view

When we at last arrive at Van Gogh's Auvers paintings, we find ourselves in the presence of something truly remarkable: the transformation of matter into energy by the mind of the observer. Rain and Poppy Field are astounding pieces of work in which the images seem about to disintegrate and fly away, only briefly held in place by the artist's mind. These God's eye-view studies of nature— created when low-flying aircraft were only a dream— suggest a mind hovering and watching with thoughtful attention.

As a sort of bonus, the exhibit includes two mini-exhibits. One is a selection of nature photographs taken by French and German contemporaries of Van Gogh. It comes as a bit of a surprise to learn that Van Gogh detested this newly emerging art form. Today photography is the most democratic of all art forms, so it seems like a no-brainer that Van Gogh, that most plebian of great artists, would welcome it.

But then, we must recall that in 1890 photography was still somewhat exotic. Brightly-colored prints were the artworks of the common man, and while Van Gogh may not have collected Epinal prints or the works of Currier & Ives, he and his art-dealer brother Theo managed to amass a collection of 500 Japanese prints. The exhibit pays tribute to their collecting zeal with a mini-display of a dozen or so Japanese prints by members of the Hiroshige family and others.

Philadelphia is the only U.S. port-of-call for "Van Gogh Up Close," and this is an exhibit that is well worth seeking out.♦


To read another review by Victor L. Schermer, click here.
To read another review by Robert Zaller, click here.
To read a response, click here.
To read a response by Victoria Skelly, click here.