"Van Gogh Up Close' at the Art Museum (3rd review)

As blockbusters go, "Van Gogh Up Close" is a relatively modest affair. Forty-five of the artist's late-period paintings, most on the smallish side, are framed by wall sections of Japanese prints and European photography that shed light on his influences. With few exceptions, including the Art Museum's own wonderful Rain, the Van Goghs are familiar mostly to connoisseurs rather than the general public.

There are no grand vistas, no starry nights and, with few exceptions, only indirect and material signs of the human presence: a pair of shoes; cut flowers in a vase; houses sedately folded in a landscape, and, above all, the cultivated fields and vineyards of southern France. As this show suggests, even that is more than enough.

Our perennial fascination with Van Gogh is based, in fact, partly on his avoidance of us. Van Gogh was an intensely lonely man who couldn't abide society, and who painted isolation and solitude even when he turned his brush to human subject matter. This fact was partly rooted in personal psychology, but also in the nature of his artistic vision.

Van Gogh saw the world itself as alive and almost unbearably bristling with particulars. Humans were among these natural phenomena, but not particularly privileged as such: A flower, for Van Gogh, was as singular as a face. Yet it was almost impossible to venture anywhere in the world without encountering the human imprint.

Fleeing humanity

This paradox was most obvious in the city— a strictly human enclosure where nature was admitted only on sufferance and for practical or ornamental purposes. Even the countryside, however, was thoroughly colonized; one could hardly raise one's eyes without encountering a barn or a plowed field. Mountains alone, and the weathers above them, retained their full dignity and independence.

Van Gogh painted this world, but it partly horrified him. (He couldn't tolerate cities at all.) In Field of Flowers Near Arles (1888), a part of the current exhibition, he stops to paint a row of irises in a field already partly plowed. He records— Vincent records everything— that he was in a frenzy to get the irises on canvas before the scythe could cut them down, for they were clearly in its path.

Perhaps the peasants had rested from their labors at a noon hour? But they would surely return, and the flowers— which had as much right to exist as they did, or Vincent himself, or you and I— would be gone in an instant.

He could do no more than lift them up with his brush and imprint them on the canvas, an act simultaneously of praise and mourning: and here they are, a century and a quarter later, still a stubborn datum of the world's experience.

Contempt for photography

There was only one way, finally, to escape the tyranny of the human, and that was to turn one's eyes down rather than up. This is a lot of what Van Gogh does in the present exhibit.

Almost as a botanist would, he surveys a small stretch of field— a few square feet per canvas— and depicts the wild grasses and flowers he finds, patching in an occasional white butterfly. Even in this circumscribed space, he finds a world of life and motion that fully absorbs his interest and spirit.

There is, no doubt, a precedent for this fascination in the nature photography of the period, and we know that Van Gogh owned some photographs. But we also know that he held photography in low esteem, if not contempt; and his landscape "snapshots," if we wish to consider his small-field studies as such, suggest why: A photograph is a static representation; even if it depicts a living thing, it is devoid of motion and hence of life.

Scientific detail

Of course, a painting is similarly immobile. But Van Gogh's brushstrokes, pulled as much this way and that by the tug of his moods as the play of the winds, have a vividness that unites them with the viewer's own moment of perception. In short, mere marks on canvas though they be, they come alive for us.

They change, moreover, with our own moods, with our distance and angle of vision, with the light they absorb and reflect. In a word, they are alive as even the best photography— its own artistry and virtues aside— can never be.

Although brimming with vitality and feeling, Van Gogh's work is always the product of highly focused observation. The smaller canvases here display this discipline with particular clarity. The very narrowness of the visual field compels a minute attentiveness— passionate in its impulse, perhaps, but almost scientific in its detail.

It's a quality that links Van Gogh with Holbein; its mode is description but its intention is praise, as his letters amply attest.

Tormented, or engaged?

We think of Van Gogh as a tormented soul, and some of his works here— Wheatfield Behind the St. Paul Hospital, for example, with its menacing white cloud— suggest a mind on the verge of engulfment. What we see more often, though, is the lucidity of a deep engagement with the world.

If that's not the best way to be contented, it may well be the best way to live. Who are we to know? Beneath all his visible suffering, van Gogh may have been a very happy man.

That suggestion certainly informs the exhibit's last work, Blossoming Acacia Branches, painted in the year of Van Gogh's death, 1890. It was intended as a birth present for his nephew and namesake, born on January 3. The thin branches with their delicate blooms are spread out against a tender blue sky. Nothing could be more sheerly joyous and hopeful. This was not the testament of a man at the end of his tether but of one who had experienced a freedom vouchsafed to few, and had every prospect of life still before him.♦


To read another review by Andrew Mangravite, click here.
To read another review by Victor L. Schermer, click here.♦
To read a response, click here.