TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/84/84gog46

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                                                                                October 22, 1984

ART

The Visionary, Not the Madman


The Metropolitan displays Van Gogh's rhapsodic energy


If you once thought Vincent the Dutchman had been a trifle
oversold, from Kirk Douglas gritting his mandibles in the loony
bin at Saint- Remy to Greek zillionaires screwing his cypresses
to the stateroom bulkheads of their yachts, you would be wrong.
The process never ends. Its latest form is "Van Gogh in
Arles," at New York City's Metropolitan Museum. Viewed as a
social phenomenon rather than as a group of paintings and
drawings, this show epitomizes the Met's leanings to cultural
Reaganism:  private opulence, public squalor. Weeks of private
viewings have led up to its actual public opening, this week.
Rarely has the idea of artistic heroism been so conspicuously
tied to the ascent of the social mountain. But now all this
will change. The general public, one may predict, will see
very little. Its members will struggle for a peek through a
milling scrum of backs; will be swept at full contemplation
speed (about 30 seconds per image) through the galleries; will
find their hope to experience Van Gogh's art in its true quality
thwarted. Distanced from the work by crowds and railings, they
may listen on their Acoustiguides to the plummy vowels of the
Met's director, Philippe de Montebello, discoursing like an
undertaker on the merits of the deceased. Then they will be
decanted into the bazaar of postcards, datebooks, scarves --
everything but limited-edition bronze ashtrays in the shape of
the Holy Ear -- that the Met provides as a coda. Finally, laden
with souvenirs like visitors departing from Lourdes, they will
go home. Vincent, we hardly knew ye.

There is little point, 94 years after his death, in trying to
imagine what Van Gogh would have made of all this. Neither the
modern mass audience for art, nor the elevation of the artist
as a secular saint, nor the undercurrent of faith in the
expiratory powers of self- sacrificial genius really existed in
1890. The insoluble paradox of museumgoing, which is that
famous art gets blotted out by the size of its public, had not
become an issue, and it was not thought "elitist" to express
regrets about it. Yet one feels it matters more with Van Gogh
than with flabby events like last year's Vatican show. For if
there was ever an artist whose oeuvre wants to be seen
carefully, whose images beg for the solitary and unharried eye
to receive their energy, pathos and depth of conviction, that
man was Vincent Van Gogh -- much of whose best work was done at
Arles in the 15 months between February 1888 and May 1889. This
rhapsodic outpouring of creative energy produced some 200
paintings, more than 100 drawings and watercolors and 200
letters, written in Dutch, French and English. Of this mass of
work, 68 drawings, 76 paintings and a few specimen letters are
included in the present show, which has been intelligently
organized by Art Historian Ronald Pickvance around the proper
armature -- the strictly chronological unfolding of the
painter's year.

Arles in 1888 was a torpid provincial town, as filthy and exotic
-- at least to a Parisian eye -- as North Africa. Van Gogh's
first reactions to it describe a foreign country. "The Zouaves,
the brothels, the adorable little Arlesiennes going to their
first Communion, the priest in his surplice, who looks like a
dangerous rhinoceros, the people drinking absinthe, all seem to
me creatures from another world."  In fact, his stay there began
the general pattern of migration southward that would be as
obligatory for early modern French artists -- Signac to
Saint-Tropez, Matisse to Nice, Derain to Collioure -- as a stint
among the marbles of Rome had been to their 18th century
forebears. Provence presented itself as a museum of the
prototypes of strong sensation:  blazing light, red earth, blue
sea, mauve twilight, the flake of gold buried in the black
depths of the cypress; archaic tastes of wine and olive, ancient
smells of dust, goat dung and thyme, immemorial sounds of cicada
and rustic flute -- "O for a beaker full of the warm South!" In
such places, color might take on a primary, clarified role.
Far from the veils and nuances of Paris fog and Dutch rain, it
would resolve itself into tonic declaration -- nouns that stood
for well- being. Such, at least, was Van Gogh's hope.

Vincent was ill when he arrived in Arles, jittery from booze,
racked with smoker's cough. He had expected, curiously enough,
that the placed would look like one of the Japanese prints by
Hokusai or Utamaro that had been circulating among avant-garde
painters in Paris. In a way it did:  the ground was covered
with snow, like the top of Fuji. But soon it (and he) melted,
and in his letters no less than in his paintings one sees the
colors that sign his Arlesian period, the yellow, ultramarine
and mauve. In the late spring, "the landscape gets tones of
gold of various tints, green-gold, yellow- gold, pink-gold, and
in the same way bronze, copper, in short starting from citron
yellow all the way to a dull, dark yellow color like a heap of
threshed corn. And this combined with the blue -- from the
deepest royal blue of the water to the blue of the forget-
me-nots, cobalt ..."  Some artists' letters are unrevealing
about their work; others mythologize it. Van Gogh's
correspondence was unique:  no painter has ever taken his
readers through the processes of his art so thoroughly, so
modestly, or with such descriptive power.

The forms of the Arlesian landscape, its patchwork of fields
and tree-lined roads, were already embedded in his Dutch
background -- "it reminds one of Holland:  everything is flat,
only one thinks rather of the Holland of Ruisdael or Hobbema
than of Holland as it is" -- but the color was like nothing in
Van Gogh's previous life. Seeing his desire for "radical" color
confirmed in the actual landscape gave him confidence. It
affected even those paintings in which no landscape occurs, like
the self-portrait of Vincent with a shaved head, gazing not at
but past the viewer with an intensity (conferred by the
unearthly pale malachite background) that verges on the
radioactive.

This, not the madman of legend, was the real and visionary Van
Gogh. The notion that his paintings were "mad" is the most
idiotic of all impediments to understanding them. It was Van
Gogh's madness that prevented him from working; the paintings
themselves are ineffably sane, if "sanity" is to be defined in
terms of exact judgment of ends and means and the power of
visual analysis. All the signs of extreme feeling in Van Gogh
were tempered by his longing for concision and grace. Those who
imagine that he just sat down in cornfields and let the
landscape write itself through him are refuted by the actual
sequence of his drawings. Some of his most vivid and
impassioned- looking sketches -- the coiling, toppling surf, the
silent explosion of wheat stooks, the sun grinding in the
speckled sky above the road to Tarascon -- are in fact copies
he made after his own paintings and sent to his fellow painters
Emile Bernard and John Russell to show them what he had been up
to. As a draughtsman, Van Gogh was obsessively interested in
stylistic coherence. Just as one can see the very movements of
his brush imitating the microform of nature -- the crawling
striations of a gnarled olive trunk, the "Chinese" contortions
of weathered limestone -- so the drawings break down the pattern
of the landscape and re-establish it in terms of a varied, but
still codified system of marks:  dot, dash, stroke, slash. In
his best drawings sur le motif, most of which belong to his
second visit to Montmajour in July 1888, one sees how this open
marking evokes light, heat, air and distance with an immediacy
that "tonal" drawing could not. Space lies in the merest
alteration of touch; light shines from the paper between the
jabs and scratches.

And so Van Gogh's Arlesian work offers one of the most moving
narratives of development in Western art:  a painter -- and,
needless to repeat, a very great one -- inventing a landscape
as it invents him. The inevitable result is that one cannot
visit Arles without seeing Van Goghs everywhere. The fishing
boats on the dark beach of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer have gone,
and the fishermen's troglodytic cottages are now replaced by
anthill apartment buildings. But to see an Arlesian orchard
foaming into April bloom is to glimpse Van Gogh rendering them
("Absolutely clear ... A frenzy of impastos of the faintest
yellow and lilac on the original white mass"). Even his
symbolism leaves its traces. One cannot see the purple
underlights in ploughed furrows against the sunset without
thinking of the strange, dull mauve luminescence that pervades
the earth in The Sower, helping suggest that this dark creature
fecundating the soil under the citron disk of the declining sun
is some kind of local deity, an agrestic harvest god. One apple
tree will evoke the Japanese roots of Van Gogh's spike line;
another will suggest how Piet Mondrian's apple trees (and with
them, his early sense of grids and twinkling interstices) relate
to Van Gogh; a third, resembling the veined canopy of a Tiffany
lamp, may recall what the decorative arts of 1900 owed to the
cloisonism (decorative "inlaying" of the picture surface with
outlines) of Van Gogh and Gauguin. The Paris of the cubists may
have gone; but like the Umbria of Piero della Francesca, Van
Gogh's Provence manages to endure, both in and out of the frame.

--By Robert Hughes