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WEEKLYPRESS.COM · UCREVIEW.COM · FEBRUARY 22 · 2012 Van Gogh At Te PMA continued from page 1


in van Gogh’s life -- the last of his ten years as a painter, and those from which he re- directed the course of mod- ern painting until he died in 1890 at 37, a purported suicide. There is a freshness here, where van Gogh just gets bigger and bigger – and more intimate. In 1886, he moves to Paris from Ant- werp, and prior to that, Hol- land. There, he had grown up in a small village where his father was the unimagi- native pastor and Vincent was one of six children tied by their parents to rules and regulations, and where the sensitive, deeply intelligent and keenly aware young Vincent learned, self-taught, to paint from the example of the Dutch masters and the French Barbizon school. In Paris, the conversation is new, the Impressionists are making their name, there


is a fascination with the aesthetics of the Japanese woodcuts of Hiroshige, first encountered in Antwerp, and van Gogh is directly engaged with other artists in exploration. The world opens for him, and his dark, brooding northern palette disappears. In Paris, he has two intensely productive years, modern- izing his palette and invent- ing his brushwork so that the textures on the surface of a blade of grass, a sheaf of wheat, a sunflower scin- tillate in a kind of energetic maelstrom that somehow makes sense and produces harmony. Moving from room to room of the exhibition, there is a vertiginous quality to van Gogh’s depictions of nature, with entirely new spatial ideas bursting with energy and flow and invention. Enough invention, says cu- rator Rishel, to take us all the way to Jackson Pollack. From 1886 to 1888 in Paris,


he lives with and is support- ed by his devoted younger brother, Theo, who works for a major art dealer, and then, overstimulated, he moves to Arles, in Provence, the south of France, where the light and the retreat from the bustling city into nature calm him. In a sense, nature rather than religion becomes his spiritual leader. And while there is the prevailing myth of van Gogh as tormented genius, his surviving let- ters reveal a thoughtful, well-read, artistically ma- ture and philosophical man whose relationship with nature was not simple emo- tional renewal but part of a complex discourse with 19th


century science and


art, even as religious faith receded in Western Europe. The elimination of recessive space, for example, in van Gogh’s paintings may not have been so much a men- tal health issue as part of his search for truth among art-


ists of his time about vision, perception of space, and perception of color.


The show moves topograph- ically in sections with such titles as “High Horizons,” “Blades of Grass,” and “Tree Trunks and Undergrowth” to designate the kind of ter- rain and the viewpoints, far and near. The initial room contains PMA’s very recog- nizable painting of cut sun- flowers in an orderly vase. These are straightforward, frontal flowers in the grand Dutch style with a French Barbizon school influence. While they have brio and charm, they call upon the requisite earthy browns for nature paintings. But do not stop here. Move to the right wall with its sin- gle, much smaller painting of sunflower pods, no vase. Here, van Gogh zooms into them, right on top of the sunflowers, almost as if he is looking down between his toes to manipulate the color and the form until we have a whole new way of looking at sunflowers. Na- ture vivante, surely, rather than nature morte. From this moment on, the show lives and breathes. A wall of Japanese prints -- some the very ones that decorated his walls in Paris -- shows their influence on van Gogh, especially in the high horizon lines, tilted perspective, emphasis on detail of the blossoms, the diagonals of falling rain, the blade of grass, the tree trunks, the close commu- nion with nature. “I am al- ways obliged to go and gaze at a blade of grass, a pine- tree branch, an ear of wheat to calm myself,” van Gogh once wrote in a letter to his sister, Wilhelmina. In “Tree Trunks and Under- growth,” van Gogh renders the intimacy of the forest interior with its dense foli- age and dappled sunlight. There is a tactile, flicker- ing, rhythmic brushstroke. Tree trunks are immediate and imposing, and like the Hiroshige prints, the trunks cross the canvas and bar


easy entrance to the paint- ings. In a forest setting called Undergrowth with Two Figures, painted during the last few months of his life, van Gogh paints purple into the receding yet command- ing tree trunks, while an un- dergrowth of flowers moves diagonally, bringing the viewer directly into a lushly flowering yellow and white forest floor. Here, unexpectedly, we spot two small, dark human fig- ures who seem overcome by despair and isolation despite their literal togeth- erness and the madly flow- ering yellow plants. Are they walking side by side? Or in opposing directions? Are they coming through the forest? Or are they en- trapped in its vastness? The curators bring the view- er out of this darkened at- mosphere and again into the light – into a sunlight that is warming, a kind of song of the universe that bursts from the canvas. While van Gogh has returned to the still lifes that he did when he first be- gan to paint, the paintings are radical, and not “still” at all. There are tilted fore- grounds, dense overlapping planes of color, truncated objects, severe cropping, and -- according to the cu- rators and easily observed -- unrivalled invention. There are blossoming acacia branches with luscious wet brushwork, quinces, apples, grapes, lemons, pears, pop- pies, pink roses, all celebrat- ing abundance and juici- ness. Even the tablecloth is a swirling vortex of thrilling energy. Sheaves of Wheat depicts the wheat that van Gogh knew so well in all the seasons, whether under snow or alive with green shoots in spring, or here at harvest time. He uses yellow and purple shadows, and the sheaves are as lyrical and as brilliant as the life-giv- ing sunshine of Provence. Even the spaces between the sheaves seem animated yet stately. Van Gogh wrote to his sister Wilhelmina that “the uglier, the older, the


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meaner, the poorer I get, the more I wish to do bril- liant color, well-arranged, resplendent.”


By 1890, van Gogh’s land- scapes, even from the windows of the St. Rémy asylum where he has com- mitted himself, are using extreme cropping, curvilin- ear leaping and turbulent brush strokes, and bold plunging perspectives, as if he had lost any sense of the vertical and the horizontal. The exhibition finishes on the sadness of what we be- lieve is true – that in 1990, in Auvers, van Gogh ends his life, heavy-hearted about his mental illness and feeling himself to be too much of a burden to his loving brother Theo, who is physically ill and dies shortly after Vincent. Yet the exhibition ends in a mo- ment of pure joy. In 1890, Theo’s wife gives birth, and the baby boy is named after his uncle Vincent. Vin- cent, in the asylum, paints “Almond Blossom” as his gift. His gaze turns upward to a limitless aquamarine sky through branches of a flowering almond tree. The painting is exuberant. There is no horizon. Rather, there is airy flight, dance, redemption and new life - - pure homage to blossom- ing. If the sun is shining when you emerge from the van Gogh exhibition, and you look from the majestic museum steps onto the panorama below, you will somehow see the world transformed, grâce à Vin- cent van Gogh. And though the trees along the Parkway are leafless, you will not see Shakespeare’s “bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.” Instead, you will see stately harmonies, and you will imagine the vitality of spring leafing to come. That is the effect of this wondrous exhibition. Van Gogh once wrote to Theo from Arles, “If only you could see the olive trees just now. There is a kind of intensely confidential utter- ance that seems immemori- ally ancient in the whispers of the olive trees. It’s too beautiful for me to dare to paint it…And the oleander is the very voice of love.” Also not to be missed: the sumptuously illustrated exhi- bition catalogue Van Gogh: Up Close by Cornelia Hom- burg (Yale University Press) and Irises: Vincent van Gogh in the Garden by Jen- nifer Helvey (Getty Publica- tions).


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