The Visionary, Not the Madman

By ROBERT HUGHES

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 Aries," 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 Aries 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 2 intelligently organized by Art Historian Ronald Pickvance around the proper armature-the strictly chronological unfolding of the painter's year.

Aries 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 wellbeing. Such, at least, was Van Gogh's hope.

Vincent was ill when he arrived in Aries, jittery from booze, racked with smoker's cough. He had expected, curiously enough, that the place 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 denned 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 stocks, 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 draughts man, Van Gogh was obsessively interested in stylistic coherence. Just as one can movements of "his brush imitating the microform of nature-the scrawling striations of a gnarled olive trunk, the "Chinese" contortions of A 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 Aries 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 persvades 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