Throughout his lonely, impoverished life, Vincent van Gogh's name appeared to have been written ... Bewitching lineman...
Throughout his lonely, impoverished life, Vincent van Gogh's name appeared to have been written on the wind. Or at least on the cold, dry mistral that blows over southern France, where he escaped for the warmth of inspiration. Today, Van Gogh's name is so ingrained in our hearts and minds — and especially, in our idea of the questing artist — that he would seem to defy further exploration. Leave it to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, then, to draw on a less-considered aspect of his art, one that demonstrates that the pen is not only mightier than the sword but sometimes, the paintbrush as well.
"Vincent van Gogh: The Drawings" (Tuesday tthrough Dec. 31) presents viewers with 113 works in a sedately handsome installation painted olive and blue-gray — colors in the brilliant Van Gogh rainbow that are nonetheless muted enough to allow the drawings to stand out. The 113 drawings from around the world, rarely displayed because of their light-sensitivity, represent about 10 percent of Van Gogh's work in this medium — more than 1,100 drawings — which in turn represent more than half of his oeuvre. So while we tend to associate Van Gogh (1853-90) with color and especially, startling juxapositions of hues — sensuous reds paired with mournful greens, psychedelic blues with radiant yellows — drawing was in a sense the skeleton on which the Van Gogh palette was arrayed.
It is, he once wrote, "the root of everything." To unearth that root, Van Gogh retreated to his parents' home in Etten, the Netherlands, in 1881 after deciding to become an artist primarily on the advice of his younger brother Theo, a Parisian art dealer who would become Van Gogh's patron and soulmate. Having failed as an art dealer and a minister, the family's principal occupations, Van Gogh set about the painstaking process of transforming himself into an artist through drawing and the study of artists' books on technique, anatomy and perspective. In seeking the root of art in drawing it was as if Van Gogh were looking to uncover the essence of himself.
"The problem is to find those principal lines so that the essence is expressed with a few slashes or scratches," he wrote to Theo in April of 1882.
In "A Marsh" (1881), a moody pen and ink and graphite work on paper that greets you in the first gallery, "a few slashes or scratches" become spindly, feathery trees under a cross-stitched sky. The ingenuity of the Met exhibit is to connect the short, quick strokes Van Gogh used in landscapes like "A Marsh" — and that would serve him so well in his Post-impressionist style — with the staccato rhythms of his letter-writing. Van Gogh was comfortable making images with a pen — he fashioned some of his own out of hollow reeds — because he was perfectly at home setting down words with one.
Like Mozart in the century before him, Van Gogh was a vibrant, inveterate letter-writer (almost 900 missives) and a facile linguist, fluent in English and French as well as his native Dutch. And he wrote in these languages — to Theo; to their sister, Wil; to artist-friends Émile Bernard and John Russell — blending grace of expression with profundity of thought.
Here is Van Gogh describing his approach to capturing nature in an October 1881 letter to Theo: "If one draws a pollard willow as if it were a living being, then the surroundings follow almost by themselves." The quote accompanies "Pollard Birches," an 1884 pen-and ink and graphite work on wove paper, heightened with opaque watercolor, in which the bristly branches of gnarled trees reach straight up for the sky, like bony fingers extending beyond the grave.
The Met makes liberal use of similar quotes revealing Van Gogh's artistic philosophy as well as blowups of letters containing sketches. Unlike other artists, who used drawing mainly as an educational or preparatory tool, the idiosyncratic Van Gogh embellished letters with small sketches of his paintings and made full-scale drawings of finished canvases to keep Theo and friends apprised of his progress and whet their appetites for his work.
These full-scale drawings, called "répétitions," were never exact copies of the paintings, or one another, but instead variations that enabled Van Gogh to explore a theme. This process is marvelously illustrated in the painting and répétitions titled "Boats at Sea, Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer" (1888).
The painting is one of the most recognizable in an iconic oeuvre, an exhilarating study of red and green boats with creamy sails, tossed on waves of teal and periwinkle. The work was a souvenir of Van Gogh's first trip to the Mediterranean Sea.
"At last I have seen the Mediterranean," he wrote to Émile Bernard on June 7, 1888. "I spent a week at Saintes-Maries....On the perfectly flat, sandy beach little greeen, red, blue boats, so pretty in shape and color that they made one think of flowers....I myself am still doing nothing but landscapes — enclosed a sketch."
The subsequent "Boats at Sea" drawing for Theo, which has a dotted sky like Russell's, is more relaxed, with looser undulating lines. Characteristically, Van Gogh signed it "Vincent" at the lower right in a fluid style that is not quite script, not quite printing.
That distinctive one-name signature encapsulates the solitariness that is at the heart of the exhibit. A prickly person who struggled with strained personal relationships and bouts of mental illness and epilepsy, Van Gogh spent much of his adult life alone. And his drawings, chiefly and most successfully landscapes, reflect that — vast stretches with windmills, cottages or boats standing as separate sentinels. Even when the landscapes are peopled, it's usually a single farmer or walker or a couple of workers engaged in individual activities. Call it the loneliness of the long-distance figures.
This is never more apparent than in the grainy, haunting "Corridor in the Asylum" (1889), in which a man in gray enters a room midway down a long, empty hallway in the hospital at St. Rémy, to which Van Gogh committed himself from May of 1889 to May of 1890. Two months later, he would be dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Van Gogh's drawings, which he continued making in St. Rémy, were his letters to a world from which he may have been increasingly isolated but with which he would never cease struggling to connect.
"It is really done for you — the public...," he wrote to Theo in November of 1882. "Of course a drawing must have artistic value but in my opinion this doesn't prevent the man in the street from finding something in it."
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