There are four artists everybody knows: Leonardo, Michelangelo, Picasso and Van Gogh. Even people who know nothing else about art know that Leonardo was a genius, Michelangelo painted a ceiling, Picasso hated women (a gross oversimplification, incidentally) and Van Gogh was so crazy he cut off his own ear. These four artists are more than superstars. They are mythical figures, the saints of our time, and their relics are the objects of pilgrimage. People go to the Louvre for the Mona Lisa, to the Vatican for the Sistine Chapel, to the Reina Sofia to see Guernica, and they come from all over the world to the second floor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see the Van Goghs.
On Sunday mornings, while millions of people sleep late and millions of others go to church, the Van Gogh gallery quickly fills with a steady stream of tourists and New Yorkers. They move around the perimeter of the room like pilgrims passing through the ambulatory of a Gothic church. They gaze reverently, speak in hushed tones and listen to sibilant sermons on their audioguides. Some pose to have their pictures taken beside these objects touched by a saint. "No flash in the galleries, please," is the museum guard’s mantra. By afternoon the paintings are obscured by a solid wall of visitor’s backs. The art is so difficult to see that one guy wanders into the gallery, glances around, walks up to the guard and asks, "Where are your Van Goghs?"
How much of this adulation translates into deep aesthetic appreciation? Are these visitors engaging with the paintings as works of art, or are they here mostly to admire the money these canvases represent?
As the pilgrims make their slow progress around the room, they speak of the incredible market value of the paintings, they talk of the artist’s madness and institutionalization, they discuss severed ears and suicide–everything, it seems, except the canvases in front of their eyes. Even the best painting here, the Cypresses of 1889, holds their attention hardly longer than any of the others. It would appear that for most people a Van Gogh is a Van Gogh is a Van Gogh, all of them as identically valuable as gold bars in a bank vault.
Van Gogh attracts crowds, but he is no crowd-pleaser. He does not give us the easy, pleasant forms of Renoir or the brilliant, sparkling colors of early Monet. Van Gogh is harder, in every sense of the word. His thick impasto, visible brushwork and heavy outlines draw our attention to the artist’s hand and to the tactile paint surfaces of the works. We wonder: Why did he paint this way? What do these marks mean? Until we can read these surfaces (as I propose to do with the Cypresses) and understand the meanings encoded in the brushstrokes and colors, our appreciation of Van Gogh’s achievement will be shallow and fragmentary.
The Cypresses’ current palatial Fifth Avenue residence is light years from its first home, a madhouse in the south of France. The asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole at Saint-Rémy, which Van Gogh voluntarily entered a few months after the ear-cutting incident, was hardly a snake pit; it was a small, private institution dedicated to the humane treatment of its inmates, and it was housed in a former monastery which the anti-clerical wit of the post-revolutionary French government had transformed into a home for the mad. It was, nonetheless, one of the dark places of the world. Van Gogh has left a haunting image of the asylum in a gouache now in the Museum of Modern Art. It is a long perspective down an arched corridor colored in vibrating yellow and green. The shadowed floor is brown and the arches are a bright, sanitary white. In the middle distance, a solitary figure is about to disappear into one of the rooms, an action that suggests the larger meaning of the piece. Like madness, the asylum is a labyrinth in which people can lose themselves, vanish from the world and never be seen again. This Kafkaesque architecture of enclosure–arches within arches, corridors leading on to more corridors–is the trap Vincent must paint his way out of.
After seven weeks in this place, Van Gogh painted the Cypresses. A week earlier, he had completed MOMA’s iconic Starry Night (now the artsy wallpaper of so many college dorm rooms), and the Cypresses is in one sense a reverse image, a photo-negative, of that painting, showing darkness rising into the daylight rather than light flowing and pulsating through the dark. Cypresses is one of the works in which Van Gogh strips painting down to essentials. There are no obvious narrative implications, no figures cribbed from Millet toiling in the fields–just the realities of canvas, pigment, form and energy. As in Starry Night, everything in this painting, especially the eponymous trees, flows and bristles with energy, but here the energy is more nervous, agitated, seeming to threaten the painter’s control. The foremost tree is so energetic that its flamelike top flows off the top of the canvas, as if it’s too powerful even for this vibrant composition to contain. Van Gogh exerts control by deploying the classic landscape divisions of foreground, middle ground (trees) and back ground (mountains and sky), but his technique so flattens the depicted space that the divisions exist more along a vertical than a horizontal plane. Instead of receding inward and drawing us into the field and villages of a depicted landscape, the "space" of this painting travels upward, like the trees themselves, from foreground to sky. This spatial flattening is not so much a herald of Modernist revolution as a calculated strategy for focusing our gaze on the surface of the canvas. Here, in the lines and dots and swirls of paint, is where the painting’s meaning lies.
Studying this surface as Van Gogh insists we must, from the bottom up, we find in the foreground the painting’s most chaotic and nearly abstract passages. Here is the work’s thickest impasto, brushed on with heavy, short, multidirectional strokes and punctuated with clotted white highlights, and it stubbornly refuses to resolve into recognizable forms. It may represent bushes and tall grass, but it still remains a furious chaos of paint. At right, curving strokes of green and yellow (the colors, one recalls, of the madhouse corridor) rise up toward the sky only to turn away, diving back into the foreground’s incoherence. A few months earlier, describing a painting by Gauguin showing Vincent at his easel, Van Gogh allegedly remarked, "It is certainly I, but it’s I gone mad."1 At the bottom of Cypresses we see what may be the only example of genuinely "mad" painting in Van Gogh’s oeuvre. The paint is violently disordered, unreasoned and perhaps inescapable.
This thick, chaotic brushwork, a kind of painterly overkill, contrasts sharply with the handling of the background hills and sky. Here all is lightness and soft, sinuous curves. The dominant colors are light blue, white and pink. The impasto is thinner, the individual brushstrokes are longer, and the curvature of the strokes is looser, more open. There is a sense of ease and freedom in this brushwork, whereas in the foreground all is constricted frenzy. The colors of the upper canvas are more harmoniously applied: white and pink almost blend to a single hue at right, while the entire sky is a soft harmony of blue and white. The sky sings a peaceful, pastoral music with no jarring notes like those hard, dissonant spots of black peppered across the foreground.
The big, frame-bursting cypress trees unite these disparate regions of the canvas, synthesizing the palette and brushwork of the foreground with the smoother rhythms of the sky. The impasto on the cypresses is still thick, but creamier than the foreground, more smoothly painted. The brushstrokes remain short and curved, but they are more orderly, more consistently upward, drawing the eye up along the paint surface with the insistent verticality of flames wafted by a gentle breeze. As the cypresses carry the palette of the frenzied foreground into the sky, the foreground colors are both darkened and harmonized: the dissonant black notes are picked up and arranged with yellow and green to become the gorgeous, serpentine blacks of the trees.
But this elevation of his painterly chaos into a dark harmony is only a part of Van Gogh’s achievement. He also brings the dark trees into tune with the sharply contrasting bright tones of the surrounding areas. The contours of the cypresses conform generally to the calmer, more peaceful rhythms of the upper canvas, and at the edges of the trees, dark jutting limbs are painted with the smooth application and gentle curvature of the brushstrokes in the sky. As if to drive the point home, a few of these dark green brushstrokes are unconnected to the trees and seem to float freely upon the sky. Like a Wordsworthian natural force that "rolls through all things," Van Gogh’s rolling, swirling brushwork blows across the upper canvas like a summer wind, setting the clouds, sky and trees in harmonious motion.
Van Gogh’s nature, however, is no Romantic idyll. Far from the pleasant, moralizing landscapes of Rousseauist cliche, it is a world both beautiful and sublime: light, pleasant beauty in the sky; overwhelming sublimity in the dark, powerful trees. Van Gogh is closer to Shelley than Wordsworth; he is equally cognizant of the beauty of a summer day and the unsettling otherness of a craggy mountain or a large cypress agitated by the wind. This painting is about the search for a synthesis of these opposing concepts, an appreciation of the beauty and sublimity in nature. It is about finding beauty in blackness. In a letter to his brother, Van Gogh described the cypresses as "a splash of black in a sunny landscape, but...one of the most interesting black notes, and the most difficult to hit off exactly that I can imagine."2 In the Met Cypresses he not only strikes the note but sets it in tune with the sunlit landscape to create a complex vision of a nature both chaotic and orderly, both beautiful and terrible. It is a nature as soft as clouds, as hard as rock, and as dark as the darkest caverns of the mind.
And so the work brings us back to the life. Van Gogh paints so close to his feelings that paying careful attention to his canvases often spirals us back into biography. In the madhouse, the painter diagnosed his own condition as "melancholy,"3 a catch-all term from pre-modern medicine (but probably no less of a catch-all than today’s ‘depression’) that originally denoted an excess of "black bile" in the patient. It is hardly surprising, then, that he was attracted to the cypresses as an image of living blackness set against the clear light of day. For Van Gogh is trying to paint his way out of madness, to find a way of living with melancholy in the outside sunlit world. Out of the formless jumble of foreground brushstrokes (like the random, chaotic thoughts in a madman’s mind), the artist’s hand, like that of a god, creates form; it transforms the abstract field of pigment into the monumental shape of the trees. But to be true to the artist’s experience, the forms must have an essential darkness about them, a patina of midnight black that they can lift into the sunny sky. They must strike a balance between sun god Apollo and Dionysus of the absinthe-soaked nights; they must bring the things of night into the daylight, creating a dark harmony through which Van Gogh can envision his own future life in the world. The cypresses are not an emblem of the artist’s madness; nor are they a symbol of mourning for anything he has lost. They are a sign of his desire to triumph over the forces that plague him. This canvas enacts a victory over chaos, a battle against formlessness that the form-giving artist unquestionably wins.
NOTES
1. Sweetman, Van Gogh, 288.
2. Qtd. in Druick and Zegers, Van Gogh and Gauguin, 288.
3. Saltzman, Dr. Gachet, 26.