fast forward almost 7 years...and voila! the impetus i needed to finally examine the interior of what used to be the best block in the city in my humble opinion....of course, in the 7 years since i left b.a.h., they've added a visitors entrance in front of the main library building...gone are the gates....the topiaries were left to wither and die on the vine and the coblestones, well, who really knows where old foundry stones go to die....the new front on madison avenue might as well be the pyramid at the louvre for how inconsistent it is with the design elements it was supposed to embrace and compliment...now you can't see the lovely details of the main building, or even romantacize the days when the pierponts and the morgans would arrive by horse and carriage to sit in their own private library with it's vast collection of world literature and rare artworks...
but now....oh now....it's ok that they defiled the monument of the past....at least until january 6th, 2008....that's because they've redeemed themselves somewhat by bringing in a very special and very rare glimpse into the life and mind of my man, vincent van gogh....and what a way to redeem themselves indeed! not since the metropolitan museum of art featured the complete works of vincent van gogh from his time in arles (1887 - 1888 when he died), way back in 1987, has there been such a rare, unique and comprehensive glimpse into the life, the art and the man who a hundred years after his death was to become the title holder for the single highest auction sale of a single piece of artwork (sunflowers, 1985, 5.5 million - catalog estimate was approximately 750,000). it was my great good fortune to have been at that exhibit as well, thank you to mlle. moore my high school french teacher! the show was sold out for a year in advance of opening and she had the foresight to purchase 40 tickets with her own money and offer them to the seniors in her 4th year french class ( of which there were 29 students, her single largest ever 4th year french class...she'd had two french classes of 30 for freshman, sophomore and junior years, which speaks volumes about how fun and intensive her classes were, but she was selective and not all 60 students were invited to take 4th year french...thank goodness i made it past the cut or i'd have never gone on to my french degree!) at that exhibit, several of the the paintings seen at the morgan library were present as well, but the scope was different, that was just paintings...it was art at it's zenith...it was also a day that could have landed me in jail and one that has kept me from frequenting the met on a regular basis....every work he did that was in a private collection was brought to the met, there were over 100 paintings in all....there was one that hung in the white house, another that was owned by elizabeth taylor (rain on my window in arles - a silent and lonely cacaphony of lavenders and blues and greens, simple streaks down the canvas which was quite small and very approachable...thus my problem....i couldn't help myself, it called out to me in it's stoic patheticism...so i reached up and touched the oil paint....and the guards roared, and security fanned in and the alarm went off...and i was escorted out of the gallery....thank goodness mlle. moore caught the flux of people and saw my tall self being escorted away post haste....she intervened...and alas, i finished the day but have never been back since...by the way, you really shouldn't touch a van gogh painting if the opportunity arises, no matter how delactable or debased it may seem...he applied his paint in such bold and thick strokes that the underlying oil and pigments are still gooey and wet under the surface luster...i didn't know this...i took a fast and hard lesson in art and good behavior 101 that day....not only could my finger print change the course of the art by releasing a torrent of fresh ooze, but i could have left fingerprints and la liz would not have been so thrilled i am told.
the thing about the current exhibit is that it featured 20 handwritten letters to a young artist by the name of emile bernard who was befriended by van gogh in paris where he had previously lived (in montmarte - near the famed moulin rouge, the basilica of sacre couer - the highest vantage point in paris, at the top of nearly 1100 marble steps, and the garret apartments of those would become some of the most famous and commonly known names in the art world of the french pursuasion....degas, monet, manet, millet, gaughan, latrec, seurat, etc.) emile, merely 19 years old at the time of his first meeting with van gogh, was one of the few friends to stand by him as his health declined and his world collided with madness and shifting perspectives of reality and fantasy....the entire time of their acquaintance, bernard would send finished paintings and sketches on to van gogh, now living in arles in the south of france, where it was believed the warm weather and clean air would help to alleviate his deteriorating mental and physical well being. in return, van gogh wrote long missives, responding to his friend's request for feedback...helping to shape the young artist from an immature and unpolished poet of paints to a demure and elegant professor of pigmentation....all the while, van gogh was sending these sketches and finished paintings back to paris, to his brother theo, who was requested to fence them as he might be able to the top art dealers and galleries of the day, so that bernard might be sent some francs to afford new pigments and an occasional live model instead of having to frequent the bars and bordellos of paris to sketch live action at the basest and most debauched level. keep in mind, van gogh himself at this time was living on merely 5 francs per day in arle, including room, board, meals and art supplies....5 francs today, if they still existed, would be approximately a single euro, which in today's news is about $1.45. back then it was less than 50 cents....that's not much to live on....van gogh himself was in such desperate financial straights that even his weekly pension from theo didn't afford him the luxury of live models....instead, he would paint the wife of the barkeep at his local bar and offer the painting in exchange for his bartab....he would paint street scenes with no life present and landscapes with biblical undertones (the olive trees in arles - all about the crucifixion of Christ, bit in a manner never before seen - no Christ figure...it was merely the fabled wood of the cross in the form of gnarled and twisted olive trees, looking for all the world like pained and arthrictic old people dancing in an unseen zephyr that only the mistrals of southern france could create), so too, he painted the militia seen in and around the town...they were drunken and unwitting models for his lonely and immediate needs...
theo managed to sell some of the artwork of emile bernard and later, this resulted in several successful showings in the salons of paris....unfortunately, theo, unbeknownst to vincent, was unable to sell a single painting of his own brother....who had unwittingly become a pyrriah in the art world. these soulful and honest letters tell of vincent's struggle, to become well, to exist on diminished funds and to finally free himself of his mental degredation so he might rejoin his other artist friends in places such as marseilles where he knew there was a thriving artist colony right along the mediterranean...while he never did get to marseille, he was able to capture the vivid colors and scenery of that area by simply using his imagination and the descriptions provided to him by bernard. he painted a beautiful and oh so simple sea scape of a small sail boat bobbing at anchor in the harbor of marseille and sent it along to bernard. bernard himself could only avow that it was not only fine form, but accurate within an iota of the colors used to depict the vivid sunset over the sea as he had posted it to vincent.
as van gogh saw his finances diminish to the point of indebtedness, he began to reuse his canvases...not just once, but seven, eight, nine, ten and more times....at this juncture of his life, while his grasp on reality spiraled out of his grasp, he was producing paintings at a rate of 20 or 30 a week. he would never have been able to afford the canvas required, nor had the time to frame and stretch canvases, to accomodate such tempestuous application of brush to board. his artwork, hundreds of canvases, and boards and sketches, survive today...and under hundreds of masterpieces and whimsical studies and elegant mistakes are unknown and untold masterpieces that may never be discovered by the human eye. when a van gogh painting is brought to an auction house such as sotheby's or christies', they always xray the painting, it's part of the verification process to authenticate the painting...in the last 25 years, there have been about 15 of his major paintings, multiple versions of sunflowers, and several of his irises, as well as crows over a wheatfield, that have been put up for auction to the public sector...every single one of these paintings has revealed itself to be atleast a secondary tenant to the canvas, covering what only the trained art historian and xray technician can decipher as his lost works....van gogh painted something like 70 self portraits.....the most famous being the self portrait with bandaged head (after slicing off his ear and sending it with a note of endearment to another person in arles, hello, a little stalker-esque....vincent...an ear....what were you thinking?) this is the time and place where the ear was removed...but the self portrait they had on display was instead a beautiful full vincent van gogh in shades of green that only hinted at his inner pain and misery...
he painted his favorite young lady friend...perhaps his muse....she is known only as "la mousme" which is a declension of what is assumed to "the muse" but it could have been an actual name...her name and records of her existence in the time of vincent's letters are all but lost....
i always thought his paintings reflected his actual mental decline....i have seen his earlier works, they are gentle, soft, flowing and almost ebullent with their liquidity of phrase and the soft capture of his subjects....they were the perfect imitation of the impressionism of the time...which was precisely what he was hoping to avoid and escape from ....he wanted to study the light and the form and the effect of time of day on both to see how shape and form could follow function and where the two diverged only to rejoin one another in a differential spatiality....he was so beautifully and classically trained that it is almost impossible to see it in his most famous paintings...that is, until you read his letters and see the sketches and studies on paper that he created and recreated and redefined and refined and later realized with such exacting precision that his uncanny artistic vision and integrity are all but visible as haughty and tempestuous brushstrokes of seemingly callous color. but that would be an injustice if i continued to propagate that belief....indeed....he painted precisely what he wanted and idealized it in exactly the shades and shadows that he thought would break down walls and over turn barriers of art....read his letters, luckily i was able to squint and squat and read silently to myself in french, grasping his exact words as they corresponded to his very visions, immortalized on paper in quick sketches outlining his color choices, the pigment color positions on his pallet and the very often fleeting changes of light and dark proffered by his southern sunlight....
to see his painting of the bridge at langoise (1888) and then to see the corresponding letter with his preliminary sketch of the scene is astounding....he sketched as he painted, every wide and seemingly arbitrary brushstroke to be placed on canvas was carefully placed and scaled in his pen and ink sketchs around the borders of the letters....his painting was as deliberate as his writing....succinct and with much thought behind every word....every stroke a story....every painting a lifetime that he would never truly be a part of. the sketch showed the bridge at noon the day of the letter, but when he went back to create the canvas, there were blackbirds along the pathway near the bridge, they were added as gently and as subtly as they would have been removed if the sketch and the canvas had been created in reverse order. every single color delineated in advance, with measured brush strokes, each genius and begging for life, each one very much a part of vincent van gogh.many people dismiss the art of van gogh as childlike and perhaps thick in terms of his painting style....i personally have always loved his landscapes and flowers...having seen the house at arles in 1985 on my first trip to france, and the self same olive grove where he painted the crucifixion concept, and the very wheatfield that he painted with crows in flight...with blotches of red in the lower corner...they say that the red would be poppies because they grow in abundance in the south of france, but those of us who know vincent's story and have lived his life surreptisciously through his artwork and the recorded evidence of his times, we know better....the red was placed with great intent by van gogh as it was one of his last paintings to be completed before his death in 1888....in fact, it foretold the story of his tragic demise as artist, as man, as friend, since three days after the painting was finished, he walked in the same wheatfield, in the lower corner of his own canvas, and took his life with a bullet in the head....perhaps they are poppies in a wheatfield overshadowed by the black forms of crows, harbingers of life, death and a memorial perhaps...but more likely, the brilliant amber of the wheatfield surrounded van gogh just as life and normalcy did, but the dark cloud of the birds separates him from normalcy and just maybe, his loneliness and unfulfilled existence needed to be marked with proof that he had actually existed.
vincent van gogh, you were an amazing man....thank you for allowing us to know you, even if briefly, through your short life, your extensive contributions to art, and now, the intimate letters of a man who put the well-being and success of another ahead of his own. i can't help but wonder if you'd have been famous in your own lifetime had there only been wellbutrin or paxil to let you know that it's ok to be sad, and alone is only a place you go to in your mind....
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