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Great Art Created From Desperate Moments: Van Gogh at Saint-Remy and Auvers
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12170 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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2 / 1987 |
1,818 Words |
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James F. Cooper
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The immediate advantage in viewing the first major retrospective to focus on the last fifteen months of the life of Vincent van Gogh is the realization that most of the artist's masterpieces were created while he was incarcerated in a mental asylum. Despite recurring epileptic attacks that sometimes lasted as long as a month, during his lucid moments van Gogh was able to create a body of work that is almost unparalleled in its expressive power and beauty.
The exhibition, Van Gogh at Saint-Remy and Auvers, held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York through March 22, offers not only a great collection but a testament to an artist's courage not to compromise his artistic excellence, even though he believed the effort would cost him his life.
A less dedicated artist might have backed off after the onset of such an illness. Instead, as evidenced by the exhibit, van Gogh entered the most productive phase of his short career. During the last seventy days of his life he produced no less than seventy paintings, many of which are displayed in this exhibition.
The Dutch artist's finest work has usually been associated with his highly dramatized stay at Arles in the south of France. This perception had been supported in several biographies and a popular Hollywood film about the artist. It was at Arles that van Gogh achieved his stylistic breakthrough with such memorable works as the Sunflowers series, producing more than 200 paintings and 100 finished drawings in the remarkably short period of 444 days. In Arles he suffered isolation and rejection from an indifferent society, a situation that established a romantic aura around the period that has endured until this day.
It was welcome news in the fall of 1984, therefore, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art presented Van Gogh in Arles, the first retrospective devoted exclusively to that period. After viewing this exhibition of some 146 paintings and drawings, however, I left the museum feeling not entirely satisfied. Where, I wondered, were all my favorite paintings? I must confess that in my own mind I had vaguely associated The Starry Night, Road with Cypress and Star, Cypresses, and a dozen other great expressive works with van Gogh's stay in Arles.
A little homework, of course, put it all right. These works had been created only a few miles away from Arles, in Saint-Remy-de-Provence. Similar concerns about all those missing masterpieces must have occurred to the organizers of the 1984 exhibition, because they began research for a second exhibition even before the first one had opened.
The result of their two-year effort is one of those rare and happy occasions when a sequel has proved superior to the original. This conclusion is based not only upon the magnificent quality of work shown but upon insights offered by the exhibition into the artist's accomplishments that are impossible to formulate without viewing all these works from his period at Saint-Remy and Auvers together. Coincidentally, this retrospective, like the first, covers a fifteen-month time period in van Gogh's short life.
The exhibition picks up the story at the point where van Gogh was transferred from the local hospital in Arles to voluntary confinement at a mental asylum in nearby
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