Art Review Finding a Museum in Mountains and Van Gogh Part 4
Art Review
Review: 'Van Gogh and Nature,' Exploring the Outside World in Loftier Relief
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Someday, museums will run out of themes for packaging van Gogh exhibitions, and that's fine. He's one of those artists you but want to spend fourth dimension with, no pretext needed, considering he's some kind of instant soul mate, startling, difficult, vulnerable, always willing to make so much of himself available to you.
However, a theme, even a broad one, tin be useful in directing us to aspects of an artist's life and work we might not otherwise zero in on. Such is the case with "Van Gogh and Nature," which opens on Sunday at the Clark Art Institute here and qualifies as one of the summer's choice art attractions. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a special display of four van Goghs and advertises it as a testify. The Clark exhibition has more 40 paintings, some familiar, many non, on loan from American and European museums (including the Met), interspersed with drawings. Information technology's a low-key large deal.
"Nature is very, very beautiful here," van Gogh wrote to his younger blood brother Theo in the summer of 1890, a few weeks before he took his own life. He was referring to the landscape of olive groves and grain fields surrounding the town of Auvers-sur-Oise northwest of Paris, where he had moved, after a hospitalization, to be closer to family unit. He had written almost identical words in other letters, from other places, over the years. Natural beauty was the first thing he noticed wherever he went.
He grew upwards with information technology. His father was a Dutch Reformed minister in southern Holland. The parish was rural: farmland, marshland, wood. The parsonage came with a sizable garden. In a memoir published in 1910, one of van Gogh's sisters remembered him equally a child avidly collecting insect specimens, studying plants, keeping track of birds. As a young adult apprenticed to an art dealer in London, he sent messages home nigh springtime in the city, describing not the people he encountered, or the architecture, but the flowers — "lilacs and hawthorns and laburnums" — he found in parks. To Theo, already destined to become a dealer, he wrote, "Painters understand nature and teach the states to see."
At this point, in the 1870s, van Gogh was not a painter himself. That would come a few turbulent years later, after he'd been fired from his art job and had failed at attempts to be a schoolteacher, then a preacher to the poor. For years, he had been sketching for pleasure. Finally, approaching thirty, he decided to accept information technology seriously, brand it his work. The primeval piece at the Clark is an 1881 ink drawing called "Marsh With Waterlilies: Etten," and information technology's slap-up. Done nigh his family unit habitation, it'due south a light-soaked vista with a pocket-sized bird hovering at its center. But information technology's something else, too: a weave of thousands of filament-fine lines, as energy-charged as an encephalogram.
His showtime oil paintings before long followed. Some were gnarly depictions of the Dutch peasants and miners he had lived with, to their puzzlement, during his fourth dimension as a self-styled evangelical minister. Others were shadowed landscapes inspired by before 19th-century French Barbizon artists like Charles-François Daubigny. (A wonderful ruby chalk Daubigny drawing, owned by the Clark, is in the testify, which has been organized by iii curators: Richard Kendall, Chris Stolwijk and Sjraar van Heugten.)
And there were all the same lifes, many, of flowers, bird nests and sheaves of wheat. From all of this, van Gogh's talent is clear; his sensibility is axiomatic. What he lacked was technical know-how and news of current trends, so in 1886 he went to Paris to get them.
Paradigm
In that location he roomed with Theo. To salve coin, they lived abroad from the center of the city, in Montmartre, a neighborhood that retained the atmosphere of a village, with windmills, cow paths and vegetable patches, but was also plenty urban with an agile night life. Apartment high rises were going upward nearby. The mix of elements meant that, with some visual editing, van Gogh could keep to paint rural scenes while living in the urban center, and he did, though his ideas of how nature could be depicted changed later he was exposed to the radical manner of the solar day, Impressionism.
He took lessons from information technology: He turned up his color, broke downwards and abstracted his forms. This might have been expected to lead him farther away from naturalism, simply it pushed him toward information technology. In an boggling 1887 painting called "Undergrowth," he'due south deeper into nature than ever. The dramatically cropped epitome of a tree body standing amongst foliage suggests a view of the world as seen by some forest fauna peering out from a leafy thicket.
A town-versus-land debate pervaded the popular fiction of the day. (George Eliot and Émile Zola were among his favorite writers.) He liked cities, or thought he did. But they gave him no rest; they wore him out. During two years in Paris, his mental and concrete health deteriorated. In February 1888, he left, heading south to Provence with hopes of finding peace of listen, clement weather, and, through some magical thinking, an art-friendly utopia resembling his cherished fantasy of a nature-intensive Nippon. Arles, where he ended up, initially provided some of this, and that's reflected in the work he did there: balanced compositions of patchwork fields and tree-lined roads.
But the productive tranquillity didn't last. Paul Gauguin joined him, and what had been envisioned as a union of kindred spirits turned tearing. Van Gogh sensed increasing hostility from his Arles neighbors. He was heading for a breakdown. It'south risky to read fine art through psychiatric filters, but some of the Arles paintings experience charged with crisis. "The Sower" is ane, with its single figure marching beyond what looks like a humid lava stream of blue and orangish pigment with a giant sun embedded like a bullet in the sky. Some commentators have interpreted the sun as a symbol of God. I see enemy, not deity.
Van Gogh signed himself into the local mental hospital, and from there went to another, larger ane in most Saint-Rémy. After a long recuperation, he calmed down and regained his powers of concentration. Nature was on his mind. From the Arles, he had written messages with chantlike lists of flowers he'd seen in the infirmary courtyard: forget-me-nots, Christmas roses, anemones, buttercups, daisies. In Saint-Rémy, he nerveless specimens the mode he had as a kid, but this time through art: an ethereal drawing of a dead sparrow, a life-size painting of a large moth, a painting of a patch of dandelions seen at kneeling-down eye level.
But danger is virtually. Awe-inspiring, solidly grounded images of cypress trees come up from this period. Merely so practise fantastic mountain landscapes fix at a tilt, as if they were sliding sideways off the surface of a capsizing planet. Van Gogh made 1 last retreat, to Auvers, where he continued to pigment the globe in high relief and on high boil, and produced at least 1 picture similar no other.
Titled "Rain-Auvers" (1890), it was partly inspired by a Japanese print of figures dashing over a blond-wood bridge in a downpour. In van Gogh's version, the bridge becomes a horizontal, plateau-like wheat field, split down the center by a kind of valley-crevasse from which flame-shaped purple trees lick up, as a black crow floats in midair. Most arrestingly, the entire painting is covered with a internet of descending diagonal lines, lines of rain.
Seen from afar, the lines await incised, as if slashed with a pocketknife. Closer upwardly, they look painted just oddly defacing, as if someone had tried to abolish the image out. If you know that motion picture was finished just days earlier van Gogh died, you might run into in it a gesture of despair. If you have been through the bear witness and paid attention to how, through art, he made the natural world his own, and ours, you might see that that'due south what he's doing, in a new, inventive mode, here. And if you've known this artist equally a longtime friend, as many have, you'll know that he's bold as a questioner, but shy equally an answerer. He doesn't explain himself. He doesn't take to.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/12/arts/design/review-van-gogh-and-nature-exploring-the-outside-world-in-high-relief.html
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