Word: sainte
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...great Van Gogh exhibition in 1984 tracked the artist's career from his arrival in Arles to the spring of 1889. Its successor, "Van Gogh in Saint-Remy and Auvers," which opens to the public this week, completes the trajectory. The organizer of both shows, the English art historian Ronald Pickvance, has brought together 70 paintings and 19 drawings from this last phase of Van Gogh's short life. Here we see the stuff of the most powerful legend of suffering and transcendence in modern art, and no superlatives seem apt to encompass its beauty and emotional range...
...thought he got to its "essence": its high tender color and sometimes violently modeled forms, its archaic antiquity and, above all, its light. In Arles the initial shock of the landscape, impacted in citron and chrome yellows, had dominated his palette. But once he was inside the asylum at Saint-Remy, a different and more reflective way of looking at the landscape around him took over. "What I dream of in my best moments," he wrote, "is not so much striking color effects as once more the half-tones...
...work and to seriousness, as a miner who is always in danger makes haste in what he does." Work and seriousness: this, not the vulgar image of the madman issuing orgasmic squirts of yellow and blue at the dictation of his lunacy, is the real Van Gogh of Saint-Remy and Auvers...
Quite often the works that seem most "expressionist," the clearest indexes of a mind approaching the end of its tether, are the most tenderly scrupulous in their treatment of fact. One has only to go to Saint-Remy and stand on the edge of the olive grove outside the asylum, looking south toward the chain of limestone hills called the Alpilles, to realize that Van Gogh changed nothing essential in the view when painting Olive Trees with the Alpilles in the Background in the spring of 1889. The heaving stratification of the limestone, its caverns and holes, and the turbulent...
...handwriting was not mechanically stamped on the landscape, as the style marks of mere obsessives tend to be. On the contrary, it was infinitely responsive to the nuances of fact. Dealing with the "difficult bottle-green hue" of his famous motif, the cypress (of which the real landscape around Saint-Remy is now disappointingly short), he went to great trouble to set forth the realities inside its hairy, obelisk-like silhouette: the mauve cast of shadow on the trunk and branches, the sparks of almost pure chrome within the enfolding darkness of its leaves...