Word: vans
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...thought Vincent the Dutchman had been a trifle oversold, from Kirk Douglas gritting his mandibles in the loony bin at Saint-Rémy to Greek zillionaires screwing his cypresses to the stateroom bulkheads of their yachts, you would be wrong. The process never ends. Its latest form is "Van Gogh in Aries," at New York City's Metropolitan Museum. Viewed as a social phenomenon rather than as a group of paintings and drawings, this show epitomizes the Met's leanings to cultural Reaganism: private opulence, public squalor. Weeks of private viewings have led up to its actual...
There is little point, 94 years after his death, in trying to imagine what Van Gogh would have made of all this. Neither the modern mass audience for art, nor the elevation of the artist as a secular saint, nor the undercurrent of faith in the expiratory powers of self-sacrificial genius really existed in 1890. The insoluble paradox of museumgoing, which is that famous art gets blotted out by the size of its public, had not become an issue, and it was not thought "elitist" to express regrets about it. Yet one feels it matters more with Van Gogh...
...Aries in 1888 was a torpid provincial town, as filthy and exotic-at least to a Parisian eye as North Africa. Van Gogh's first reactions to it describe a foreign country. "The Zouaves, the brothels, the adorable little Arlésiennes going to their first Communion, the priest in his surplice, who looks like a dangerous rhinoceros, the people drinking absinthe, all seem to me creatures from another world." In fact, his stay there began the general pattern of migration southward that would be as obligatory for early modern French artists-Signac to Saint-Tropez, Matisse to Nice...
...dull, dark yellow color like a heap of threshed corn. And this combined with the blue-from the deepest royal blue of the water to the blue of the forget-me-nots, cobalt . .." Some artists' letters are unrevealing about their work; others mythologize it. Van Gogh's correspondence was unique: no painter has ever taken his readers through the processes of his art so thoroughly, so modestly, or with such descriptive power...
...Arlesian landscape, its patchwork of fields and tree-lined roads, were already embedded in his Dutch background-"it reminds one of Holland: everything is flat, only one thinks rather of the Holland of Ruisdael or Hobbema than of Holland as it is"-but the color was like nothing in Van Gogh's previous life. Seeing his desire for "radical" color confirmed in the actual landscape gave him confidence. It affected even those paintings in which no landscape occurs, like the self-portrait of Vincent with a shaved head, gazing not at but past the viewer with an intensity (conferred...