The show starts as any museum exhibition might, with framed images and written explanations to give us an overview. We compare vivid reproductions of a dozen or more of Van Gogh's self-portraits, more than I knew existed. Some that surprised me showed the famously tortured artist in moods I interpreted as quiet confidence and dispassionate interest.
Nearby, a chronology filled in between the sketchy incidents we all know -- the rejections (church, art dealers, women), the brother, the asylum, the ear, the suicide. He was mostly happy, a hard-working guy, producing a painting every 36 hours: who knew? He wrote beautiful letters quoted throughout the exhibit, including this: "I think that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people." In another passage he writes, "in my great discouragement... I will go on with my drawing." One highlight in that opening hall was the physical reproduction of his private room at the asylum in Arles, alongside prints of Van Gogh's four versions of that room.
Another highlight was a short video commentary that offered answers to the question "what makes Van Gogh unique?" One answer is his odd juxtapositions of colors, a clue that Van Gogh favored high-contrast because he had trouble distinguishing shades. More exciting for me was the analysis of Starry Night that drew attention to the silhouetted cypress tree that "pierces" both the darkness of the sleepy town and the wildness of the glorious (or delirious?) heavens, unifying the two worlds.
Entering the next room was like wading into the deep end of an Olympic-sized swimming pool where an animated slide show washed over us in waves. Each "wave" had its own theme, look, and soundscape.
Clusters of families and friends, standing or sitting on the floor or in scattered seats, watched in awe. For a few moments, we seemed to be in a Gothic cathedral at night; for a while we were in a train station, the engine two storeys tall crashing at us as steam billowed up from around our feet; contemplative music played when the influence of Japanese prints was the theme and blossoms fell like snow around us. I was surprised to be overcome with emotion when that view dissolved into an animation of a painted landscape that I recognized, wheat swaying around us, birds chasing each other, horse cart rolling past homes in the distance. Each theme included vocal commentary (too loud to be intelligible to my tender boomer ears) and projections of texts from Van Gogh's letters, each pertaining to an element of Van Gogh's approach to his work.
The cathedral images brought to mind faith, an element missing from the exhibit. When Van Gogh started his career, he was a missionary assigned to coal miners. Living among them, he shared in their poverty. After six months, the church fired him for being "too zealous" and ineffective as a preacher. His own father and uncle, both preachers, rejected him. Van Gogh never returned to the church that rejected him, but he has always seemed to me to express faith through his art. While he avoided overtly religious subjects, he dignified the lives of the poor, gloried in the beauty of creation, and, with roiling skies and glowing stars he suggested life beyond our earth-bound existence. (Teresa Watanabe, LA Times religion writer, concurs. See A Divine View of Vincent Van Gogh., Jan. 23, 1999)
We skipped over the arts-and-crafts room for the Virtual Reality tour of Arles. I was skeptical, but this was the greatest delight of the tour. Seated in a revolving chair, my head ensconced in a VR helmet, I floated from Van Gogh's famous room down the stairs and out into the streets of Arles. These were computer-generated images, but three-dimensional, lifelike, and animated. Look down and you see the cobblestones; look right or left and see fields or trees; look up for clouds; look behind you to see the rise of the hill you're descending. Presumably following a street plan from Arles during the time of Van Gogh's residence, we appreciate the cozy proximity of different sites familiar from his paintings -- the fields, the boarding house, the cypress tree, the pier, the café.
But the magic happened whenever empty frames appeared ahead of us. For a moment, we see a scene as Van Gogh would have done: two field hands napping in the straw, or patrons seated in a sidewalk cafe. Then within the frame Van Gogh's painted version of the image superimposes on the living scene, and we suddenly appreciate the value that his vision and techniques add to the natural view. Composing a slice of the landscape within a two-dimensional frame with shapes and colors starkly defined, Van Gogh intensifies a pleasant but unremarkable view into something we can love.
Pretty isn't beautiful...
Pretty is what changes.
What the eye arranges
is what is beautiful.- Stephen Sondheim, "Beautiful"
from Sunday in the Park with George
My friend Susan and I got the "VIP" treatment at the exhibit, thanks to a retirement gift from my longtime colleague and friend Mary Ann. The gift was especially appropriate because I've displayed Van Gogh's café prominently in my classroom for decades, using it to teach students how to look beyond what we see or read in an artist's work to ask how the artist chose to present it and why they chose to do it that way. I'm grateful for the gift, for friends, and for Van Gogh.
[The subject of Van Gogh's spirituality came up in another exhibit that I visited with Susan, where we saw Van Gogh's depiction of laborers repairing a village street alongside trees that seem to be on fire. See Art Takes Us Out (06/2019)]
[My Stephen Sondheim page curates many blogposts about his work. My most recent reflection on Sunday in the Park with George is about what it says to me now that I've retired from teaching. See Children and Art: Sunday in Retirement with George (05/2021)]
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