WEEKEND WITH THE ARTS: VAN GOGH

There's more to life than war, taxes and politics - and a lot of it's more fun, too! That's why every WEEKEND, here at THE ASTUTE BLOGGERS, we post some of the cultural things we're into, things we think you might also find entertaining, enriching, and stimulating. We just might turn you on to something cool. After all, the arts - ALL ARTS, not just fine arts - are a big part of what our liberty is for, and what we're fighting to defend!

THIS WEEK: VAN GOGH: PAINTER/WRITER .. AND FILM DIRECTOR

NYTIMES:

“My God, if only I had known this country at 25, instead of coming here at 35.” That was Vincent van Gogh, freshly arrived in southern France, with its aromatic fields and star-spilling skies, in 1888. He was writing to his artist-friend Émile Bernard, 15 years his junior.

And he kept writing. On the train through Provence from Paris, his eyes glued to the window, he saw countryside “as beautiful as Japan for the limpidity of the atmosphere and the gay color effects.” Settled in the town of Arles, he stood all day in wheat fields painting “in the full heat of the sun, without any shade whatever, and there you are, I revel in it like a cicada.”

After a year in ashen Paris, he was in a chromatic delirium. He couldn’t stop cataloging the colors he was seeing and using. A painting of an orchard has a “white tree, a small green tree, a lilac field, an orange roof, a big blue sky.” His description of his painting of a sower in a field reads like Gertrude Stein:

“The chrome yellow 1 sky almost as bright as the sun itself, which is chrome yellow 1 with a little white, while the rest of the sky is chrome yellow 1 and 2 mixed, very yellow, then. ... There are many repetitions of yellow in the earth, neutral tones, resulting from the mixing of violet with yellow.”

If verbal accounts seemed inadequate, he drew ink sketches of paintings — of the sower in the field, of the orchard — right in the body of a letter, with the names of colors added. And when the descriptive circuits are overloaded, there are detonations. Frustrated at how to convey the reality that even transparent elements — water and air — have complex color ranges, he ends up shouting on paper: “No blue without yellow and orange.”

All these words, ideas, sensations and images are packed into “Painted With Words: Vincent van Gogh’s Letters to Émile Bernard” at the Morgan Library & Museum, a display of manuscripts that is also something more. Although 20 handwritten letters, given to the Morgan by Eugene and Clare Thaw, are at its center, they are surrounded by nearly two dozen paintings and drawings, half of them by van Gogh, including a splendid self-portrait.

I WILL GO SEE THIS SHOW NEXT WEEK.

BTW: VINCENT'S LETTERS TO HIS BROTHER THEO ARE A MUST READ.
(BUY A DT VERSION HERE.)

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