Van Gogh letters at Morgan Library

A glimpse inside Van Gogh's mind

ROBERT ZALLER

The solitude of genius is nowhere represented more poignantly than in the case of Vincent Van Gogh. Genius is seeing things differently than they’ve been seen before, and inspiring others to share your vision. A French countryside looks more like a Corot than a Van Gogh, but we see France now as Vincent taught us to.

This is by no means to discount Corot, a great painter whom I admire endlessly but simply not a revolutionary one. What Corot saw was what everyone had agreed to see in a landscape, with a wonderfully realized palette and delightful touches of discovery. What Vincent saw was something no one had ever seen before, and which seemed to most people primitive, repellent, and bizarre. It may have seemed that way to him, too. But he kept seeing it, and felt compelled to record it.

At a distance of more than a century, we can understand that Van Gogh intuited what the late 19th Century was in the process of discovering, namely the tumultuous dynamic and terrifying violence of natural process, the scandal of the world in its most naked state. Life was part of this process, but only part; mountains heaved, and waving wheat fields responded, with awesome attraction, to the motion of star-swirls. Einstein was to figure this out a few years later in the classical reduction of mathematical equations, but Vincent saw and felt it all, with only a brush and a palette to reveal it.

A genius for art, and also loneliness

As I say, genius is lonely work; but Van Gogh had a genius for being lonely as well. This may seem paradoxical; what I mean is that loneliness was not only a condition of his work but part of his artistic experience. This was painful, and made him seek the company he could not long endure. One of those he reached out to was a precocious 19-year-old painter named Emile Bernard, with whom he corresponded for more than two years, and whose work he paid the supreme compliment of copying. These letters are spread out before us in the Morgan Library’s exhibit, “Painted with Words,” and surrounded by the work of both men.

The relative modesty of this show, with 20 of Van Gogh’s own paintings and drawings from the period of the correspondence and another dozen sketches embedded in the letters themselves, is part of its charm. The drawings are keyed as far as possible to paintings for which they were preliminary sketches (or, in some cases, répétitions of the paintings themselves), thus giving us not only a sense of the process of his work but of his sense of that work as process itself, an ever-shifting perspective in which the inherent dynamism of the world interacts with the shifting moods and perceptions of the artist.

Talent translated into genius

Vincent’s copy, or rather transmutation, of Bernard’s own Breton Women in a Meadow is instructive, too, as a translation of talent into genius. Bernard’s original, on display with several of his other paintings and sketches, is monumental in a Gauguinesque manner. Van Gogh breaks up the composition, deranges the palette, crops the corners, and produces an altogether busier, more ragged and far more vital work. It’s a gesture that prefigures his subsequent rupture with Bernard, which ends the correspondence as abruptly as it began.

To his credit, the younger man championed Vincent after the latter’s death, and played a considerable role establishing his reputation. That did Bernard himself no harm. Being the cupbearer to a god is one way to get into heaven oneself.

Risky (but economical) business

The Morgan’s other current show, “Drawing Connections,” builds on the recent vogue for allowing contemporary artists to situate their own work among the old masters. It can be risky business, but it’s one way to save on curators’ bills. In this case, the Morgan asked the Americans Ellsworth Kelly and Dorothea Rockbourne, the German Georg Baselitz and the Italian Giuseppe Penone to choose work from the Morgan’s own rich drawing collections to be interspersed with their own. Unlike the magical juxtapositions between Quattrocento and 20th-Century art in last summer’s “Sublime Convergences” at the Feigen Gallery, there’s no particular resonance here; Rubens’s Sleeping Lion doesn’t tell us much about Kelly’s spare, elegant forms, nor does Parmigianino about Baselitz’s mock-heroic figures.

Still, almost any excuse to trot out some of the Morgan’s infrequently displayed treasures seems worthwhile: Durer’s portrait of his younger brother; a fierce self-portrait of Matisse at 76; Parmigianino’s surprisingly classical Man Standing Beside a Plinth. Kelly and Rockbourne, in particular, hold their own in august company. Side by side, they’d have made a good show of their own. As it is, the parts of this one far exceed the negligible intellectual results of the whole.



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