Van Gogh and the Art of the Future
Life & the Arts Column by Eric D. Lehman
At the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, I stare in wonder at Sprig of Flowering Almond in a Glass, so delicate in both form and color. There is something so sad about it, so fragile and broken. White flowers and knobbly branches are set in a dirty glass of water on a yellow-green table. A red line crosses the painting behind the sprig and the glass, in the same red shade that Vincent signs his name in the upper left corner. I decided that I prefer it to the popular design of the almond blossoms with its sky-blue background, so easily reproduced on the mugs and scarves for sale in the lobby.
My wife Amy and I are not in Holland for the marijuana bars; we are addicted to art. We plan to see over a dozen art museums in the next week, but our first stop is this temple to Vincent Van Gogh. And it is a temple, make no mistake, filled with pilgrims from all over the world here to worship the life and work of this strange and troubled Dutch painter. This is not so strange. There is something cold and true that an artist has that the critics and the haters can never touch. In past centuries they would have called it a connection to the divine. It is clean and holy beyond the reach of politics, ideologies, and personalities, beyond the dirt of gossip and malice, way out there in the purity of space.
The sheer number of paintings Van Gogh completed in just a decade of work before his death is outrageous. Excellent, complex, original effort, not drudgery. Amy notes the strong black lines that outline his Giant Peacock Moth, marveling at the greens and blues, loving the animals and still lifes. I focus on a landscape, on a red door in a white cottage, framed by green tufts of plants, orange-brown dunes, and blue, blue sky. In every piece you can see his struggle and feel his process, but at the same time each holds together. You can see every movement and stroke of the brush, and yet they make sense, daubs of paint spreading out to create little pieces of the whole.
Something like Undergrowth with Two Figures looks competent and perfect, and yet you can see how quickly they were conceived and painted. The perfection comes from color choice and composition, then thick quick paint, and voila! An effect to last 1000 years. One painting is just a pair of shoes, his shoes, and yet they somehow capture the Ur-essence of shoes. “Those shoes got character, man,” I tell Amy. The museum even allows us to zoom in, showing us that at a microscopic level the paintings look like colorful viscera.
One room includes twelve self-portraits, a third of the total, representing an unbelievable range of appearance and style, with ice-blue eyes and an ugly, changing face. “I think he saw them as a means to explore color and style,” says Amy. “It’s almost a mistake to look at them for their subject matter only, as self-portraits. He’s painting a subject, but he is different psychologically every time. That creates a weird conjunction.” We explore the psychology of self-portraits, the historical moment or mood. We place things in context, naturally, as soon as we learn more about them. But is that biographical context necessary? Can’t we just enjoy the art for itself?
I remain ambivalent, but the answer that this temple of art gives is a resounding “no.” The top floor of the exhibition includes Van Gogh’s personal collection of prints, the ones he hung on his walls at Arles, the ones that changed his point of view. These sorts of personal objects often solidify an argument about influence for the art critics. For the rest of us, they connect with the personality of the man himself; we can see across the centuries to his life as well as his art. These little objects connect us to the artist’s lived reality: a paint box, a modeled statue, a glove, a shoe. A vase in which flowers were placed.
But the most spectacular inclusion here is on a mezzanine floor, which they have dedicated entirely to his letters. Many are framed on the walls, their scrawl making a sort of visual art itself, while we listen to a translation on headsets. Other artifacts like his writing desk make these words from another century even more real. “My word, these anxieties!” he writes. “It seems that we cannot live in modern life without them.” His antidote? “Strong friendships.” Another line jumps out. “I believe in the new art,” he tell us. “The artist of the future.”
Surely it is not a strange but natural thing to have an entire floor of an art museum dedicated to the painter’s second great art, the literary art of writing letters. But then again, his collected letters are one of the great works of world nonfiction, along with Anne Frank’s Diary, both out of this little country of canals and bicycles. I read Van Gogh’s Letters first in college, a beat-up copy that I eventually sent to a friend with whom –naturally– I exchange letters.
Art begets more art. I finished Irving Stone’s biographical novel Lust for Life for maybe the 5th time a few days ago, and Amy is well into it now. It is only one vision of the man, though, and even I have written my own, in a short story called “The Boy Who Knew Van Gogh.” Another appears in my novella Shadows of Paris. Amy has written a dozen poems about him, as well. Hundreds of thousands of others have done the same, each creating their own version of the painter, a clone with subtle differences.
Clones of his actual art are repeated over and over on the internet and a million art store prints. Eighteen years ago, I visited this museum and bought one of those prints, Wheatfield with Crows, and have had it framed in my bedroom wall ever since. Now, standing in front of the original, I see it is brighter, clearer, better in 4000 ways. A print is truly only a shadow of a shadow. And yet, can we not apprehend in those dim shadows the majesty of the original? Can we not feel the echo of his holy words?
Perhaps. Today, though, as I walk through the museum, I feel differently. After all, I have spent money and time to fly across the ocean. My back aches, my feet hurt, my stomach grumbles. It can be hard work to look at art so long. While prints on the internet or my bedroom wall can substitute for the real thing when necessary, a true lover of art cannot be satisfied with that. We have to travel and suffer and squint at the real objects to see them truly. We have to be pilgrims sometimes to see things whole. To know what sacred really means.
Standing there in the Van Gogh Museum, I realized how personal the sacred can be, and also how universal. The sacred is deeper than emotion. It can be produced at a mind-blowing concert, in the last line of a great book, or in the presence of a work of sculpture that suddenly brings you to your knees. Whether or not you believe in God, you have felt it, atheist or theist, cynic or romantic. It is deep within us, and also everythere at once. It is an act, a creation, and a connection. Van Gogh saw it, clearly, in what he called the art of the future. He believed, and here, for a moment at least, in this museum dedicated to his life and work, so do I.
Eric D. Lehman teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Bridgeport and his work has been published in dozens of journals and magazines, from Berfrois to Gastronomica. He is the author of fifteen books of fiction, history, and travel, including Shadows of Paris, Homegrown Terror, Afoot in Connecticut, The Foundation of Summer, and Becoming Tom Thumb.