Shock Treatment

The most popular painter in the world today is probably Vincent Van Gogh. The public of today, that honors him, is prone to feel superior to his own public of yesterday, that ignored him, and to forget that a better way to judge its taste is in the respect it pays to the original talents of its own day. The 14 Van Gogh masterpieces on exhibition in a Manhattan gallery last week had all been painted in the last years of his life. Looking back, it was hard to see how anyone could have been blind to them.

Toward the end, before he killed himself, Van Gogh considered his painting a kind of therapy. Writing from an insane asylum to his brother Theo, he said: "I am struggling with all my energy to master my work . . . if I win that will be the best lightning conductor for my illness." That illness was possibly epilepsy, but it has also been defined as manic depression. Today, it might have been given electric shock treatment. As gallerygoers could see, Van Gogh's self-prescribed therapy was also a "shock treatment."

The electric force in Van Gogh's art was sheer color. Describing his famed Night Cafe--in which a green billiard table squats like a beast under the bright yellow lights of a red room--he could say without the least self-consciousness: "I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green." When he was very ill, he sent his brother a self-portrait head which seems to burn like an electric bulb, with nerves for filaments. "You must look at it for some time," he wrote. "You will see, I hope, that my features are a good deal calmer, though my look is vaguer than formerly. . . ."

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