Sanity Defense for a Genius

By ROBERT HUGHES

Vincent is back. We left him at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1984, crop- eared and dazed in Arles: "Sometimes moods of indescribable anguish, sometimes moments when the veil of time and fatality of circumstances seemed to be torn apart for an instant." Two months after writing this, he voluntarily entered the lunatic asylum at Saint-Remy in Provence; and 15 months after that, discharged but still plagued by unassuageable fits of melancholy, he shot himself to death in the rural village of Auvers, just north of Paris. Van Gogh was 37 when he died -- at the same age, it has often been noted, as Raphael, Caravaggio and Watteau, and with an oeuvre no less brilliant than theirs.

The Met's great Van Gogh exhibition in 1984 tracked the artist's career from his arrival in Arles to the spring of 1889. Its successor, "Van Gogh in Saint-Remy and Auvers," which opens to the public this week, completes the trajectory. The organizer of both shows, the English art historian Ronald Pickvance, has brought together 70 paintings and 19 drawings from this last phase of Van Gogh's short life. Here we see the stuff of the most powerful legend of suffering and transcendence in modern art, and no superlatives seem apt to encompass its beauty and emotional range. It is a characteristic of great painting that no matter how many times it has been cloned, reproduced and postcarded, it can restore itself as an immediate utterance with the unexpected force of strangeness when seen in the original. Some of the Van Goghs in this show, such as the Museum of Modern Art's Starry Night, with its oceanic rush of whorling energy through the dark sky, ought by now -- if frequency of reproduction were as lethal as one sometimes thinks -- to be among the most overworked cliches in art. But on the wall, among less familiar paintings (of which there are many in this show, thanks to the persistence with which Pickvance nailed down the loans), they are refreshed, and we see them with new eyes.

The longer Van Gogh stayed in Provence the closer he thought he got to its "essence": its high tender color and sometimes violently modeled forms, its archaic antiquity and, above all, its light. In Arles the initial shock of the landscape, impacted in citron and chrome yellows, had dominated his palette. But once he was inside the asylum at Saint-Remy, a different and more reflective way of looking at the landscape around him took over. "What I dream of in my best moments," he wrote, "is not so much striking color effects as once more the half-tones."

One may perhaps connect this yearning for stabilization with Van Gogh's fear of his own ailment, whatever it was (epilepsy complicated by syphilis is a likely guess). It is as though the calmer color, the growing penchant for structuring his work as a process of sequential research into a given motif -- a walled field near the asylum, the olive grove outside it, the pines in the asylum garden -- had an apotropaic use for him, keeping at bay the demons of the unconscious. He wrote incessantly; his letters from the asylum, unmarred by a single note of self-pity, are among the most lucid and heartbreakingly frank disclosures ever written by a painter. He categorized and cataloged his work, a habit for which art historians, wishing Cezanne had done the same, have long been grateful. And in October 1889 he summed up the relation between his paintings and his illness in one piercing metaphor: "I am feeling well just now . . . I am not strictly speaking mad, for my mind is absolutely normal in the intervals, and even more so than before. But during the attacks it is terrible -- and then I lose consciousness of everything. But that spurs me on to work and to seriousness, as a miner who is always in danger makes haste in what he does." Work and seriousness: this, not the vulgar image of the madman issuing orgasmic squirts of yellow and blue at the dictation of his lunacy, is the real Van Gogh of Saint-Remy and Auvers.

Quite often the works that seem most "expressionist," the clearest indexes of a mind approaching the end of its tether, are the most tenderly scrupulous in their treatment of fact. One has only to go to Saint-Remy and stand on the edge of the olive grove outside the asylum, looking south toward the chain of limestone hills called the Alpilles, to realize that Van Gogh changed nothing essential in the view when painting Olive Trees with the Alpilles in the Background in the spring of 1889. The heaving stratification of the limestone, its caverns and holes, and the turbulent profile of Mount Gaussier to the west do look exactly like that, just as the writhing strokes of his brush on the olive trunks are a direct pictorial equivalent to the real arabesques of ancient bark and wood. One might not often see a real cloud like Van Gogh's -- that strange fetal shape extruded into the blue sky -- but it powerfully conveys the strength of the wind over the plains beyond Les Baux.

The idea that landscapes like this are fantasies, mere projections of psychosis on the mundane, is wrong and does no justice to Van Gogh's exquisite sense of reality. The matter is more complicated than that. It is true that Van Gogh applied the formal system he preferred to the Provencal landscape: the rapid, shifting notation of dots, speckles and slashes in the drawings, with the white paper burning like noon light behind the sepia ink; the characteristic spirals of the paintbrush, which link back to the decorative line work of Edo Japanese screens and point forward to the whiplash rhythms of art nouveau. But this handwriting was not mechanically stamped on the landscape, as the style marks of mere obsessives tend to be. On the contrary, it was infinitely responsive to the nuances of fact. Dealing with the "difficult bottle-green hue" of his famous motif, the cypress (of which the real landscape around Saint-Remy is now disappointingly short), he went to great trouble to set forth the realities inside its hairy, obelisk-like silhouette: the mauve cast of shadow on the trunk and branches, the sparks of almost pure chrome within the enfolding darkness of its leaves.

To watch him shifting gears in the portrait of the elderly head attendant of the asylum, Charles-Elzeard Trabuc, is to receive a vivid lesson in the adjustment of manner to motif. Trabuc's cotton jacket, with its emphatic parallel stripes of blackish-blue, is as explicitly stylized as anything produced within the next quarter-century by Klimt or, for that matter, Miro. But in the head, this graphic energy is subordinated to volume, to the immobile self-containment of a man who, Van Gogh realized, "has seen an enormous amount of suffering and death." The chin and mouth are compressed, but the brow bulges irresistibly from its pale background, the relation between head and coat subtly maintained by the black strokes of hair and mustache and the unwavering darkness of Trabuc's eyes.

In such portraits, Van Gogh attained the grave humane fullness of his great model Rembrandt; the landscapes are like nothing anyone had painted before. No wonder the little asylum, with its worn flagstone corridors and pine-shadowed garden, remains one of the sacred sites of modernist culture. Here, as in Manet's Paris and Cezanne's Aix-en-Provence, art turned on its pivot in the 19th century to face the 20th. One does not see many exhibitions like this in a lifetime.