'Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night' - Download Free Phim, Nhac, Phan Mem, Karaoke

conmeo · #1 (**permalink**) 10-04-2008, 01:28 AM

'Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night': Brilliantly charting an artist's metamorphosis

The masterpieces painted in the last three years of van Gogh's life were landscapes, like "The Sower," above, seen with the eye of the mind. (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam)

NEW YORK: A new type of blockbuster art show is emerging in which a limited but rigorous selection and a spartan display free from gimmicks allow the art to deliver its full punch. The admirable exhibition "Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night" on view at the Museum of Modern Art until Jan. 5 is the ultimate example.

Hung with an impeccable sense of space and pace, some of the Dutch artist's most famous pictures have a whole panel or a wall section to themselves. This minimalist representation might seem to be dictated by common sense when it comes to works with such an explosive power as the "Landscape with Wheat Sheaves and Rising Moon" of 1889 from the Kröller-Müller Museum at Otterlo, the Netherlands, or "The Starry Night" of the same year from the MoMA's own collection.

Yet the option is rarely retained because it is taken for granted that quantity is needed to draw large attendances. The MoMA experience should put that canard to rest.

Allowing the art to speak so forcefully is a blessing for the viewers, but it has a downside for the curators. Their discourse gets lost, drowned by the deafeningly louder message of the sequences that they have brilliantly devised. Few visitors will heed the learned comments made in the exhibition book about subjects common to van Gogh and Jean-François Millet. By contrast, they instantly take in the dual aspect of van Gogh's oeuvre made crystal clear in this dazzling pageant put together by Joachim Pissarro of the MoMA, and Sjraar van Heugten, head of collections at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

Never was the splendor of van Gogh's first period, which really began in 1883 and was over by the end of 1885, made so evident. Even the inclusion of one near-daub in the name of art history, "Twilight, Old Farmhouses in Loosduinen" of 1883, finds its excuse. In the exhibition book, it serves to illustrate van Gogh's early attraction to evening scenery and rural life, which is hardly an earthshaking revelation. For those who love art, the undistinguished landscape helps to measure how fast van Gogh, who decided to become an artist in 1880, moved from the level of an indifferent amateur to that of a major master.

Indeed, in that same year, 1883, the Dutchman produced one of the most stirring masterpieces from his early phase, "Landscape with a Stack of Peat and Farm Houses." A sense of forlorn immensity emanates from this study in darkness and light painted in shades of blackish green with little color and no details. Profoundly expressive, the picture exudes a dull despair.

"Lane of Poplars at Sunset" painted a few months later in 1884, heralds the advent of Symbolism. The black figure of a woman carrying some burden walks away between two lines of trees. The orange sun disk about to sink below the horizon at the end of the perspective is the only colored note. The brushwork is imperfect, but the vision is powerful.

A year later, no trace of clumsiness remained in the "Evening Landscape" loaned by the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid. It is done in nervous but controlled strokes that suggest the density of the shadow enveloping all things but leave out the detail. The orange disk of the moon, some shreds of very pale orange amid the grayness of the clouds and the reflections of dark light in the canal waters keep color notations to a minimum. This owes little to Jules Dupré, Théodore Rousseau or any of the Barbizon school artists, repeatedly mentioned in the book. There is a gravitas about it that invites meditation. While the Barbizon painters saw the poetry of nature, van Gogh read tragedy into it.

Within a year of his arrival in Paris in March 1886, van Gogh's art underwent a metamorphosis. The contrast in the choice of colors was radical. Intense yellow, blue and turquoise soon invaded his pictures. The dark stillness of the Dutch period gave way to swinging rhythms. Rippling curves run through the fields, trees sway like fire in the wind and swirling lines set heaven in motion.

This transformation is often cited as evidence of the supposed influence of Impressionism on van Gogh. But the Dutch master's art rejected everything that Impressionism stood for. The paintings of Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir and Camille Pissarro were all about light and the different grades of color derived from it, used to convey volume and perspective. The Impressionists observed nature, transcribing its reality through visual impressions, hence the name of the movement.

Van Gogh on the contrary was the first European artist since the Renaissance who stopped rendering volume and perspective. There is neither light nor shadow in his later landscapes, only color. In those rare pictures of the late 1880s in which the memory of Barbizon school sunset landscapes lingers, the rejection of naturalistic depiction is startling. "Stevedores in Arles" of 1888, cited in the exhibition book as an example of the enduring Barbizon legacy actually illustrates van Gogh's radical break with it. The figures and the growth in the foreground are reduced to rough black forms barely identifiable, as are the constructions on the horizon line. The sky is painted in fiery red, orange and green such as the human eye never saw at dusk.

This was not due to van Gogh's inability to paint in the Impressionist manner. "Corner in Voyer-d'Argenson Park," done in 1887, reflects his close acquaintance with the Divisionist offshoot of Impressionism and, more specifically, with its interpretation at the hands of Pissarro. Yet, even here van Gogh's instinctive rejection of naturalism led him to paint the sky as a sprinkling of regularly spaced turquoise dots that bear little connection to reality.

If Impressionism may have acted, at best, as a catalyst in the choice of the bright palette during van Gogh's second period, the decisive influence was that of Japanese woodcuts which impressed him so much that he interpreted some of these in oils. The acid yellows, the deep blues, the orange, the turquoises are borrowed from them and so is the idea of juxtaposing strongly contrasted colors. Most importantly, Japanese Ukiyo-e probably played an essential part in his radical rejection of naturalism. In the Dutch painter's works dealing with vesperal or nocturnal scenery on which the show is focused, this rejection is blatant. Here, however, a second factor came into play.

In their introduction, Joachim Pissarro and van Heugten observe that van Gogh was fascinated by the celebration of the night in literature long before he turned to painting. In 1873, the future artist sent a friend a copy of an ode to "The Evening Hour" composed by one of his favorite poets, Jan van Beers. In van Gogh's sensibility, the mental image thus preceded physical perception and that predisposed him to be receptive to the Japanese printmakers' stylized rendition of the material world, with its emphasis on expressiveness.

The masterpieces painted in the last three years of his short artistic career are landscapes seen with the eye of the mind. In "The Sower" from the Van Gogh Museum, the enormous sun disk poised on the horizon that sets off the head of the man looks like an aura of glory redeeming the darkness of the human condition. The farmer bends in a twisted posture, partly matching the outline of the trunk that cuts across space as it might in a woodcut by Hiroshige.

In another 1888 picture on the theme of "The Sower" on loan from the Kröller-Müller Museum, the sun disk emits yellow and orange strokes. Pale blue, white and pinkish brown accents are meant to render the brown soil of a freshly plowed field. This lyrical hymn to Creation bears no connection to the material world.

Toward the end of his life, van Gogh transcribed ever more feverishly his inner visions. In the MoMA's "Starry Night" done in 1889, haloed stars and the moon roll like balls of light in the tumultuous waves of the blue night. The mystical image could not be further removed from the joyous naturalism of the Impressionists. By breaking with the illusionistic rendition of the world as the eye sees it, van Gogh became the true founder of modern art.

(The exhibition will be at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam from Feb. 13 to June 7.)

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