Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, through September 13
And when no hope was left inside
On that starry, starry night
You took your life as lovers often do
But I could have told you, Vincent
This world was never meant for one
As beautiful as you
— Don McLean
Don McLean wrote and recorded some pretty ghastly songs over the years, but probably most egregious was Vincent, his 1972 dirge for Van Gogh. It is worth quoting here, however, because, like Kirk Douglas’s crackpot performance in the 1956 movie Lust for Life, it accords with an understanding of the artist that the organizers and curators of Van Gogh and Nature have set themselves the task of overturning.
Theirs is a quite remarkable exhibition: a once-in-a-generation opportunity that no one with any interest whatsoever in the visual arts, or in how the natural world is understood, should miss. They have brought together some fifty major paintings and drawings by van Gogh from collections all over the world, and supplemented them with works by his influences and contemporaries. They hope that we might emerge from the show having entirely forgotten about Don McLean’s schmaltz. This, in the words of Richard Kendall, the Clark’s Curator at Large, is “a typical Clark show in that we say, ‘We have something new to offer’.”
The van Gogh that this show presents is “the thoughtful and meticulous student of nature.” The van Gogh who, his sister remembered many years later, had been the child who could identify all of the birdsongs in their garden, and who had collected insects in boxes and written their Latin names on them. The van Gogh with an extensive natural history library – the show includes copies of books that he is known to have owned – and the van Gogh “who found solace and personal fulfillment in studying and enjoying the natural world.”
Of course their principal evidence for this interpretation is found in van Gogh’s extraordinary paintings. There are his well-known canvases of cypresses and wheat fields here, but also real discoveries like the 1887 painting called Undergrowth where his brush strokes glisten as though he had been painting with fruit syrup.
This is, in other words, an enormously enjoyable show, but the suggestion that van Gogh is best understood as a nature painter will leave many visitors wondering.
Of his contemporaries and immediate predecessors, van Gogh’s distortions of nature are least explicable in terms of picture structure, painterly process, or quasi-scientific enquiry. Olive trees often do twist and bend, and clouds sometimes do curl across the sky, but the scene presented in The Olive Trees is a perplexing one. Its range of colors is oddly limited, and its drawing strays a long way from anything that was visible in the Saint-Remy landscape in that summer of 1889. Its focus is sharpest in the tree trunks just to the left of the picture’s center, but the further one’s eye moves from there, particularly on a diagonal from the picture’s top left to bottom right, the more erratic things become. The distant hills buck and twist disconcertingly and it is anyone’s guess what the bright green shape at the foot of the painting represents.
Why did van Gogh paint like this? The Clark’s wall text tells us that “a rhythmic vitality unites hillsides, rock formations, olive trees, and even plants,” but for anyone seeking a better understanding of van Gogh that reads as an assertion rather than a clarification. Asked for further guidance, Richard Kendall suggests that van Gogh was “clearly thrilled by clouds and trees right up until the end of his life … his exhilaration is reflected in his color and line.” Not everyone will be persuaded, and the knowledge that this painting was made during van Gogh’s year at the nearby Saint-Paul Asylum will still seem more relevant.
This is a key issue because although this is without doubt a fantastic show, the question of whether it offers a tightly focused view of van Gogh or merely an unbalanced one hinges upon it. After all, there are some of van Gogh’s most celebrated paintings here, but there are no sunflowers, no interiors (so nowhere to “ruin oneself, go mad or commit a crime”) no portraits, no self-portraits (and thus no bandaged ears), and – it has to be said – no Starry Night.
For information about and directions to the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, consult the Berkshire Edge calendar.
