Two Van Gogh paintings are like night and day
Seeing his 'Starry Night' with 'Cypresses' is eye-opening
NEW HAVEN - Two paintings by the world's most popular artist, Vincent Van Gogh, face off in a partitioned room at the Yale University Art Gallery. As far as exhibitions go, this one, which the gallery's lively curator Jennifer Gross spent no less than three years putting together, is certainly on the small side. But it's well worth taking the trouble to see. (Reservations are required, but tickets are free.)
You will doubtless be familiar with one of the paintings: "The Starry Night." Painted in 1889, when Van Gogh was resident in an asylum at Saint-Remy-de-Provence, France, this restless, awkward image is regarded by many as his masterpiece. It's certainly his best-known image, and probably not far behind Leonardo's "Mona Lisa" as the world's most famous painting.
Frankly, it's never been my cup of tea. In fact, whenever I've strolled by it in New York's Museum of Modern Art, where it usually hangs, I've always felt faintly embarrassed.
The painting, of course, has inspired poems and musical scores, and it was immortalized (if that is the right word for a process closer to dunking in cinnamon sugar) by Don McLean in a song called "Vincent." (Don't even hum those first lines; they're the sonic equivalent of flypaper.)
I have always assumed that my own disinterest in "The Starry Night" had to do with all this ancillary stuff. Who wants to fall in love with a painting that already has so many swooning, sentimental suitors? It would be like competing on "The Bachelorette."
Painting number two is called "Cypresses." Again, it's well known, because it usually hangs in the Metropolitan Museum - although there it is surrounded by so many Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces that it is easily overlooked.
On paper, the two works make a good match. It's easy to see why the Yale University Art Gallery, which has two Van Gogh paintings of its own (including the beloved "The Night Cafe"), wanted to put them together. They were both painted in Saint-Remy in the same period. They both contain cypresses and sickle-shaped moons. And they are neatly complementary: One is a nighttime image; the other - moon notwithstanding - shows a slice of the Provencal landscape in the blazing heat of day.
Of course, placing them together like this makes qualitative comparisons inevitable. And for me, the revelation of this show is that "Cypresses" knocks "The Starry Night" clean out of the ring. Of the two here, it is the real masterpiece.
Demonstrating this was not, I hasten to add, Gross's intention in organizing the show, nor is it an opinion she shares (or if she does, she is too polite to say so). But she did, during a phone conversation I had with her, describe "Cypresses" as "a lion of a painting," and I can think of no better description.
"Cypresses" roars. It absolutely teems with life. It bubbles over with atmospheric energy. You can feel the wind, the heat, the summer juiciness, and the interconnected, overwhelming beauty of all the elements it boldly sews together.
"The Starry Night," by contrast, looks more and more like a curious graphic experiment that doesn't quite come off. Those interlinked scroll-like arabesques and exaggeratedly radiant stars in the sky may be the painting's hook, like a maddeningly catchy pop melody, but the pattern they form sits on the surface and hence negates our impulse to read the scene three-dimensionally - to enter its atmosphere. They suck all the reality from the intimate scene below, a little village at night.
This would not be a problem if Van Gogh was a fantasist, like all the teenage girls who have posters of "The Starry Night" in their bedrooms. But he was not. He may have been tormented, but everything that was great about Van Gogh's art owes its greatness to an immediate and visceral connection with reality. (This was what made him different from, and superior to, Gauguin, who rarely let reality interfere with his narcissistic dream life.)
"The Starry Night" was painted from memory and imagination in one of Van Gogh's weaker moments: You can tell. It looks like a whimsical cartoon. Of course, haul in the art-history record and the painting's two-dimensionality makes sense: Van Gogh was profoundly influenced by the graphic reductions of Japanese prints, and he belonged to a generation of artists who were starting to see pictures in abstract terms: flat arrangements of color and shape on two-dimensional supports.
But when something looks thin, it looks thin.
To a certain extent, we get used to this "thinness" in extremely well-known images, because we are forever seeing them in reproduction. But while "The Starry Night" suffers little in reproduction, because it is already quite two-dimensional, "Cypresses" suffers more when we see it on a postcard or in a book, where so many of its bristling, multi-directional energies are ironed out.
That's why this show - a chance to see these paintings for oneself and to compare them directly - is so revelatory.
Van Gogh described "Cypresses" as "a splash of black in a sunny landscape, but it is one of the most interesting black notes, and the most difficult to hit off exactly that I can imagine."
And indeed, the coloring in this painting is one of its wonders. The idea that Van Gogh's use of heightened colors was somehow an unintended result of his mental illness is one that Gross said she is keen to disprove. "Cypresses" is brilliant evidence, for its bold harmonies are integrated with tremendous subtlety and skill.
The cypresses are not, in actual fact, black - Van Gogh was talking in relative terms - but they are a deep, deep, glossy green, and as every colorist knows, it is very hard to make blacks or very dark, cool colors work in the foregrounds of pictures, because they tend to recede. (When Matisse met the aging Renoir, the old Impressionist admitted he did not much care for Matisse's work, but knew he was "a real painter" because he knew how to handle black.)
Van Gogh has set his foregounded dark trees against a bright turquoise sky flecked with pink and white clouds above hills painted a purply royal blue. All of these colors (pink clouds? A turquoise sky? Who would have thought!) are brighter than the darkest greens in the trees, but they come in varying degrees of warmth and coolness that chime together beautifully. The dark cypresses, meanwhile, are flecked with warmer, lighter colors that vibrate with the brightness around them.
Notice, too, the way Van Gogh has cropped the image, so that the top of the tallest cypress is cut off well below its peak. This decision - perhaps another sign of the influence of Japanese prints - has the effect of making the tree feel closer, bigger, more monumental, as if it were too big to be contained within a mere frame.
This compositional ploy combines with Van Gogh's wild, unpredictable brushstrokes to give the image all its pulsing immediacy. The linear swirls in "The Starry Night" may be attention-grabbing, but they feel formulaic and preordained, whereas the short, twisty lines in "Cypresses" are shaggy and wild, like thick wet hair after it has been vigorously rubbed by a towel. The rhythmic curves in the clouds, the sky, and the grass below echo and reinforce these energies.
I admit, I may be pressing the point too hard. But the fun of a show like this, so radically distilled, is that it gives us all an opportunity to think about what it is we really value in painting. I value audacity, vigor, and originality, all of which Van Gogh has in spades, in almost all his work.
But I also value truth-telling and credibility, as they pertain both to the exterior world and the world of the emotions. And if you were to ask, in front of these two paintings, "Which image do you truly believe?" I would unhesitatingly answer, "Cypresses."
Sebastian Smee can be reached at ssmee@globe.com. 