Van Gogh’s Cypresses

I approach a themed show at the Met with some skepticism: are the curators making, let alone creating, a point in order to justify amassing loans for a blockbuster show? From a museological viewpoint, it is no longer enough, or professionally justifiable, to say, “Here are a lot of van Goghs for your viewing pleasure” (although the Rijksmuseum’s current Vermeer show contradicts this thesis). They must find something “new” to warrant putting on an exhibition and, particularly, to make pressing loan requests. (“We can’t tell the story without your wonderful example, blah, blah, blah.”) And once the projected theme is identified, all available works are looked at through that lens. The museum can cherrypick an artist’s oeuvre to support its point, often at the expense of providing an accurate picture of the artist or the period in question. This is, in any case, how I felt about recent Met shows about the Civil War and Winslow Homer, which I’ve described elsewhere, and the same is true for the latest Hopper show at the Whitney, albeit drawn exclusively from that museum’s own storeroom.

Van Gogh, of course, is the number one art world tourist attraction. Just putting his name in the title of your show will sell tickets. I don’t know what anniversary we are celebrating, but van Gogh has recently been everywhere. Santa Barbara’s “Through Vincent’s Eyes” last year was its most popular show in ages, while at the same time Mia was celebrating “Van Gogh and the Olive Groves,” just to mention the two museums I’m most associated with. And New York downtown featured competing Van Gogh Immersion experiences for the masses, if not the art world. So, it is hardly groundbreaking for the Met to sponsor a van Gogh exhibition. But to do so, it had to have a hook–something no one has done or seen before. The hook: cypress trees, which so happen to feature prominently in van Gogh’s most famous painting, “Starry Night,” from MoMA.  A marketing jackpot!

I am not a van Gogh scholar, and there are many. He left voluminous letters in addition to thousands of images. Someone in the catalogue, I am sure, has picked out van Gogh’s written mentions of cypress trees in assigning importance to this subject. But unless you’ve read all of van Gogh, how could you know just how important the cypresses were to him? So I would be skeptical of the catalogue, too, because it will necessarily cherry-pick references that support this show. Which is my way of saying I liked the captions in the exhibition, but I read them as I would a lawyer’s brief.  There are always points to be made on the other side of the argument as well.

What I can do is look at the pictures presented in the exhibition. They are wonderful! They are van Goghs! And many, if not most, of them contain cypress trees. But does this mean the cypress had some special, some spiritual, meaning to van Gogh? Or did he just think they were picturesque? Or, even, are they just what he saw when he walked afield from his asylum?

The show is presented in three distinct galleries, covering three chronological periods, and I should admit that, due to insufficient signage, we went the wrong way upon entering and viewed the show in the II-III-I order. II contained the masterpieces, the show-stoppers; so it wasn’t a bad place to start, but we missed the buildup-peak-letdown rhythm that the curators intended. Everything else was a bit of anticlimax after the wall that held “Starry Night,” “Wheat Fields and Cypresses,” and “Landscape from St. Remy,” van Gogh at the top of his game. But even here, the crux of the show, one wondered about the role of the cypresses. In none of these were they anything but a side player, a compositional balance. More spectacular were the skies: huge, roiling clouds, and of course swirling discs in “Starry Night.” Could the Met have done a show, “The Skies of Van Gogh,” and had just as sensational loans and, in fact, more to say about the artist’s style choices? As for a tree species, van Gogh’s olives certainly reflect more his tortured nature, show more his experimentation with color and form and have more obvious symbolic heft from their association with Gethsemane.

Look more closely at one example, the “Landscape from St. Remy,” an exciting loan from Copenhagen. Yes, there is a cypress grove–as opposed to the sentinel cypress that has latent power–but it is buried in the distance, a dark counterpoint to the bright green and yellow grasses in the foreground and the menacing white cloud above. I can’t believe they are in the painting for any reason other than they happened to be in the landscape that van Gogh observed. If I were to analyze this picture, the cypress grove would be point number six. A pair of similar cypresses is more prominent in the other two works I mentioned, but in both they seem to be bystanders, to the wheat fields and clouds in one, to the sky and stars in the other.

The intended first gallery is a prelude to the cypresses, showing van Gogh’s interest in Nature when he arrives in Arles. These works are uniformly smaller and weaker, as if van Gogh is finding his footing in the new terrain of Provence. One of the works, of apple trees in a farmyard, struck me as rather insipid when it was auctioned at Christie’s last fall, although I subsequently saw it sold for something like $35 million. There is a row of cypresses in the background, painted with diagonal slashes, but I can’t believe they have any significance beyond contributing some needed dark color to the composition. Even more farfetched is a still life from Washington in which a severed cypress bough lies behind the plate of fruit.

The third gallery, the curators admit with rare candor, represents a falling-off in van Gogh’s art. He doesn’t paint with the same conviction or power, so perhaps it is not important that the cypresses disappear from his oeuvre, and the show. He mixes scenes and subjects from his native Holland with Provence, painting from imagination and memory more than the landscape in front of him. Even if cypresses are little more than an excuse to pull together extraordinary loans from private collections (a fabulous work from Larry Ellison!) and museums in Europe and America, who am I to complain?

PS: I returned for a second visit, following the intended order this time. All my observations described above remained true, with one related comment and one new idea. The label for the painting from Denmark notes that “the enclosed field of wheat…would anchor more than two dozen works over the course of his yearlong stay,” indirectly suggesting that this would have been as viable a peg as cypresses for a show. My new thought, which is hardly novel and should have been obvious, came from looking at how Van Gogh applied his marks. I can think of no other artist who, in the same painting or drawing, would use slashes, curvy lines, dots, thick and thin, horizontal and vertical, textured and flat, random and neatly lined up. He does the same thing with color, more obviously. How does he get away with it? Why has no other artist?

Juan de Pareja.
The Met’s current effort at “woke” is a show of and about Juan de Pareja, Velazquez’s slave and assistant who went on to his own career as a painter when freed in 1654. Showing four or five works by Pareja, including his two “masterpieces” from the Prado, didn’t do him any favors in terms of establishing his reputation. Anyone would come off second-best to Velazquez, who had eight remarkable works in the show, including the eponymous portrait, but Pareja’s derivative and mediocre efforts justified the obscurity he has heretofore been accorded. The two highlights of the show, beyond Velazquez’s sensational Kitchen Maid from Ireland, were the gallery devoted to Morton Schamburg, who went from Harlem to Spain in 1923 to study and preserve the legacy of Black culture there, and the show’s general theme: the story of Spanish art in the 17th century has to include the presence and contributions of Blacks (while pointing out that slaves in Spain at the time weren’t all Blacks).

Cecily Brown.
The Met’s show of this British-born, New York-resident artist gave me a pretty good picture of her distinctive style, which henceforth I should readily recognize. There is that in its favor. It’s not, not surprisingly, a style suited to my taste: deKooning without restraint, Guston without control. Every inch of the canvas is activated, but unlike a Pollock there are no empty spots. Swirling, exploding are adjectives that came to mind. The labels frequently identified references to be found within a composition, but for the life of me I couldn’t see most of them. Some paintings I liked more than others; they were ones that had a semblance of organization and a more limited palette. And sketchbooks offered proof that she could draw; that just isn’t her style.