Vincent van Gogh considered drawing to be "the root of everything." He once confided to his brother, Theo, that he could not stop drawing because "I really have a draftsman's fist, and I ask you, have I ever doubted or hesitated or wavered since the day I began to draw? I think you know quite well that I pushed on, and of course I gradually grew stronger in the battle."
Although his career lasted only a decade, van Gogh created about 1,100 known drawings, capturing everything around him, from peasants and postmen to landscapes and interiors. Drawing was as important a way to record his thoughts as the letters he wrote to his family and friends.
Yet the public is far more familiar with his 800 paintings. Images like "A Corridor in the Asylum" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "The Starry Night" at the Museum of Modern Art and "Irises" at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles are among the most famous images in the history of art.
That situation may change next week, when the Met unveils "Vincent van Gogh: The Drawings," the first major exhibition of the artist's drawings ever held in the United States. (A version of the show was on view at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam this summer.) The exhibition, which opens next Tuesday, includes 113 works from public and private collections around the world, 20 of which were not shown in Amsterdam.
"Drawings have always been the P.S. part of van Gogh's work," said Colta Ives, a curator of drawings and prints at the Met. "Yet he was a letter writer, a guy with a pen in his hand."
Ms. Ives and Susan Alyson Stein, a curator of 19th-century, modern and contemporary art at the Met, teamed up with two of their colleagues from the Van Gogh Museum - Sjraar van Heugten, head of collections there, and Marije Vellekoop, curator of drawings - to put the show together. Their mission was to tell the story of van Gogh's work through his drawings and watercolors.
Sitting in the Met's galleries, surrounded by packing crates and work tables, as the exhibition was being installed, Ms. Stein said she had been thinking about a show like this for 20 years. As coordinator first of the Met's blockbuster 1984 show "Van Gogh in Arles" and "Van Gogh in Saint-Rémy and Auvers" two years later, she was introduced to the artist's drawings. "As exciting as the paintings are," she said, "the drawings were a revelation."
For three years she and Ms. Ives have immersed themselves in van Gogh's world, traveling extensively throughout the United States and Europe. "People opened their collections to us," Ms. Stein said. So did the Van Gogh Museum, which has the largest number of the artist's works on paper in the world.
"We borrowed judiciously," Ms. Stein said. Deciding what not to show was as difficult as what the curators chose. For every drawing on view, at least 20 were reluctantly rejected.
The exhibition also includes eight paintings: three from the Met's own collection, two from the Van Gogh Museum, and three loans, from the Rodin Museum in Paris, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow and a private collection. Each was chosen for its relationship to his drawings.
Rather than tackle the subject strictly chronologically, as most curators have done, Ms. Stein and Ms. Ives decided to underscore relationship between drawing and painting in van Gogh's work and how he reinvented certain recurring themes in different ways.
When they began conceiving the show, Ms. Stein said, one of the first things she did was to put together 86 pages of excerpts about drawing from all three volumes of van Gogh's letters. "We wanted to hear his discussion," she said, "to know what mattered to him as an artist."
Throughout his life van Gogh embraced drawing for many different reasons. At first he felt it necessary to master black-and-white before tackling color. Sometimes it was a question of economics: paper and ink was far cheaper than canvas and paint. He also used drawing as a way of working on subjects that interested him, like wintry trees or tree-lined roads or expansive views of wheat fields.
Drawing didn't always come easy. "He struggled with black and white," Ms. Ives said. "But when he got to Arles in 1888, he discovered the reed pen, and it was then he developed a more comfortable relationship with his tool. As reed wears down, it becomes softer, more flexible and responsive to his gestures on paper."
It is generally assumed that most artists make drawings as studies for larger, more complete paintings. But sometimes van Gogh did just the opposite. He would reproduce some of his paintings in pen and ink; he would then send them to his artist friends Émile Bernard and John Russell, and to his brother, Theo, as a way of letting them know what he was up to. None of these drawings were exact copies; each contained spontaneous details.
Often even scholars haven't been sure which came first, a painting or a drawing. Three images of a Zouave solider - a watercolor from the Met's collection, a painting from the Van Gogh Museum and a pen-and-ink drawing that belongs to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum - have been the subject of scholarly debate. "It's been long accepted that the watercolor came after the painting," Ms. Stein said. "But when we looked at it, it seemed there were hesitant passages. The background, for example, is unresolved."
First the curators looked at the Met's watercolor next to the Guggenheim's pen-and-ink drawing, which they knew came after the painting.
"It's harvest time; it's raining," Ms. Stein said. "He has a model, he spends five days and writes his brother and his friends that he's finally painting portraits. He doesn't mention the watercolor. Six weeks later he sends the pen-and-ink rendition of the portrait to John Russell. But because the watercolor isn't mentioned in the letters, it's one of the many riddles we addressed."
Marjorie Shelley, a Met paper conservator, subjected the works to technical analysis, including infrared reflectography that revealed the artist's graphite sketch underneath the finished work, showing how he was struggling with his subject, something he did not do with either the painting or the later pen-and-ink drawing.
Ms. Ives was curious about "Street in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer," an 1888 series of drawings and one painting of a dirt path with a row of thatched cottages on one side and tangled vegetation. From his letters it is known that a pen-and-ink drawing was made before a painting of the same subject. He did the drawing in Saintes-Maries, in the Camargue region of Provence, then returned to nearby Arles and made the painting.
"Noticing the similarity in size between the drawing and the painting, I wondered if there might be a still closer link between them," Ms. Ives said. "Perhaps it wasn't a free-handed interpretation in oil." Or, she said, he may have been so happy with his drawing that he traced it onto the canvas, which is unusual, because he generally painted freehand.
So Ms. Ives made copies of both the painting and the drawing to scale, then superimposed the drawing on the painting. She deduced that van Gogh had indeed traced the drawing's outline onto the canvas as the structure of the composition, then added more sky at the top and more pathway at the bottom to fill the squarer canvas. But drawings and paintings were never exactly the same. In a drawing he made for Bernard, he added a tiny boat in the horizon. "There is no boat in the painting," Ms. Ives said.
The way van Gogh grabbed onto a theme, composed it in his mind and then tried it out in different variations fascinated the curators. "Very few artists do that," Ms. Ives said. "Often we tried to get into van Gogh's shoes and walk with him to see what was catching his eye." A series of watercolors van Gogh created of the plains of La Crau, three miles northwest of Arles, is one example. The curators persuaded the Van Gogh museum to lend them "Harvest in Provence" (1888), a rarely lent painting, because they were able to borrow a watercolor that preceded it and a pen-and-ink drawing from the National Gallery of Art in Washington that the artist did after it.
"Each has a distinctive character," Ms. Ives said. "During the harvest he was out there every day, tromping through the fields, and certain motifs like fences, haystacks, clumps of reeds and rushes he keeps repeating in all different media and scales."
As an art form, however, works on paper are extremely delicate and cannot be subject to light or to changes in temperature. As a result, many of the drawings and watercolors in the show have rarely been exhibited, and it may be some time before the public will see them again.
"The problem with drawings is they have to have a rest," Ms. Ives said. "The next generation won't be able to play in this garden for quite a long while."
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