The cypresses stand tall and unbudgeable in the blustery wind as, perhaps, a symbol of strength and fortitude.
The sky, by contrast, is speckled and swirling. Clouds spiral and whorl, or twist into tight knots, rising up from behind a mountain range that slopes gently downward to where it joins the land. Foul weather is on the way.
An explosion of wheat grass, golden and yellow, carpets the foreground of the painting. The grass leaps high into the air like flames, mimicking the elegant, vertical, slender shape of the cypresses.
This work, “Cypresses,” by Vincent van Gogh, was painted in June 1889 during his confinement at the asylum in Saint-Rémy in the south of France. Until September it will be hanging at the Yale University Art Gallery, on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City as part of a two-work show organized by Jennifer Gross, the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art.
The other painting is van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” on loan from the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Also painted in June 1889, it provides a very different view of the southern French countryside.
Perspective is the most obvious difference between them. The cropping and closeness of “Cypresses” convey an immediacy and almost tactile relationship to nature, immersing you there in the grasses beneath the grinding sun. “The Starry Night,” by contrast, is painted from up high, the town off in the distance and possibly observed from the artist’s window at the asylum. You get a feeling of detachment.
It is tempting to see these pictures (one at daytime, the other night) as a reflection of the artist’s lighter and darker moods. “Cypresses” suggests joy and an attachment to the world. “The Starry Night” tends to reinforce a sense of the artist’s isolation. Whereas “Cypresses” is a painting about living life in the moment, “The Starry Night” seems to say that, for the artist, life is elsewhere.
Then there is that incredible sky in “The Starry Night.” The moon and stars are balls of orange-yellow light verging on the radioactive. Meanwhile, the clouds have begun to coil, twist or whirl into atmospheric surf. An unearthly glow confers a further intensity to the picture. It is manic and tripped-out.
All this neatly equates with the madman of legend. But the idea that van Gogh’s paintings are the expression of his illness and thus somehow “mad” is so wrong-headed that it requires immediate refutation. It was van Gogh’s illness that stopped him from painting. His paintings are the product of his moments of lucidity, his efforts to stay in touch with reality. They couldn’t be saner.
In both paintings there is ample evidence of the artist’s concision, exactness of judgment and remarkable powers of visual analysis. And how brilliantly he assimilates color opposites, mixing together hot colors like orange, yellow and red with cold whites and blues to give the paintings added zing.
He is also looking closely at nature. Although some of van Gogh’s paintings were spontaneous outpourings of creative energy, in many cases he plotted out his pictures. He made countless drawings, impassioned sketches in which he worked out compositional elements. His paintings are mindful and premeditated.
Perhaps the museum could have assembled some of these drawings to illustrate the sequence of the painting’s evolution? It also might have been useful to have seen here “Nuit Étoilée (Starry Night)” ( circa 1850-1865) by Jean-François Millet, housed at Yale but currently on loan to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Ms. Gross said in an e-mail message that van Gogh might have been able to see the Millet painting in Paris between 1873 and 1875, and it may even have inspired him to paint his own version.
But these historical add-ons are in no way essential to the exhibition. The logic behind putting two paintings together in an intimate setting is to invite viewers to slow down, to look closely and have a concentrated experience with an artwork. And when the paintings are as good as the two that are showing here you don’t need anything else.
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