The Metropolitan displays Van Gogh's rhapsodic energy
If you once thought Vincent the Dutchman had been a trifle oversold, from Kirk Douglas gritting his mandibles in the loony bin at Saint-Rémy to Greek zillionaires screwing his cypresses to the stateroom bulkheads of their yachts, you would be wrong. The process never ends. Its latest form is "Van Gogh in Aries," at New York City's Metropolitan Museum. Viewed as a social phenomenon rather than as a group of paintings and drawings, this show epitomizes the Met's leanings to cultural Reaganism: private opulence, public squalor. Weeks of private viewings have led up to its actual public opening, this week. Rarely has the idea of artistic heroism been so conspicuously tied to the ascent of the social mountain. But now all this will change. The general public, one may predict, will see very little. Its members will struggle for a peek through a milling scrum of backs; will be swept at full contemplation speed (about 30 seconds per image) through the galleries; will find their hope to experience Van Gogh's art in its true quality thwarted. Distanced from the work by crowds and railings, they may listen on their Acoustiguides to the plummy vowels of the Met's director, Philippe de Montebello, discoursing like an undertaker on the merits of the deceased. Then they will be decanted into the bazaar of postcards, datebooks, scarves-everything but limited-edition bronze ashtrays in the shape of the Holy Ear-that the Met provides as a coda. Finally, laden with souvenirs like visitors departing from Lourdes, they will go home. Vincent, we hardly knew ye.
There is little point, 94 years after his death, in trying to imagine what Van Gogh would have made of all this. Neither the modern mass audience for art, nor the elevation of the artist as a secular saint, nor the undercurrent of faith in the expiratory powers of self-sacrificial genius really existed in 1890. The insoluble paradox of museumgoing, which is that famous art gets blotted out by the size of its public, had not become an issue, and it was not thought "elitist" to express regrets about it. Yet one feels it matters more with Van Gogh than with flabby events like last year's Vatican show. For if there was ever an artist whose oeuvre wants to be seen carefully, whose images beg for the solitary and unharried eye to receive their energy, pathos and depth of conviction, that man was Vincent Van Gogh-much of whose best work was done at Aries in the 15 months between February 1888 and May 1889. This rhapsodic outpouring of creative energy produced some 200 paintings, more than 100 drawings and watercolors and 200 letters, written in Dutch, French and English. Of this mass of work, 68 drawings, 76 paintings and a few specimen letters are included in = the present show, which has been 2 intelligently organized by Art Historian Ronald Pickvance around the proper armature-the strictly chronological unfolding of the painter's year.