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This, not the madman of legend, was the real and visionary Van Gogh. The notion that his paintings were "mad" is the most idiotic of all impediments to understanding them. It was Van Gogh's madness that prevented him from working; the paintings themselves are ineffably sane, if "sanity" is to be denned in terms of exact judgment of ends and means and the power of visual analysis. All the signs of extreme feeling in Van Gogh were tempered by his longing for concision and grace. Those who imagine that he just sat down in cornfields and let the landscape write itself through him are refuted by the actual sequence of his drawings. Some of his most vivid and impassioned-looking sketches-the coiling, toppling surf, the silent explosion of wheat stocks, the sun grinding in the speckled sky above the road to Tarascon-are in fact copies he made after his own paintings and sent to his fellow painters Emile Bernard and John Russell to show them what he had been up to. As a draughts man, Van Gogh was obsessively interested in stylistic coherence. Just as one can movements of "his brush imitating the microform of nature-the scrawling striations of a gnarled olive trunk, the "Chinese" contortions of A weathered limestone-so the drawings break down the pattern of the landscape and re-establish it in terms of a varied, but still codified system of marks: dot, dash, stroke, slash. In his best drawings sur le motif, most of which belong to his second visit to Montmajour in July 1888, one sees how this open marking evokes light, heat, air and distance with an immediacy that "tonal" drawing could not. Space lies in the merest alteration of touch; light shines from the paper between the jabs and scratches.
And so Van Gogh's Arlesian work offers one of the most moving narratives of development in Western art: a painter-and, needless to repeat, a very great one-inventing a landscape as it invents him. The inevitable result is that one cannot visit Aries without seeing Van Goghs everywhere. The fishing boats on the dark beach of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer have gone, and the fishermen's troglodytic cottages are now replaced by anthill apartment buildings. But to see an Arlesian orchard foaming into April bloom is to glimpse Van Gogh rendering them ("Absolutely clear ... A frenzy of impastos of the faintest yellow and lilac on the original white mass"). Even his symbolism leaves its traces. One cannot see the purple underlights in ploughed furrows against the sunset without thinking of the strange, dull mauve luminescence that persvades the earth in The Sower, helping suggest that this dark creature fecundating the soil under the citron disk of the declining sun is some kind of local deity, an agrestic harvest god. One apple tree will evoke the Japanese roots of Van Gogh's spike line; another will suggest how Piet Mondrian's apple trees (and with them, his early sense of grids and twinkling interstices) relate to Van Gogh; a third, resembling the veined canopy of a Tiffany lamp, may recall what the decorative arts of 1900 owed to the cloisonism (decorative "inlaying" of the picture surface with outlines) of Van Gogh and Gauguin. The Paris of the cubists may have gone; but like the Umbria of Piero della Francesca, Van Gogh's Provence manages to endure, both in and out of the frame.
-By Robert Hughes