Vincent is back. We left him at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1984, crop- eared and dazed in Arles: "Sometimes moods of indescribable anguish, sometimes moments when the veil of time and fatality of circumstances seemed to be torn apart for an instant." Two months after writing this, he voluntarily entered the lunatic asylum at Saint-Remy in Provence; and 15 months after that, discharged but still plagued by unassuageable fits of melancholy, he shot himself to death in the rural village of Auvers, just north of Paris. Van Gogh was 37 when he died -- at the same age, it has often been noted, as Raphael, Caravaggio and Watteau, and with an oeuvre no less brilliant than theirs.
The Met's great Van Gogh exhibition in 1984 tracked the artist's career from his arrival in Arles to the spring of 1889. Its successor, "Van Gogh in Saint-Remy and Auvers," which opens to the public this week, completes the trajectory. The organizer of both shows, the English art historian Ronald Pickvance, has brought together 70 paintings and 19 drawings from this last phase of Van Gogh's short life. Here we see the stuff of the most powerful legend of suffering and transcendence in modern art, and no superlatives seem apt to encompass its beauty and emotional range. It is a characteristic of great painting that no matter how many times it has been cloned, reproduced and postcarded, it can restore itself as an immediate utterance with the unexpected force of strangeness when seen in the original. Some of the Van Goghs in this show, such as the Museum of Modern Art's Starry Night, with its oceanic rush of whorling energy through the dark sky, ought by now -- if frequency of reproduction were as lethal as one sometimes thinks -- to be among the most overworked cliches in art. But on the wall, among less familiar paintings (of which there are many in this show, thanks to the persistence with which Pickvance nailed down the loans), they are refreshed, and we see them with new eyes.
The longer Van Gogh stayed in Provence the closer he thought he got to its "essence": its high tender color and sometimes violently modeled forms, its archaic antiquity and, above all, its light. In Arles the initial shock of the landscape, impacted in citron and chrome yellows, had dominated his palette. But once he was inside the asylum at Saint-Remy, a different and more reflective way of looking at the landscape around him took over. "What I dream of in my best moments," he wrote, "is not so much striking color effects as once more the half-tones."