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The idea that landscapes like this are fantasies, mere projections of psychosis on the mundane, is wrong and does no justice to Van Gogh's exquisite sense of reality. The matter is more complicated than that. It is true that Van Gogh applied the formal system he preferred to the Provencal landscape: the rapid, shifting notation of dots, speckles and slashes in the drawings, with the white paper burning like noon light behind the sepia ink; the characteristic spirals of the paintbrush, which link back to the decorative line work of Edo Japanese screens and point forward to the whiplash rhythms of art nouveau. But this handwriting was not mechanically stamped on the landscape, as the style marks of mere obsessives tend to be. On the contrary, it was infinitely responsive to the nuances of fact. Dealing with the "difficult bottle-green hue" of his famous motif, the cypress (of which the real landscape around Saint-Remy is now disappointingly short), he went to great trouble to set forth the realities inside its hairy, obelisk-like silhouette: the mauve cast of shadow on the trunk and branches, the sparks of almost pure chrome within the enfolding darkness of its leaves.
To watch him shifting gears in the portrait of the elderly head attendant of the asylum, Charles-Elzeard Trabuc, is to receive a vivid lesson in the adjustment of manner to motif. Trabuc's cotton jacket, with its emphatic parallel stripes of blackish-blue, is as explicitly stylized as anything produced within the next quarter-century by Klimt or, for that matter, Miro. But in the head, this graphic energy is subordinated to volume, to the immobile self-containment of a man who, Van Gogh realized, "has seen an enormous amount of suffering and death." The chin and mouth are compressed, but the brow bulges irresistibly from its pale background, the relation between head and coat subtly maintained by the black strokes of hair and mustache and the unwavering darkness of Trabuc's eyes.
In such portraits, Van Gogh attained the grave humane fullness of his great model Rembrandt; the landscapes are like nothing anyone had painted before. No wonder the little asylum, with its worn flagstone corridors and pine-shadowed garden, remains one of the sacred sites of modernist culture. Here, as in Manet's Paris and Cezanne's Aix-en-Provence, art turned on its pivot in the 19th century to face the 20th. One does not see many exhibitions like this in a lifetime.