“In the last few days I have been working a lot and very fast and in this way I try to express the desperate pace of things in this world of modernity”. At the top, in full light, Vincent van Gogh lived his last days in Auvers-sur-Oise. There, between wheat fields and freedom, he reached the top and, immediately afterwards, he decided to fall off. Of those barely two and a half months, VVG spent two days in Paris and in his last two days he dedicated himself to dying badly after shooting himself.
Between the curtain and the burial, a blinding whirlwind in which the troubled painter starred in one of the most extraordinary swan songs in history: in 70 days he finished 74 paintings, some anthological. A glorious drive that ended in descent into hell and ascension to posterity. So much work in so little time. A very short career, barely ten years, after traveling through half of Europe and seeing his fate at his parents’ house in Nuenen.
The fireworks that you smell in Amsterdam continue to smoke from that fireworks display. The Van Gogh museum turns 50 and celebrates it with 57 of those 74 paintings. A display similar to that of the Rijksmuseum that brought together 28 of Vermeer’s 37 paintings.
In Auvers, Van Gogh literally lost his life. He had just come from being locked up in the Saint-Rémy sanatorium and when he came out he painted freely, with all his styles and in places that no one had noticed before. It was his last testament. And we must pay our respects. Take off our straw hat and revere it. We already cut off his ear another day, if that.
One day, ten years ago, museum researchers Louis van Tilborgh and Teio Meedendorp considered what could be the most beautiful and unique exhibition with which to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Museumsplein temple promoted by the artist’s great-nephew, his namesake Vincent Van Gogh, whom everyone called The Engineer.
“We needed time –explains Meedendorp, Magazine guide for the entire show- because we had to tie up many loose ends, on paper there were 74 paintings in 70 days. Pretty amazing. We were working on the latest catalog of the work, and we were intrigued by his state of mind and his relationship with his doctors, because he had studied himself little. That’s when we started to see his Auvers-sur-Oise period.”
The figure of Monsieur Gachet, a Parisian doctor who spent weekends in the town, was key. “Her advice to him was: ‘paint all the time.’” Van Gogh was happy working because it was the best therapy of his. The only thing he wanted was to flee from Saint Remy, there he had a very strong crisis, in which he bordered on absolute madness.
“We wanted to see that period under the magnifying glass, his relationship with Dr. Gachet. The first thing we saw was that in those 70 days, the painter was changing his style without any problem. He achieved absolute mastery. It was difficult to align them chronologically, some are mentioned in the letters, others are not, ”says Meedendorp.
The curator explains that the 54 paintings are a complete compendium of his eventful life, a hellish roller coaster. “It is as if he was telling us how great and complete he is as a painter due to the amount of work, quality and time in which he achieves it. He chooses to paint quickly and simply to the point that some of his works are like very complete sketches with very few brushstrokes and in a format that he barely worked on, which is square. Other works are very detailed, more refined, ”he details.
At the same time experiment. There is a composition where he commands blue and it is surely inspired by the Hiroshige prints that he had just seen on what would be his last trip to Paris. Japonism was very fashionable in Paris at the end of the 19th century.
Van Gogh worked like day laborers, from sunrise to sunset: “He got up at four and at five he was in the fields until lunchtime. Then he would return to the place or if the canvas was almost finished, he would finish it off in that space in the inn where the painters worked. He would finish one painting a day and, after two or three days later, he would finish them off or retouch them a bit”, says Meedendorp.
A part of the exhibition is made up of a series of vintage postcards of Auvers and its surroundings and has helped to define the perspectives of some paintings of The Fool with Red Hair. The curator says it with a small mouth, but the collection is his. He has been accumulating it over the last 15 years and has given it to the museum all these months.
“He changed the landscape to his liking, but the fields and houses are still there. Another of Van Gogh’s geniuses –he analyzes- is that he painted what the rest of the painters in the area did not look at. They were followers of (Charles-François) Daubigny and they all went to the river, but he didn’t. He painted the church, the old houses…”.
The painter’s show is special for several reasons, one being the collaboration of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, where he will travel when it closes in Amsterdam in October. The Parisian art gallery houses the collection of vangoghs bequeathed by the son of Dr. Gachet, who amassed paintings in exchange for medical services and was very zealous in showing them off.
Meedendorf explains that Cachet turned away anyone who wanted to see his collection. “In 1905 five of his paintings were secretly photographed. He got so angry, he recalls, that he never left them or let them photograph. In fact, when De la Faille made the catalog raisonné in 1928, those that had not been secretly photographed were only numbered and described. There are paintings that were not seen for the first time until 1950”.
If the exhibition The Last Months… is so important, it is because the entire collection of the Orsay can only be donated to Van Gogh. “It was one of the conditions of the doctor’s son. And that the Van Gogh Foundation did not yet exist, but it was already carburing in the head of its promoter, The Engineer. And that was crucial. We have had to work with 30 institutions, hard work ”, confesses the commissioner who closed agreements on the campaign. Yes, there was a painting that arrived late, but unlike the late students, this one was allowed to pass.
The compendium of works is a lesson in mastery, a source from which Matisse drank with measure or with a nose, as is the case with Edvard Munch, who never concealed his admiration. Van Gogh paints the road with wide, clean bands of jade that Munch recreates in The Scream.
Vincent also howls in his museum. He whistles, sings, is happy, and suddenly decides to get out of the way. From the top of life to the pit of nothing. “What false invulnerability is happiness”, sings Silvia Pérez Cruz. She sounds a shot and the crows of the wheat fields take flight.
