The demanding exhibition of Van Gogh’s work presented this fall by the Musée d’Orsay in Paris is surprising, if you will pardon the expression, and focuses on the last work of the tormented Dutch artist. The extraordinary painting from the Auvers-sur-Oise period features a disturbing oil painting from Otterlo’s Kröller-Müller collection: in The Threshold of Eternity, a leading example of the artist’s plastic plenitude in a difficult time. It represents a tired farmer sitting on a straw chair with his head between clenched hands that accentuate the drama of the scene. Curiously, the painting does not appear in the exhibition, although it does appear on a full page in the catalogue. The Arles years, in fact, stand out for the memory of situations of violence that culminated in the tragedy of the imputed ear and the forced confinement of the artist in the psychiatric hospital of Saint-Rémy in Provence in 1889, when the creative energy of the painter He already perceived the admiration of the best artists of the moment: Monet and Toulouse-Lautrec among them.
Later came the exile of Auvers, which gave the painter intimacy with Dr. Gachet, a witness to the artist’s decline. A paying pensioner at the Ravoux hostel, Van Gogh feverishly completes more than thirty drawings and seventy oil paintings that in time will become legendary: the portrait of Gachet and the preceding landscapes that the family of his doctor friend treasures and that still dazzle us in the family home. 1888 is the year of the painter’s escape to Arles, blinded by the light of Provence, which opens an essential parenthesis in the artist’s later work, with Vue des Saintes-Maries, today the perfect example of a serene moment, along with Jardin Fleuri from The Hague. Two brave metaphors, in my opinion, in those days of belligerent unrest.
The pleasant, unexpected and surprising relationship with Gauguin, the bold and racial adventurer obsessed with color, I would say, allows Van Gogh to divine a new art of revolutionary tracery and color that curiously captivates the Dutch painter and perhaps explains his terrible end. Paintings such as Église d’Auvers and the Sous-bois avec deux personnages are exquisite works that still enrich private collections that are difficult to visit in the artist’s environment, along with the solitary etching that points in sinuous lines to the nearby figure of Dr. Gachet, as well as others accomplished portraits of the doctor in an awake attitude and with furious expressive polychromy, with blues and vivid touches of clean yellow and green with a predominantly fauve impulse. A feat avant la lettre.
What would the world be without art? Gachet fantasizes. Simply, a struggle without defined goal or objectives. Rare moral in a self-confessed positivist, a severe listener of strays who parade through the sanatorium and the pages of the spiritual sciences, in a time when he already knows scientific rigor and experimentation, with even sibylline theosophical flashes. The citizens of Auvers are seen today, to the inquisitive historical gaze, as the clear visualization of the ideals of the French Third Republic, peasants and settlers who live the incipient urbanism and the rising flow of occasional visitors in what will soon be an unstoppable summer parade. “Les nouvelles social couches”, of which Gambetta spoke sarcastically, will be tinged with mourning after the lacerating Franco-Prussian war.
Among those emigrants, or curious weekday tourists, was Arthur Gustave Ravoux and his family who will run the mairie where Van Gogh will stay for three and a half francs a day. He fled Paris in 1888, an astral year that advised the Van Goghs to do the same: free themselves from the anxiety of the city and seek “tranquility, rest and stillness after an empty and busy life” in the open countryside. Van Gogh family adventure. The meeting with Gachet was, in a certain way, providential. Mental doctor at the Salpêtrière, Sunday painter and exceptional witness to the patients’ ravings. Homme avec pipe is the doctor’s first bistre note, with an intimate and friendly gesture. A model of a modern citizen, moreover, who will initiate a collection sponsored by Guillemine, the rampant and successful Parisian dealer of the century who will boldly direct opinion on the “healthy art of the day.” Cézanne, Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley and all the well-known artists who shared a Japanese-style Sunday lunch, no matter where. A school of complicit citizenship, without a doubt, that is committed to the recovery of the adrift Dutch painter.
Deux femmes à travers champs, a brief canvas from 1890 on paper, is an accurate jab at the emerging sensibility. Two young people in festive attire walk through a bright yellow wheat field awaiting harvest. Impasse avec maison, a splendid fulminating point of lead, and Sous-bois avec deux personnages, a spectacular canvas already mentioned, are the images that will last after a fleeting visit to the Parisian exhibition.
