2023-06-18 08:20:21
A group of people tours the exhibition “Van Gogh’s Cypresses” at the Metropolitan Museum (Met) in New York. Some 30 institutions and collectors from around the world have collaborated with the Met to make this very specific exhibition possible / EFE
The Metropolitan Museum of New York (Met) has open to the public, until August 27, an exhibition focused on the cypresses of the Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh that reveals that the post-impressionist master was fascinated with these trees for the last two years of his life , longer than expected.
“Van Gogh’s Cypresses” brings together in the same room two iconic paintings from 1889 that are usually visited in two different museums in the city, the “Starry Night” at MoMA and the “Wheat Field with Cypress” at the Met , and that they had not met since 1901.
They are accompanied by dozens of works from all over the world, including some twenty paintings, watercolors and drawings.
The curator, Susan Alyson Stein, highlighted that some 30 institutions and collectors have collaborated with the Met to make possible this very specific exhibition, which she described as “once in a generation” and that changes any idea regarding the history of one of the most important artists. recognizable and studied.
According to him, the “conventional” theories place the discovery of the cypresses by Van Gogh following his admission to the Saint-Rémy psychiatric hospital, in June 1889, but the sample ensures that those trees already fed his imagination months before, and “tells the background for the first time.”
“DARK NOTE” BETWEEN COLOR
After two years in Paris, Van Gogh moved to Arles, a country town in the Provence region, in search of color and sun for his works, but he found the “dark note” of these slender trees associated with death, which he incorporated into a drawing as early as March 1888.
In this drawing, which begins a journey divided into three stages, the first of which is called “The roots of his invention” and dated between February 1888 and May 1889, Van Gogh captures a landscape with a path flanked by the typical willows of the Netherlands with a lone cypress tree in the background.
The work “Starry Night”, by Van Gogh, is part of the exhibition on cypresses, at the Metropolitan Museum of New York / EFE
“The cypresses immediately struck a chord with the Dutch artist, who explored their design in works produced during the 15-month period he spent in Arles and continued to examine it until his final months in the psychiatric hospital,” two months before his suicide, in June 1890, Stein explained.
Initially, Van Gogh places these trees in the background by portraying vivid landscapes of flowering orchards, some clearly inspired by the pointillism of Georges Seurat, but later turns them into an “emblematic design” between May and September 1889, a period marked by their physical and mental deterioration.
By then the painter had already lost his ear during the mental crisis for which he was admitted to the Saint-Rémy hospital, where he created more than ever from his improvised studio in a spare room and following his subsequent walks in the countryside, which inspired the “Starry night”, the “Wheat field with cypresses” or the majestic “Cypresses”.
Nature continues to move the painter in his last stage, also in Saint-Rémy, between October 1889 and May 1890, when he “closes the circle” and produces a final work in which an enormous cypress tree stands in a wheat field. before a crescent moon and a star, with its characteristic brushstrokes.
THE SISTER-IN-LAW, A KEY FIGURE
The presentation at the Met was attended by a descendant of Van Gogh, Machteld van Laer, who claimed the figure of his great-great-grandmother, Johanna Van Gogh-Bonger -widow of the painter’s younger brother, Theo- as the key figure that preserved the master’s work and contributed greatly to his posthumous fame.
“Half a year following Vincent died Theo died, so (Johanna) was a young widow with a one-year-old boy, who was my grandfather. She had this whole legacy that she might have gotten rid of, but she felt responsible as Theo always said that Vincent was a great artist, even though he wasn’t famous at the time,” she noted.
“Jardín en Alés”, by Van Gogh, is another of the pieces by the Dutch master on display at the Met in New York / EFE / Ángel Colmenares
That legacy included some 800 letters, most of them from Vicent to Theo, an art dealer by profession, in which the former spoke to the latter of “his art, his intentions and how he felt”, with numerous mentions of cypress trees. Some of them are written on the walls of the rooms and that complement the works.
The woman, who said she was excited that her family legacy is in the New York “temple of art” and “proud” of her great-great-grandmother, read some ideas that she helped spread, such as this comment by Van Gogh to her brother regarding cypresses : “I am amazed that no one has made (painted) them yet as I see them”. (EFE)
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