'Van Gogh: Face to Face'

July 6 - 13, 2000

[Art Reviews]

Seeing the face of God

The divine portraits of Vincent van Gogh

by Jeffrey Gantz
"VAN GOGH: FACE TO FACE." At the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, through September 24.

It's hard to believe, but 110 years after his death, Vincent van Gogh is still underexposed. His works are as famous as Michelangelo's or Rembrandt's or Picasso's, and they sell for mega-millions. Yet to the world he's still Vincent the starving artist and mad genius (syphilis, schizophrenia, and Menière's syndrome have been proposed; most likely he suffered from a combination of endogenous depression and psychomotor epilepsy caused by temporal-lobe dysfunction) who cut off his ear, painted Starry Night, and committed suicide in a wheatfield filled with crows at age 37. In part that's because his output strains comprehension: more than 2000 catalogued works in just 10 years, almost half of them oils. Even more incomprehensible is his consistency: there are minor van Goghs but no bad ones. Genius, as the restoration of Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling proved, is inexhaustible.
So, as, inevitably, it looked around for a blockbuster to follow "Pharaohs of the Sun" (1999), "John Singer Sargent" (1999), and Monet in the 20th Century" (1998), the Museum of Fine Arts hit upon Vincent. And since the two Metropolitan Museum megashows of the '80s -- "Van Gogh in Arles" (1984) and "Van Gogh in Saint-Rémy and Auvers" (1987) -- had pre-empted a period approach, the MFA decided to focus on the portrait. In a sense, every van Gogh is a psychological portrait of Vincent: Vincent's Bedroom and Café Terrace at Night (both 1888) offer a safe-haven vanishing point; The Church in Auvers and Street and Stairs with Five Figures (both 1890) find that haven blocked off; Wheatfield with Crows (1890) expresses his panic by vanishing out into the viewer. But his faces -- both his own and the friends he depicted, from Clasina Maria Hoornik in the Hague to Joseph Roulin in Arles -- offer a more direct experience.
These days, of course, every touring blockbuster has to deal with works that don't travel, skyrocketing insurance costs, and competition from other blockbusters. "Van Gogh: Face to Face" comes to the MFA from the Detroit Institute of Arts and will go on to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in October. And though these three institutions landed many of Vincent's major portraits, a number of familiar faces are missing. Self-Portrait with Dark Felt Hat (1886; JH 1089). Both versions of Père Tanguy (1887; JH 1351 and 1352). Self-Portrait in Front of the Easel (1888; JH 1356). La Mousmé (1888; JH 1519). Eugène Boch (1888; JH 1574). Lieutenant Milliet (1888; JH 1588). Both versions of the Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear (1888-'89; JH 1657 and 1658). The Self-Portrait with the blue-gray swirl of a background (1889; 1772). Boy with Uniform Cap (1890; JH 1879). All four 1890 portraits of The Arlésienne, Madame Ginoux (JH 1892-1895). And Portrait of Doctor Gachet (1890; JH 2007). This last one was bought by the late Daishowa Paper Company chairman Ryoei Saito for $82.5 million in May of 1990 and now apparently resides in a private collection in Europe after being bought back by Christie's for one-eighth the 1990 purchase price; the other version, JH 2014, couldn't leave the Louvre because of travel restrictions (that's also why the blue-gray swirling Self-Portrait isn't here). With 81 pieces, "Face to Face" is about all one could expect; it's the museum's hype (press notices started going out last year) that's overboard.
Then there's Van Gogh Face to Face: The Portraits, ostensibly a catalogue of the show (even though it has a slightly different title), actually a collection of illustrated essays on Vincent as a portrait artist. The writing is instructive if not inspired; the reproduction is so-so (Vincent put so much paint on his canvases that his work is almost unreproduceable); the $50 hardback/$30 softcover price is more than fair. You have to have it. But in no way does it catalogue the show: there's no notation as to which of the 228 plates is in any of the three versions of "Face to Face." Did the organizers (all named, with show dates, on the copyright page) want to make their blockbuster seem bigger and better than it is? The plates are in rough chronological order but with numerous exceptions, and no index. That's not the end of the puzzlement, either: 22 works that are in the MFA's "Face to Face" (including a major late one, Portrait of a Girl, JH 2056) are not in the catalogue. Confused? It gets worse: the MFA and the catalogue frequently use different titles to identify the same painting -- the MFA's Young Girl in an Apron (JH 300) appears in the book as Sien's Daughter with Pinafore. Vincent is partly responsible -- he didn't give his works titles -- but surely this mess could have been avoided. (In desperation, and with apologies, this reviewer has resorted to citing the JH catalogue numbers from Jan Hulsker's The Complete Van Gogh.)
The show itself is not overcrowded, the chronological order lets you follow Vincent's development as a portrait painter (there's a particularly perceptive wall text for the last two works in the show), and the audio guide goes beyond the norm by quoting from his letters and getting ear-catching insights from the likes of local photographer Elsa Dorfman (try stop 56, Young Girl in an Apron). The lighting, however, could be better (the scalloped shadows on the two portraits of Marie Ginoux are especially distracting), the works could have been numbered in some way, and photographs of some of Vincent's sitters would have put his achievement in perspective.
SHORTCOMINGS ASIDE, "Face to Face" is, like any van Gogh exhibit, an event that puts the meaning back into "must-see." Some viewers may be disappointed to find that 35 of the 81 works here are not oils, and that half the show predates Vincent's 1886 arrival in Paris. They shouldn't be. These days even the Met would be hard-put to re-create its two '80s blockbusters (which had their own major omissions). More important, the wealth of early drawings here strips Vincent to the bone, reminding us that even before there emerged his distinctive combination of dots and hatch strokes and his foreshortening of foregrounds and his psychological use of color and his intuition for energy fields and electromagnetism and cosmology (yes, it appears that neighboring spiral galaxies NGC 5194 and 5195 have sneaked into Starry Night), this son of a Dutch Reformed pastor and nephew of three gallery owners had discipline and technique as well as genius. Yet from the beginning he was an outsider. Just consider his models: old-age pensioners ("orphans" is his revealing name for them, as if he felt himself to be parentless), peasants, prostitutes, working folk, the kind of people this devotee of John Bunyan and Thomas à Kempis and Ernst Renan considered the salt of the earth. Granted, the pensioners of the Dutch Reformed Old People's Home in the Hague were about the only models Vincent could afford, but there's no doubt he identified with them. The top-hatted orphan man of JH 284 (1882; catalogue plate #12) looks at us resigned but unbowed, like the workhorses Vincent so sympathized with, and there's no sugarcoating. When Vincent finally acquired a sou'wester, he began to dress his subjects up as fishermen (for example, JH 309; #13), connecting their actual weathered faces with fantasized hard-working lives.
Vincent himself connected with real life when in 1882, to the dismay of his parents and friends, he took in the prostitute Clasina Maria Hoornik. Sien Seated (JH 144; #11) shows her wearing an elegant black merino dress and seated in a chair in an attitude of melancholy; you don't need to see her face to feel her despair. Both Sien Sewing (JH 145; not in the catalogue) and Sien Seated Sewing (JH 346; #59) depict her in profile, the face hard, unattractive, the hands engaged in honest work. In Sien with Cigar Sitting on the Floor near Stove (JH 141; #64) she relaxes in a more casual white outfit, joyless still. Vincent initially wanted to marry Sien, seeing her as an image of the downtrodden and neglected, but after a year and a half he, like the fathers of her two children, left: the complexity of real life was more than he could handle. The complexity of his portraits, on the other hand, increased. The dark faces of Head of a Peasant (JH 563; #18), Head of a Peasant (JH 687; #4), and Peasant Woman with Red Bonnet (JH 722; #8), all from 1885, stare at us unashamed; the latter two seem almost insolent, challenging us to plumb spiritual depths that belie their economic position.
Vincent looks so frankly at these people, it's not surprising to find that, in Paris and strapped for models, he's able to look frankly at himself. "Face to Face" doesn't have his earliest self-portraits -- possibly JH 996 (#81), certainly JH 1089 (#85) and 1090 (#172) -- but Self-Portrait with a Felt Hat (JH 1211; #94) shows that by 1887 his mature self-portrait style had evolved. The red beard keys the painting's textures: his whole face seems to bristle, and the gray tweedy coat he's wearing; only the hat looks soft. The self-portraits of JH 1248 (#95) and JH 1249 (#92) extend this notion. The gray-brown coat of JH 1248 is dissolving into the background, the universe, as if to say it's all part of Creation; the more complex green and orange of JH 1249 incorporates the red-bearded artist into Creation-as-harmony-of-color. (Portrait of Alexander Reid -- JH 1250; #93 -- goes farther still by merging face, jacket, and background into a riot of orange and green and yellow.) Self-Portrait (JH 1309; #96 -- this is the Detroit straw-hat portrait, not the Met's disputed JH 1354) looks at us warily and defensively, and the style is in retreat: shellshocked by the fast-paced intensity of Paris, the artist has reaffirmed his identity by donning a blue jacket.
In Arles, where he arrived in February of 1888, Vincent was able to turn his attention outward. "Face to Face" includes both versions of his late-1888 painting of Marie Ginoux (whose husband owned the establishment that Vincent depicts in The Night Café): The Arlésienne, Madame Joseph-Michel Ginoux (JH 1624; #181) and The Arlésienne, Madame Ginoux (JH 1625; #148). Judy Sund's catalogue essay argues that JH 1625, in which Marie is shown with parasol and gloves, is Vincent's "first impression" and that JH 1624, in which she appears with several paperbacks, is the more carefully worked painting. Certainly JH 1624 is the more refined: rather than being limited by her accessories, this Madame Ginoux is lost in literature. It's too bad "Face to Face" doesn't give us any of the four portraits (JH 1892-1895; #184-185) a nostalgic Vincent did in February of 1890: based on Gauguin's late 1888 drawing and portrait, they show an older (Marie was not in good health), rougher-featured, troubled-but-maternal-looking woman. The catalogue, here indispensable, includes two of the four van Goghs and both Gauguins as part of an illuminating discussion by Sund that begins on page 200.
Van Gogh Face to Face: The Portraits also helps out when we come to the family of postman Joseph Roulin. "Face to Face" has a generous Roulin collection: seven depictions of Joseph himself (including the most famous, the MFA's own JH 1522; #145); five of his wife, Augustine (including the MFA's La berceuse, JH 1671; #125); two of older son Armand; two of younger son Camille; and three that show baby Marcelle. Missing are JH 1646 (#155, Augustine) and JH 1879 (#156, what Face to Face and most authorities identify as Camille, though Hulsker believes it's a boy Vincent painted at Saint-Rémy) -- and why these are important is that in his catalogue essay Roland Dorn posits a Roulin-family series of five and, beginning on page 164, lays out an ingenious theory of color coordination. Regardless of whether Dorn is right, Vincent has patently developed an alternative background strategy defined by flat areas of color rather than galactic swirls; it's evident in the two absent bandaged-ear portraits (one of which anticipates -- or echoes -- the red-orange background of JH 1879) and the Self-Portrait Dedicated to Paul Gauguin (JH 1581; #129) as well as the Ginoux and most of the Roulin portraits. On the other hand, Doctor Félix Rey (JH 1659; #128) has a kind of musical wallpaper behind the sitter; the JH 1675 portrait of Joseph Roulin (in the show but not the catalogue) and both versions of La berceuse have flowered wallpaper; and of course there's the absent JH 1772 Self-Portrait (#174), whose blue-gray swirl suggests an electromagnetic field. The absent portraits of the painter Eugène Boch (#140) and Lieutenant Paul-Eugène Milliet (#141) fall in between, the former's background starry against the blue of infinity, the latter's turbulent green embossed with the star and crescent moon of Milliet's regiment.
"Face to Face" thins out during the last year of Vincent's life, first at the asylum in Saint-Rémy and then in Auvers-sur-Oise. We get one of the last self-portraits, JH 1770 (#169), where, as in JH 1356 (#28), Vincent is trying to reassert his identity as an artist, his blue painter's jacket merging into the immortality of the dark blue background. There's The Gardener (JH 1779; #162), whose subject, not too unlike Vincent, blends into the fields behind him. There are some odd renderings of children: Child with an Orange (JH 2057; #190) depicts an almost adult face with an unsettling, thin-lipped smile; the same is true of Two Children (JH 2052; #189) and the absent Head of a Boy with a Carnation Between His Teeth (JH 2050; #191). Adeline Ravoux (JH 2036; #197) is the 13-year-old daughter of the innkeeper whose auberge Vincent stayed at in Auvers-sur-Oise; she looks both grim and strangely exalted against a dark blue infinity background with its hint of pale roses.
As for Dr. Paul-Ferdinand Gachet, he appears here in Vincent's only etching, Portrait of Dr. Gachet (JH 2028; two versions in the show, neither in the catalogue). The elongated face is characteristic of Vincent's two Gachet oil portraits but not, to judge from the contemporary photograph that's in the Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh in Amsterdam, of the actual Dr. Gachet. The catalogue illustration of the $82.5 million oil portrait (#198) shows the doctor leaning against a red table in an attitude of pensive melancholy, his face looking almost more like Vincent's than his own, his blue frock coat disappearing into the roiling blue (cosmos?) behind him.
WHAT, IN THE END, do Vincent's portraits tell us about him? It's significant that they didn't always please their sitters: Dr. Rey's mother used his to stop a gap in her henhouse; Adeline Ravoux's father sold her portrait and The Mairie in Auvers for 40 francs. Vincent's subjects are almost invariably seen close up, and in space that's flat but infinite. Often figure and background bleed, as if to suggest that flesh is mere matter -- or, more likely, given Vincent's religious beliefs, that matter is divine energy. And it isn't just the Christ figure in his Pietà (After Delacroix) and the Lazarus of The Raising of Lazarus that take on his own features: portrait after portrait is suffused with his own doubt and loneliness, but also his determination to explore and understand the universe. Many of his subjects don't look ready to accompany him: they want to be seen in a comfortable armchair, not as the matrix of an electromagnetic field or a premonition of Einstein's discovery that matter curves space. Like his late implosive landscapes, whose increasingly troubled perspective lines bespeak an increasingly troubled mind, Vincent's late portraits suggest an artist in crisis -- the Auvers portraits seem circumspect next to the Sien group, or the trio of women in white caps (JH 544, 678, and 745; none in the catalogue). Yet even in Auvers there were masterpieces like Wheatfield with Crows and the JH 2007 Dr. Gachet. Dead at 37, Vincent had a lot left to say.