Van Gogh's Winter Garden

Vincent Van Gogh, Winter Garden, March 1884, pen and ink & graphite on paper.

The exhibition of Van Gogh’s drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art demonstrates the ten-year inquiry, development, and stylization of a brilliant self-taught career. While full of lively drawings with staccato line work and intense descriptions of form, a series of five earlier pieces stand out for their potency of emotion and sincerity.

Van Gogh sought to “draw as easily as writing,” which he achieved when he discovered the reed pen in Arles and ‘curlicue ciphers’ which became a speedy and effective shorthand for thoughts about light, color, shape, and perspective.

However, prior to developing this energetic style that characterized later work, Van Gogh labored extensively in the Netherlands. His concerns were heavy with the influence of social realism and magazine illustrations, particularly in the gravity and idiosyncrasy of rural peasant life. Following a commission to document the Hague and a series of the “heads of the people,” he turned to the bleak winter landscape of his father’s vicarage. Here he found a somber and elegant metaphor for the vulnerability and hardship of life dependent on the land in leafless pollard birches and wind-blown winter hedges. These five drawings from the beautifully melancholic series of seven present perhaps his most poetic and heartfelt works on paper.

All from March 1884 and using a deliberate language in pen and ink, these vicarage drawings possess an emotional depth, communicating Van Gogh’s fascination and intrigue with the setting. Of the Winter Garden, he wrote, “the garden sets me dreaming.” A common theme in the approach to nature at the time, this sentiment was echoed by his friend Paul Gauguin, who wrote “Art is an abstraction – derive it from nature by dreaming in its presence” in 1888. Centralizing the focus on angular bare trees stiffened by winter cold, the starkness of the flat, empty fields becomes more pronounced. The scratching, forceful quality of line work reduces the complexity of tangled branches to a graphic potency. This is particularly apparent when set against the ephemeral, atmospheric cross-hatching in the sky, which gracefully describes diffuse shifts in cold light. With a touch of the macabre Van Gogh depicts a black-cloaked peasant as a grim specter – perhaps related to the building which appears to be a church on the horizon – inflecting this image with a possible foreboding spiritual meaning befitting his Dutch Reformist upbringing.

In a second, vertical rendering of Winter Garden, Van Gogh clarified the focus and drew more precise attention to the tree with vertical sets of parallel lines flattening the ground and surrounding fields. The language in the tree is refined from thick, forceful strokes in the trunk to hair-thin tapering in the upper branches. The sophistication of mark extends to graphite used evocatively in conjunction with ink work in the sky. Together with Behind the Hedges, these two drawings are sensitive, at times slow and calm, others restless and frenzied, yet always controlled, with tight, disciplined line work and subtle tonality.

The intellectual meaning in this series becomes more explicit in Pollard Birches and The Kingfisher, drawings executed with more specific pastoral and poetic references, though perhaps slightly less of the emotional conviction of the first three.

Van Gogh wrote, “If one draws a pollard willow as if it were a living being, then the surroundings follow almost by themselves.” Ambient scribbled horizontal lines are used behind the trees in the sky and to define planes of the ground. The gnarled trees appear as thick knuckles, with a concentration of density in the whirled knots of their trunks. The deliberate, massive pollards appear particularly vital and defiant when juxtaposed with the spindly tree at the left side of the picture, whose sparse leaves contribute to the sense of merely incidental surroundings, a spring life in suspended animation.

The Kingfisher is the least immediately seductive of the set. Highlighted with chalky opaque white, the subtlety of contrast is broken in an unnatural way. When using the lightness of the paper as his highest light, Van Gogh successfully communicated a wide range of ambiance and light, but this superimposition undercuts the image as a whole. It pierces and overpowers the murkiness of the luminous sky and reflections in the river, two of the drawing’s strongest parts. Nevertheless, the drawing manages a simplicity and economy of expression in lines which become nearly abstract at the right side of the image.

These five drawings demonstrate Van Gogh’s contemplative concern for the land and its people, showing how he was “always more at ease drawing landscapes,” despite a persistent goal toward portraiture or later concern with the colors and textures of the French countryside. This series carries forward the serious demeanor of a formative artist working out basic issues of drawing, yet tackles a concise and potent metaphor rife with emotion. Dark, sincere, heartfelt, and intriguing, they feel more private and intuitive than his later sketches or presentation drawings. They are perhaps all the more potent for their self-conscious absence of the buoyancy and enthusiasm of a stylized artist recognized by his peers, giving access to a more meditative and starkly honest place in the artist’s mind.

LINKS:

- Van Gogh: the Drawings
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art
- NY Times multimedia presentation

Natural Consciousness in "Russia!"

Ivan Aivazovsky, The Ninth Wave, oil on canvas, 1850

“I assure you, gentlemen, that to be too acutely conscious is a disease, a real, honest to goodness disease.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground, 1.2, 1864

Looking at the restraints placed on Russian artistic consciousness, seen in the Guggenheim’s “Russia!” one cannot help experiencing a weary exhaustion, taking up the struggles for expression and a hyper-aware national identity as so many peasants labored over the unending expanse of the oppressive motherland. In nature, Russian artists find a subject capable of tempering and challenging the force of totalitarian rule, as well as a source of inspiration to endure the bleakness of social currents and political turmoil.

How can something so beautiful and uncorrupted as the landscape of Russia’s glory present such overwhelming, staggering weight in place of the awe and giddy exhilaration one might anticipate? Pavel Peppershtein’s Flag in the Landscape (oil on canvas, 2005) consolidates centuries of history into a simple, desolate scene: stark white chill extending over three large panels in an arduous, all-encompassing and insurmountable expanse which dwarfs the seemingly-insignificant far-flung details of lone cottages, a single tree heaped with snow, a mounted rider perhaps in uniform, and at the most extreme distances tiny sprawling cities like remote islands. Instead of the corresponding white or grey sky one might expect for such a cold monolith of Siberian dominance, the viewer is assaulted with gaudy cerulean skies, choppy defiant brushstrokes rendering an even more detached harshness, punctuated with a thick red flag imposed at its horizon. In light of the foreground details so tiny they seem obscured, this flag becomes epic, consummate, occupying one’s vision with a disproportionate potency for its actual pictorial space.

So too does the domineering force of the Russian flag hulk over the minds of her artists, eclipsing and subverting identity into massive super-consciousness, too acutely aware of exterior pressures to the point of disease of consciousness, a uniquely Russian, pervasive epidemic.

Throughout the history of Russian art presented in this show – inextricably viewed in the context of national political and cultural history – a plague of suppression and subversion of identity spreads. Whether struggling to keep up with the French under Catherine the Great or attempting to work within the strict confines of Socialist Realism as mandated by the Communist Party, Russian artists have often faced an officially-prescribed doctrine of thought and agenda of visual culture. A conundrum arises as -- having relinquished the personal or idiosyncratic -- the sensitivity of national ego, the inherent pride or love for the land, or indeed the confounded imprisonment of so much of mankind in its service, fails to fully unseat the artist’s sense of personal awareness, yet captivates in national hyper-awareness.

Some of the most successful answers come in turning to nature, an indigenous path which arose in the late 17^th century icon painting – artists sought and found a space to ask questions, a terrain for thought, a place to project outrage or confusion, or even a force greater than any politics of man. Ivan Aivazovsky’s The Ninth Wave (oil on canvas, 1850) is an unsettling, dramatic and tempestuous scene of men hopelessly clinging to the mast of a sunken ship amidst colossal surging waves in the eerily beautiful sea back-lit to gorgeous transparency by an ambiguously eventful pink and yellow sky such as one may dream of in a vision of the heavens, either the most welcoming sunrise after the treachery of a night in turmoil or, more likely, the departing rays of a seductive and rapturous sunset sure to be the last vision of earthly beauty emblazoned on the minds of men about to be abandoned to the tortures of the night and certain death. This visage of man’s struggle is as horrifying as it is captivating, incorporating the most moody and awe-inspiring aspects of Romanticism with the wholly Russian introspection of a prescient self-awareness, a national consciousness drowning in its own tides of change and unrest, carrying all the weight of history against an airy optimism for the future, the fervent faith in spring which surely makes survival through the winter even remotely possible.

The undeniable and unequivocal importance of nature and the land – either as prison or salvation for the spirit – most poignantly surfaces as a status indicator of consciousness and identity throughout the tiresome and suffocating history of Russia. While at times bleak and cold, it shines through enough to demonstrate the true health and vitality of Russian visual culture; honestly, potently, lushly, cruelly, it is there, and it is real, acutely aware and always with an eye on the horizon, however historically manipulated or diseased.


LINKS:

- Russia! at the Guggenheim, New York NY
- Constructivist Criticism by Mark Stevens for New York magazine
- The" Russia!" art lovers should know by Roberta Smith for The New York Times