New York exhibition exploring Van Gogh▓s genius

Date: 18.10.2005 Source: news agency "Russian Antique"

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An exhibition titled ╚Vincent Van Gogh: The Drawings╩ opens today, Tuesday, October 18 and will rub through December 31 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This great exhibition, the largest of its kind ever presented in the United States, reveals drawing as the core of Van Gogh's art. From the start of his brief career, Van Gogh (1853√1890) rehearsed on paper not only the subjects but also the articulation of his paintings. This can be seen clearly in late drawings such as ╚Cypresses╩ (1889) and ╚Cafe Terrace on the Place du Forum╩ (1888), where reed pen strokes over graphite appear to have guided his brush in the paintings that followed. Metropolitan Museum of Art presents drawings for ╚Cypresses╩ and several other notable pictures alongside the paintings they preceded.

Colors seem to blare in the late paintings juxtaposed with drawings, as if Van Gogh's graphic manner somehow notates his thinking ahead about color. Next to the drawings, color in the paintings looks unnecessarily explicit. Foreshadowing of color in drawings occurs literally in a few images in thinned oil colors on paper, such as ╚Corridor in the Asylum╩ (1889). But even some early drawings in ink, graphite and black chalk, dense with shading, have an evocative richness that lingers like color in the viewer's mind.

╚Vincent Van Gogh: The Drawings╩ downplay Van Gogh's fraught inner life, which apparently led to his gunshot suicide in 1890, referencing it primarily to heighten appreciation of his creative discipline, resourcefulness and productivity.

The exhibition traces Van Gogh's startlingly rapid growth from a tonalist imitator of the genre painting popular in the Hague, where he studied briefly with Anton Mauve, to the author of a cosmopolitan style equally responsive to the work of Delacroix and Millet and to the most progressive influences of Parisian art. Where the early drawings of laboring, suffering peasants stage his vision as a dramatic appeal for compassion, the later ones do it with an almost mystical calligraphic brilliance that terms such as ╚Post-Impressionism╩ and ╚Expressionism╩ merely make it harder to see.