Jeff's Met Picks: van Gogh

Cypresses

Vincent van Gogh  (Dutch, Zundert 1853–1890 Auvers-sur-Oise)

van Gogh called cypress trees "Nature's perfect architecture." If you walk north through Central Park to The Met, you pass a grove of them on Cypress Hill. It is an especially fun thing to do if you are taking in the number of canvases of cypresses by van Gogh hanging in the museum. van Gogh's paintings are three-dimensional as he slathers on the paint with such abandon, the wide and wild paint strokes have an actual depth. Paintings in relief. The colors range from brilliant to putrid and the painting is at once a peaceful view of hilly countryside and a manic ride through the mind of one of the world's most celebrated artists, the man who sold one work out of his 2,100 in his lifetime, works that now sell regularly for 50 to 100 million dollars.

I wonder that van Gogh wasn't so much troubled as he was lonely. He may have had a social adjustment problem that today we would place on an autism continuum. He suffered from vertigo and inner ear infections, and as such, owns a piece of my heart. He cut off his ear out of pain, not out of love. He's been described as bipolar, epileptic, alcoholic (especially fond of absinthe), porphyric, and schizophrenic. And the end of his life is not often told correctly. A group of local youths in Auvers-sur-Oise taunted van Gogh for weeks, pretending to be his friend. It is very likely they lured him to a garden one day and shot him. He stumbled blocks to his room where he told the manager he had shot himself, despite no gun ever being found. He never told on the boys. He thought they were his friends.

His last words were: The sadness will last forever.

I remember all of that when I see this painting. A man longing for connection, giving life to the inanimate around him. And I do not find the painting sad or the product of a tortured mind. I find it joyful and telling from a man capable of ecstatic highs who paid our price with inconsolable lows.