Exhibition explores how Van Gogh changed reality with poetic imagination

It happened to me in room two. There are six of them in the first major Van Gogh exhibition at the National Gallery in London – no fewer than 61 works of art painstakingly assembled from museums and private collections around the world. They all date from the period 1888-1890, before the painter moved to Arles in the south of France and then moved again to Auvers-sur-Oise outside Paris in the few months before his death, aged 37, in July 1890, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Many were painted during the year the artist spent in the asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, outside Arles. Together, they represent the great flowering of Van Gogh’s genius, and there are several recognised masterpieces. The show has a theme, of course, which we will get to – but first, sooner or later, if you visit this exhibition, chances are you will too. You will be looking at a painting and your heart will burst with joy.

It happened to me while I was contemplating The garden of the Saint-Rémy asylum (1889), one of the first works Van Gogh painted after he voluntarily checked himself in for medical treatment in May 1889, following months of unstable mental health after he cut off his ear with a razor in December 1888.

Van Gogh was confined to his room and the hospital grounds at the time, but he delighted in the overflowing expanse of trees, shrubs and grasslands he discovered there.

The garden was in bloom when he arrived and this painting of a shady corner, devoid of people, is both relaxing and full of colour. In the same room is Iris (1889), painted on cardboard because the artist had run out of canvas. It is a marvel.

Van Gogh’s ability to provoke intense emotions in the viewer is almost unique in the Western canon. In recent years, it has sometimes seemed as if his reputation has been on the wane, even among the Post-Impressionists: Cézanne is said to have been the greater artist; Gauguin, the more influential. True, perhaps neither of them suffered from excessive familiarity like Van Gogh; one wonders whether the ubiquity of works like The sunflowers y The starry night has begun to blind us to the depth of his talent.

Van Gogh was an enormously productive artist; works here, such as The big plane trees: repairing roads in Saint-Rémy (1889) o The green vineyard (1888), taken in Cleveland, Ohio, and the village of Otterlo in the Netherlands, respectively, which look absolutely fresh. Van Gogh paints with such sincere passion that the canvases, especially those from these years, when he was at his most anguished and plagued by a sense of failure, convey something that seems transcendent, beyond talk of composition and style.

Up close, for example, it is possible to see how his brushstroke technique evolved from the divisionismin which the paint is applied directly, without mixing, so as not to attenuate the intensity of the original color of the tube. However, here, in the presence of these broken brush strokes and thick globs of paint, the only thing that is surprising is how the works come to life with a vividness that is impossible to convey in prints and reproductions. The white spot to the right of the tree in The sower (1888) seems almost accidental, the bright stars in Starry night over the Rhône (1888) shine on a sea so dark and blue that the layers of impasto could be fathoms deep.

The exhibition Poets and lovers explores how Van Gogh used his poetic imagination to transform reality. He abandons formal perspective in the magnificent The bedroom (1888), turns a drinking companion into a mythical being (with green-toned skin) in The Lover: Portrait of Lieutenant Milliet (1888) already the owner of the local café in a regional archetype in two versions of The Arlesian (1890).

Beautifully designed

The exhibition also proudly displays a triptych that he drew himself in a letter to his brother Theo, two paintings of sunflowers painted a year apart flanking La Berceuse: The Lullaby (1889). One wonders why he suggested it. Perhaps because his central figure – Augustine Roulin – has a gleaming yellow-gold face and hair: a sunflower woman, seated in the centre.

The exhibition is beautifully designed, with each room – even the benches in them – a different colour. Bright yellow for room five, which contains a triptych; a silvery green suggesting the colour of olive leaves in room six. Signage is kept to a minimum – titles without captions, found in a separate pamphlet. There is just you and the paintings (plus a few drawings, which condense the artist’s technique in their use of line and compositional devices).

Yet it is the paintings that remain in my memory, from the olive groves to the vineyards, from the parks to the people. There is darkness here, in the towering tree trunks, in the tangled undergrowth, but there is also much wonder, much light, many small pleasures, like the lovely way Van Gogh paints buildings. The National Gallery clearly wanted this exhibition to be unmissable. And it is.

Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers on display from September 14 to January 19.

©The Independent

Translation: Jesus Abraham Hernandez