Gathered in numbers, Van Gogh's paintings reveal a man fractured by disease, bitten by doubt, scarred by destitution, and rattled by fear -- but who strove to render beauty and order out of the bleak chaos that ruled his life. Van Gogh's paintings almost never reach that peace -- they are doomed, no matter his struggle to achieve sanity, to reproduce the artist's madness -- but that is precisely why they exude such remarkable tension and deep power.

In The Sower (1888), it's the end of the day and the figure is stooped from his long labor. He has come upon the only tree for acres and acres. It is slanted sharply downward, as if it has patiently waited decades for this man to pass beneath so it can fall on him. The tree is horribly sadistic, not only in its mortal mocking of the sower, who has done his toil only to encounter this unlikely booby trap. It also stands for Van Gogh's cruelty to himself: the tree's diagonal thrust nearly rips the canvas in two; it's like half an X canceling out the painting. (The other half, colored the same brown-black as the tree from which he has been disparted, is the sower himself.) Meanwhile, a huge, molten sun is setting right on top of the man's head. This is a perfect metaphor for the artist's genius: as lifegiving, hot, and massive as the sun; but as crushingly heavy, as oppressively demanding ... and now, like Van Gogh's life (he would be dead within two years), sinking under Saturn's weight.

Before the sun falls on him, Van Gogh is tirelessly planting the earth with the strange seeds of his mind. Strange, indeed: The sky, inexplicably, is not blue, nor even white or gray, but green and pink. (The reproduction above cheats toward yellow.) I have no idea why; I love works of art that rebuff my attempts to understand their maker's intent and methods. I do know that a green and pink sky seemed so natural to me that I didn't even notice the oddity until I'd looked at The Sower for several minutes. The colors pose as a natural, inextricable part of the whole. And of course they are natural. I want to say that genius inheres in making the impossible seem inevitable; it inheres there, and in making the old new again. Van Gogh has recast tired symbols -- sun, tree, fieldhand -- in wantonly incorrect colors, entrapped the subject and artist in implausible peril, and virtually defied us to mock or doubt his authenticity. Do we dare deny the emotional truth he's carved out of a handful of clichés and a green-pink sky? You may look at this painting and declare it melodramatic or self-pitying, find it garish, deluded; you may hate Van Gogh -- many do -- and I respect your opinion. But it would be a shame to dismiss this grisly, vivid beauty, this desperate mad aria; it would be a shame not to smirk ruefully at Van Gogh's profound existential joke, not to acknowledge his glowering, rocksure statement of artistic purpose -- all captured in a 22" x 18" frame.

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