I read parts of a thick book of Van Gogh's letters to his brother Theo, some of the most famous correspondence ever written by a twentieth century artist. I don't know what I was looking for there. Not only did he produce hundreds of paintings, Van Gogh was a prolific writer, and sifting through his letters is, as you might expect, like listening to a psychiatric patient vent for hours on end -- occasionally revelatory, mostly exhausting. Because he exposed himself so volubly, little of Van Gogh's life, unlike Vermeer's, remains a mystery to us. (Except for that severed ear, of course, which is, finally, nothing more than a sick joke, a red herring (Dutch wordplay, ha ha).) And yet, for all his confidences to his brother, with whom he was so symbiotically close that Theo died of grief a year after his brother's suicide, the words of Vincent Van Gogh that stick with me are the ones that were splashed in huge text on the wall of the museum. Admiring the music of Berlioz and Wagner in a letter (written, I think, to his friend, the painter Paul Gauguin), Vincent longed to produce "a consolatory art for broken hearts!" Artists who make intensely personal work and ignore 'society' -- as if this is really possible, but OK -- are often labeled maudlin, or self-important, or inessential. I'm sure I've never heard pure self-expression justified quite so succinctly, convincingly, and eloquently, as when Van Gogh vowed his loyal artistic companionship to the heartbroken. He was so generous, so human! We have only to look at his paintings to earn his sympathy.
If we know too much, perhaps, about Van Gogh, next I will encounter an artist who looms even higher over his own homeland (almost literally) than Van Gogh does over the Netherlands -- but whose private life is a cipher. If Amsterdam reposes comfortably in its lenity, then I am about to go where repose scurries into the corner to hide from incessant traffic and carousal; where the greatest art treasury is called the Block of Discord. Amsterdam was temperate and urbane. Amsterdam was closing up by eleven o'clock. Amsterdam was restrained and compact. Amsterdam spoke English. Amsterdam was Vermeer's precise detail, Van Gogh's crippled passion, and pleasantly flat 10K runs around the Vondelpark.
Not Barcelona.
Next Week (or three)
Gaudí vs. Gothic, Miró & Picasso; Going for the Custo; Steep Hikes to High Parks (hard travel to sacred places?); and 95 Degrees in the Shade.
