Art: Electricity in Water

Nearly 80 years after his death, Vincent Van Gogh still remains a startlingly modern artist. Psychologists continue to delight in analyzing the psychoses betrayed by his tormented whorls. Lovers of abstract expressionism find in his sulfurous palette a close relationship with Pollock and De Kooning. Yet, as is made clear by a lively display of 90 Van Gogh watercolors and drawings (see color opposite) that go on view this month at Philadelphia’s Museum of Art, Van Gogh was in more than one major respect a 19th century man. While today’s painters see their paintings as objects in themselves and delight in elaborate techniques, Van Gogh used the simplest mediums he could find to convey his own intense response to the world about him.

Although Van Gogh labored diligently to perfect his draftsmanship, he had nothing but contempt for it as an end in itself. “Art,” he wrote a friend, “is something not created by hands, but something that wells up from a deeper source out of our soul, and in the cleverness and technical knowledge with regard to art, I find something that reminds me of what in religion one would call self-righteousness.” As a Dutch preacher’s son preparing for the Protestant ministry, he taught himself to draw the dour peasants and bleak countryside almost as a form of spiritual communication. “I see in the whole of nature, for instance in the trees, expression, and so to speak, soul,” he said of an early sketch. “A row of pollard willows sometimes has something of a procession of orphaned men about it.”

Later, when he had forsaken evangelism for a career as an artist, Van Gogh used the pen and pencil as a way of storing up details or of working out the organization of scenes he wanted to do in oils. In the last ten years of his life, he produced 800 oils and an even larger number of preliminary drawings and watercolors. The process of distilling the essence of dozens of sketches into one painting “was something like an electric discharge,” says Vincent W. Van Gogh, his nephew and chairman of the foundation from whose collection the current display was assembled. “That’s why in Provence he could very often complete a large painting in a single day.”

Nonetheless, many of the minor works are high-voltage pictures in themselves. A savage chop of cross-hatching and rapid brush strokes give Van Gogh’s watercolor foliage as much urgency as one done in a heavy oil impasto; the extravagantly translucent turquoise shadows of his barred window at the Saint-Remy asylum emphasize the manic oppressiveness of the room’s yellow walls.

Van Gogh’s paintings have made the squares, houses and bridges of Saint-Remy and Aries among the best-known scenes of France. But neither town as yet has raised a monument to the artist who made them famous. This oversight is now being corrected by Los Angeles Sculptor William Earl Singer, 57, who has cast a large head of Van Gogh, designed to reflect varying emotions as the sun passes over it, and has offered the sculpture as a gift, to be set up in a public place in Aries.