Art: VAN GOGH IN HIGH YELLOW

IN the heat of inspiration, Vincent Van—Gogh could put in a straight eleven-hour stretch before his easel, then sit down and write: “These colors give me extraordinary exaltation. I have no thought of fatigue; I shall do another picture this very night, and I shall bring it off. I have a terrible lucidity at moments when nature is so beautiful; I am not conscious of myself any more, and the pictures come to me as in a dream.”

Such superb passages from Van Gogh’s letters to his younger brother, Art Dealer Theo Van Gogh, plus the fact that Van Gogh sliced off his left ear during an epileptic fit, have prompted popularizers to portray him as an artist who raised painting to such a pitch of ecstasy that he went mad. The result has been to make Van Gogh one of the most misinterpreted artists in history. In an ambitious Hollywood effort to right the record and explain the inner workings of an artist, M-G-M this week released its version of Van Gogh’s life, Lust for Life, based on Irving Stone’s high-colored 1934 bestseller.

Intensity & Tragedy. To photograph Van Gogh’s original oils, M-G-M sought out the canvases of collectors and museums all around the world, including some of the masterpieces in Moscow’s rarely seen collection (see color). Film crews shot on-the-spot takes of the Van Gogh family house in Holland, re-created some of the scenes he painted, retraced his footsteps from the Borinage to Paris and the sun-baked square at Aries.

The film is best when it places the scenes that inspired Van Gogh next to sweeping CinemaScopic closeups of his paintings. Actor Kirk Douglas (whose natural red beard makes him look astonishingly like Van Gogh’s self-portrait) and Anthony Quinn (splendid as the swaggering Paul Gauguin) at times manage to catch what Van Gogh called “the high yellow note” of painting intensity and the “electric arguments” about art which Van Gogh wrote left them “with our heads as exhausted as an electric battery after it is discharged.” The film captures the fierce drive and bitter tragedy in the life of Van Gogh, who completed more than 800 paintings in his 37 years, sold only two, and lived on handouts from his brother. But because the Hollywood story builds relentlessly to Van Gogh’s ear-slicing for its climax. Lust for Life falls midway between being a first-rate art film and high-pitched melodrama.

“Our Pictures Speak.” A comparison of Moscow’s Van Goghs (MGM received transparencies of them too late to include them in the film) makes clear, as the story does not, that Van Gogh’s epilepsy halted his painting, but does not explain it. The Grape Harvest, painted in the buffeting mistral outside Aries before Van Gogh’s first attack, is faithful to the glowing description he wrote his brother of a “red vineyard, all red like red wine. In the distance it turned to yellow, and then a green sky with the sun, the earth after the rain violet, sparkling yellow here and there where it caught the setting sun.”

Van Gogh’s Prison Court, painted in the St. Rémy asylum (where he voluntarily committed himself in 1889 after he slashed his ear), is copied from a Gustave Doré engraving. But despite its somber mood, it shows no shortening of Van Gogh’s great talent. In one of his last works, After the Rain, painted less than two months before Van Gogh shot himself at the onset of another epileptic attack, he shows that until the end he could be moved by “the immeasurable plain with cornfields against the hills, immense as a sea . . .”

After painting After the Rain, Van Gogh, soon to die, wearily stated the problem underlying all efforts to explain painters in words or on celluloid: “The truth is, we can only make our pictures speak.”