"A Certain Souvenir"

Back from a friend's -- he has a new house, and I was delighted to see a massive Van Gogh print on the wall. I thought I'd seen it at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam earlier this year, but looking at their website now, I don't see it on there. I'll have to look it up elsewhere. Based on the colors and the composition, I'm fairly sure it's from his time at the asylum in Saint-Remy, or else the late period in Auvers. (I tend to think the latter -- it reminds me very much of Landscape with Twilight and Wheatfield with Crows.)

Anyway, my friend told me of seeing some Van Goghs at a museum in Zurich (where he must have seen this one, come to think of it). He talked about it being such an emotional experience, that he found it quite overwhelming. The prints don't really capture it -- you have to see them up close. The canvases are so big, the colors so vivid, and the brushstrokes so thick they have a texture all their own. You can't get all those dimensions from a print.

I totally understood what my friend was saying, as I was surprisingly and profoundly moved by a number of the paintings at the Van Gogh Museum. It's a bit hard to explain this if you've never experienced yourself -- I've had similar experiences with certain pieces of music, certain films, and especially in poetry and in the theater -- where a moment is so aesthetically together and revelatory of some deep truth of human experience, and that truth -- and the beauty of it, represented in art -- overwhelms you. It's not about melodrama -- melodrama indeed runs counter to it, dealing mainly in surfaces -- but when these moments come, rare as they can be, they are really something. I usually have to catch my breath, and then I might tear up a bit.

I had the most powerful of such moments with a painting I'd never heard of: Amandelbloesem (Almond Blossom), painted in February 1890 at the asylum in Saint-Remy. Van Gogh had just heard that his brother Theo's son had been born, and named Vincent. On hearing the news, Van Gogh started the painting, which features branches of small white almond blossoms against a blue sky.

Describing it as such hardly does it justice, because the canvas is so tall and wide, and the sky has such a richly varied texture, in places barely blue-white, in others a deep turquoise. The branches stretch up and across in such an odd fashion you realize at last that you are looking up at them from underneath. And the branches are at once barren -- indeed, most of the branch space is bare -- but abundant, as the budding blossoms begin to take shape. The work is so large, and so hopeful, and yet so grounded in its perspective and its time -- the winter of the year. And you get where Van Gogh is coming from, as the joy and hope of his nephew's birth is undergirded by the sadness of knowing he won't have a son of his own, and indeed of understanding he wouldn't be able to sustain his own struggles long enough to get to know his namesake.

You can see the painting here. They even let you zoom in!

I've tried writing a poem about what seeing that painting was like twice, but nothing seems adequate to the experience. So I thought I'd try it in straight prose.

What makes it all the more remarkable is this bit from the wall of the museum. The museum is brilliantly laid out, as it takes you through Van Gogh's life chronologically. Where you start the tour, there's a bit about his early life. And this:

At the age of twenty-six, unemployed and at a complete loss, he decided to become an artist, following the advice of his younger brother Theo, who had also gone to work for Goupil. His earlier need to serve people, arising from his religious calling, now became -- as he himself wrote -- a strong desire to leave "a certain souvenir" to humankind "in the form of drawings or paintings, not made to comply with this or that school but to express genuine human feeling."

Which he did. And more than the stuff I bought at the museum shop -- 'cause you know I stocked up there -- those moments in front of Amandelbloesem are what I took with me.