Van Gogh’s Cypresses, Metropolitan Museum — the perfectionist behind the wild genius

Try to define genius, and you may find yourself thinking of Vincent van Gogh. In the popular imagination — and, for a long time, in mine — he represented the essence of the untameable spirit, “a brain suffering under the burning of a star”, as Paul Klee described him.

There’s something irresistible about that idea — a mind that can summon a masterpiece in a spasm of mad inspiration. But it’s a cliché, and it can lead to lazy judgments and a torpid eye. Fortunately, the jab of a sharp exhibition can jolt us into paying proper attention.

Van Gogh’s Cypresses at New York’s Metropolitan Museum homes in on one of his most dogged obsessions and his under-appreciated capacity for hard, meticulous work. “Talent is a matter of patience over time,” Flaubert wrote. “It involves studying everything one wishes to express, long enough and with enough attention to find an aspect of it that no one has seen or spoken of.” Van Gogh took that sentiment to heart. Preoccupied with the trees for two years, he ached to paint them as forces gyrating with unquenchable life, but also as manifestations of his own distinctive perception.

Van Gogh is partly responsible for his caricature as an expressionist who slapped torment and joy on to canvas. He referred to colours in emotional terms (“a note of intense malachite green . . . something utterly heartbroken”) and described his compositions as intense bursts of feeling. “They are immense stretches of wheat under a troubled sky,” he wrote to his brother Theo. “I had no difficulty in trying to express sadness and extreme solitude.”

And yet curator Susan Alyson Stein guides us away from this portrait of the artist as ur-emoter and towards a picture of him as relentless perfectionist. He had settled on the cypress as a principal theme by the spring of 1888, comparing its elegance of line and proportion to an Egyptian obelisk. Over the next year, it migrated from the edge of his consciousness — as a needle-like spire in the distance, or a copse demarcating the boundary of a field — to the hub of his imagination. He returned to it over and over again, painting cypress-lined bridges and shaded parks, determined to capture the species’ elusive essence. “No one has yet done them as I see them,” he wrote to Theo.

Finally, in an explosion of creative vigour, propelled by well-honed technique, he achieved the apotheosis of the evergreen in June 1889. First came “The Starry Night”, with its torch-like conifer leaping towards the blazing sky. “Wheat Field with Cypresses” followed, full of torrid brushstrokes whipping across golden swards and through wind-tossed branches, then swirling into creamy clouds. Soon after, he painted “Cypresses”, a close-up rendered in whorls of black, blue and green, speckled with hints of purple and brown. The yellow crescent moon from “Starry Night” reappears by day, now placidly presiding over the unpeopled earth.

The tree nearly felled him. He produced multiple versions and, far from splattering his feelings all over the place, struggled to keep effusions in check so that his vision would remain limpid. “Until now I have not been able to do them as I feel it,” he wrote to the critic Albert Aurier. “In my case the emotions that take hold of me in the face of nature go as far as fainting, and then the result is a fortnight during which I am incapable of working. However, before leaving here, I am planning to return to the fray to attack the cypresses.”

For the first time in more than 120 years, two versions of “Wheat Field with Cypresses” hang side by side at the Met: Van Gogh’s exuberant first attempt, executed outdoors in the Provençal summer; and the more deliberate copy he made in his studio the following autumn. (A third, in ink on paper, translates his buoyant brushwork into a profuse graphic lexicon of squiggles and lines.)

The juxtaposition opens a window on to Van Gogh’s creative conflict between observation and abstraction, immediacy and distance. The later version feels cooler and more stylised than the original. Frenzied strokes have been flattened, shadows softened, violence stilled. Clouds, fields and tree cohere into a larger decorative pattern.

Torn between emotional impulse and monastic labour, Van Gogh lived out Flaubert’s maxim about talent requiring patience and time. Nobody can hold a feeling long enough to encode it in a symphony or transcribe it in paint, and great artworks would be poorer if they did nothing more than express a single passing pang. So, although Van Gogh infused landscapes with his own internal drama, mapping his psyche into the choice of strokes and colours, he was also determined to fashion a solid, permanent presence out of the chaotic slosh of his humours.

While he spent months scrutinising foliage, Paul Gauguin and a knot of Post-Impressionists in Paris were trying to convince him to look inside rather than out. They advocated an art that “sacrifices anecdote to arabesque, analysis to synthesis, fugitive to permanent, and confers on nature, which finally grew tired of its precarious reality, an authentic reality”, as the critic Félix Fénéon declared in 1890. By their logic, nature could only manifest in painting as an exhalation of the human spirit. A tree served as symbol, a communicative artist’s rune.

Van Gogh hardly needed to be sold on that idea. The heavens are giddy in “Starry Night”, alive with incandescence. In that painting, he found a balance between observation and transcendence, fixing the emanations of his psyche in the observable world.

But he was no born Symbolist. Van Gogh drew succour from the physical objects that tethered him to reality. The immense effort involved in committing the tangible world to an arrangement of pigments functioned for him as a form of therapy. Intimate, intricate study of nature was his anchor, and the farther he drifted from it, the more his mind dissolved into madness.

Gazing at cypresses day in, day out, examining the angle of their branches, the depths of their greens, their movement in the wind — all that constituted a crucial discipline. “Attacking the cypresses” involved an act of will that saved him. Until it no longer could.

To August 27, metmuseum.org

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