LETTERS FROM HOME: A PAINTER WHO SAW REASONS TO LOVE THE WORLD

July 27, 2000

Dear Julie,

For reasons now inexplicable, as boy of about 13 I arose in the dark on winter mornings to watch odd TV programs. With only three channels available, that hour offered two choices: For the farmers sitting down to their bacon and eggs, programs about the joys of soybeans; and for people unable to get enough self-improvement during normal waking hours, a show called "Sunrise Semester."

That year, "Sunrise Semester" educated me about the great painters. I learned one thing: How to spell van Gogh. It has come in handy.

Van Gogh seems to be everywhere DC and I go. A few years ago, we accidentally ran into a van Gogh exhibition while on a vacation in Paris. Last week in Boston we stumbled upon a show exhibiting 75 of his portraits.

Seeing the paintings in person makes clear why the world loves Vincent van Gogh. Both the landscapes and portraits vibrate with unexpected collisions of color. The portraits are themselves human landscapes with perhaps a beard constructed from the same hues found in a hay field at dusk.

Add van Gogh's destitution, possible madness, the self-mutilation and you have a myth.

Sien, a seamstress and former prostitute van Gogh lived with for a time, is the subject of many portraits. His parents discouraged their relationship. But, van Gogh wrote, "She and I are two unhappy people who keep together and carry our burdens together; in this way unhappiness is turned to joy, and the unbearable becomes bearable."

Van Gogh's father was a minister and he himself considered pursuing the calling for awhile. He wrote his benefactor and brother, Theo, that an artist need not be a clergyman "but he certainly must have a warm heart for his fellow men."

In the faces of workmen and peasant women, van Gogh saw only reasons to love the world.

Paris offered the landscapes of an artist who saw the world as none other did. In the portraits in Boston, van Gogh's vision seems less secure, as if he is painting these people to understand them better. Supposedly he painted so many self-portraits because he couldn't afford to pay people to pose for him. I wonder if he was trying to survey his own emotional turmoil.

If his behavior weren't enough, his paintings provided more reason for people to think van Gogh mad. Before leaving the museum, I walked through the modern art gallery. In the middle of the room hung an Alexander Calder mobile so exquisitely balanced it was moved by a force that could not be perceived.

Next to the Calder work was "Troubled Queen" by Jackson Pollock, an Abstract Expressionist work of scrambled curves, angles and pigments meant to look like nothing. I wondered what van Gogh would think, just over a century after his death, if he could see it. He might think Jackson Pollock was not mad either, just intuitive.

The Impressionists seemed to predict the discoveries of the atomic world, the dance of particles and light. Modern art seems a representation of the quantum one, in which all matter is believed to exist at the smallest level as both particles and waves.

His paintings are not religious but to me they are sublimely spiritual. Van Gogh connects the dots between the Life Force in both a starry night and a woman's eyes.

He wrote: "We are still far from the time when people will understand the curious relation between one fragment of nature and another, which all the same explain each other and enhance each other."

Love, Sam