Impassioned Expressions

While traveling in Europe this summer, I stopped by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and noticed a few empty spaces where paintings ought to have been. This bothered me, for, after all, I had come to the museum to see paintings I couldn't see anywhere in the United States, and the paintings were obviously missing.

But this summer, many of van Gogh's (1853-1890) portraits were spending their summer here in Boston at the Museum of Fine Arts, as part of Van Gogh: Face to Face. Although this exhibit left empty spaces in museums such as the Muse dursay in Paris and the Kršller-MŸller Museum in the Netherlands, it is significant in that it is the first exhibit ever to focus solely on van Gogh's portraits.

Yet the paintings will return home as well, leaving Boston on the 24th. After a stop in Philadelphia, the paintings will again be dispersed. Catching this phenomenal compilation of rarely seen portraits before it leaves ought to be a priority for anyone who even remotely enjoys looking at art. You don't need to concentrate in Visual and Environmental Studies or the History of Art and Architecture to appreciate this show of over 70 portraits, arranged chronologically and curated nearly perfectly by a team drawn from the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art as well as the MFA. Anyone stopping in for a brief peek will see not only van Gogh's growth as an artist but also something of van Gogh's personality, from his relationships to his personal philosophy.

Mention van Gogh and images of sunflowers, trees and the find-me-in-any-poster-shop 'Starry Night' (1889) come to mind. And while it is easy to be swept away by his lively French landscapes or his gorgeous renditions of flowers, van Gogh himself considered portrait painting a supremely important part of his work, writing to his younger sister:

'What impassions me most - much, much more than all the rest of my mŽtier's the portrait, the modern portrait...I should like to do portraits which will appear as revelations to people in a hundred years' time...I am trying to achieve this not by photographic likeness but by rendering our impassioned expressions, using our modern knowledge of an appreciation of color as a means of rendering and exalting character.'

Van Gogh did not begin his life as an artist but as a preacher. The exhibit unfairly glosses over this fundamental decision and instead simply begins with a short biographical history and places his first drawings from 1881 and 1882, when he was living in The Hague, in the same room. This section features van Gogh's first portrait and his dark drawings of pensioners in charcoal, chalk and ink.

The exhibit clearly underscores van Gogh's rejection of ideally beautiful, perfect figures. 'I find a power and vitality which, if one wants to express them in their peculiar character, ought to be painted with a firm brush stroke, with a simple technique,' van Gogh said, referring to the common men he preferred painting. The first rooms feature a haunting display of old pensioners, fishermen and weavers with craggy, misshapen faces. They have a serene dignity, particularly 'Orphan Man with Top Hat' (1882). Van Gogh's drawings reflect his eagerness to express the humanity of his subjects.

Face to Face reveals the many personal traumas in van Gogh's life. While in The Hague, to his family's severe chagrin, van Gogh began living with a former prostitute, Sien, and her mother and children. His earlier portraits of Sien, which occupy more than a wall of the exhibition, reflect a woman defined by hardship and given a sense of beauty. Cleverly juxtaposed with these images are later ones, from 1883, showing an aged, unsmiling and cynical Sien. Shortly after one particularly jaded drawing, van Gogh upped and left for Nuenen, a village in the Netherlands, to live with his parents.

The exhibit itself changes with this move. Inspired by Jean-Franois Millet, van Gogh became convinced that the peasantry was the true subject for modern art. Study after study, in dark earth tones, reveals van Gogh's desire to capture the humility and spirit of the common worker. Particularly impressive is the exhibit's collection of van Gogh's studies for his first masterpiece, 'The Potato Eaters' (1885), the final version of which is not included in the show. Van Gogh was upset with the reception of this painting, moved briefly to Antwerp, where his brother Theo introduced him to Delacroix's color theory, and then landed in Paris.

Everything brightens as the exhibit moves to the Paris and Arles years of the late 1880s. Even the walls of the museum change from somber blue to yellow, van Gogh's favorite color. In Paris, van Gogh was busy but poor, so he often used himself as a model. Seven of his self-portraits appear in the exhibit, more than have ever been seen together before.

Van Gogh's brushstrokes reveal his interest in Impressionism and Pointillism, as well as the influence of his friends Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin and Seurat. The portraits are hung close together to underscore how small changes in technique and pose can make an image completely different. The sea greens, seen later in van Gogh's flower paintings, make their first appearance here.

When van Gogh leaves Paris for Arles, the mood shifts yet again, to pink and yellow hues and intense color. In Arles, the Roulin family - Joseph Roulin, postal worker, his wife Augustine, and their three children, all friends of van Gogh - becomes his primary subject. This is the largest collection of the Roulin family portraits ever seen together - 17 in total, including seven different versions of 'The Postman Joseph Roulin.' Granted, the exhibit was conceived in part because the Detroit Institute of Arts wanted to show off one newly acquired version, but the museum-goer gets a little lost in the mass of paintings of this family.

Each painting shows van Gogh's desire to experiment with color and pose to convey emotion. About this series, van Gogh wrote, 'if I manage to do this whole family better still, at least I shall have done something to my liking and something individual.' The placement of two different versions of a portrait of Augustine and the different versions of 'The Postman Joseph Roulin' make clear van Gogh's desire to see how background affects mood, reflecting an artist at play and alive.

Easy to overlook in this section of the exhibit, due to the focus on the Roulin family, are two subjects unusual for van Gogh, 'Italian Woman' (1888?) and 'The Zouave' (1888), which offer a different side of the artist from his portraits of weavers and peasants.

In the Arles section, van Gogh's tragic life at last truly emerges in full force. Fascinated by the idea of an artist colony, van Gogh begged Gauguin and Bernard to join him in Arles. The three exchanged portraits. Yet the MFA exhibit only shows the self-portrait van Gogh sent to Gauguin, which portrays him as a thinking man, deeply committed to art, in vibrant, unrealistic colors suggesting a remove from reality. If the curators had borrowed van Gogh's portraits of Gauguin and Bernard from Amsterdam, a much clearer reflection of van Gogh's insecurities and hopes might have emerged.

Nonetheless, the exhibit offers an explanation of van Gogh's breakdown after working with Gauguin in Arles for two months. Van Gogh, after a heated argument, mutilated his ear. Yet only one image of the artist without his ear appears in the exhibit - an important curatorial decision. Instead of focusing on van Gogh as 'the crazy artist who cut his ear off,' the exhibit moves on to the tragedy of what this fit implied for van Gogh - as the exhibit undersores, van Gogh is more than a mad genius.

Scared of himself and his disease, now thought to be a type of epilepsy, van Gogh placed himself in a mental institution in St.-RŽmy. The last room of the exhibit, treating the last year of the artist's life, is flurried and rushed, and once again painted in somber blue. Even the text on the wall reads like a timeline - first St.-RŽmy, then Auvers and Dr. Gachet, then suicide with a shot in the chest.

St.-RŽmy was an important time in the artist's life - the Van Gogh Museum devotes almost half a gallery to van Gogh's work there, mostly paintings of the countryside in deep purples and dark greens. Images of death resonate in his depictions of reapers and harvests. While the intention of Face to Face is to focus on the portrait, one of his two final self-portraits is lost in the room's attempt to embrace a very intense period. This self-portrait caused van Gogh to allude to his own death, describing himself on the day he painted it as 'thin and pale as a ghost,' but it is barely noticed in the room. Van Gogh's descent into his final depression deserves more attention, either through commentary or the inclusion of more works from this period.

Similarly, Dr. Gachet, a crucial person in the life of van Gogh and other artists, including Pissaro, so important that the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York devoted an exhibit to him a few years ago, is noted only by the inclusion of some etchings. Gachet nurtured van Gogh in his final days, but this is somehow overlooked by Face to Face, an exhibit that otherwise does an excellent job of connecting van Gogh's portraits to his personal life.

The two last paintings in the exhibit - 'Adeline Ravoux' (1890), a girl with blond hair painted against a black background, and 'Portrait of a Girl' (1890), a girl with black hair painted against a white background - strangely summarize van Gogh's career as an artist and his emotional maturation. He could appreciate color, but in the end, the contrast between color and darkness, or his madness, was too much for him. As his brother Theo wrote, 'Life was such a burden to him, but now, as often happens, everyone is full of praise for his talents.'

The intrigue and beauty of van Gogh's portraits are immortal because they present a person and an artist. Seeing all of these portraits together is a phenomenal opportunity to learn about dignity, humanity and intellectual curiosity as seen through the eyes of an artist. Although the artist wrote, They say -and I am very willing to believe it - that it is difficult to know oneself - but it isn't easy to paint oneself either,' his portraits do reveal himself - not just the self-portraits, but all of his work - and to miss this chance to appreciate the genius of van Gogh's personality would be a shame.

Van Gogh: Face to Face is on view through Sunday at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Above left: Vincent van Gogh, 'Sien's Sister with Shawl,' 1883, chalk and graphite.