' Vincent van Gogh's Friendship in Letters and Paint ' at the Morgan Library

Written by Gerald Alfaro Friday, 16 March 2012 23:20

New York City - “My God, if only I had known this country at 25, instead of coming here at 35.” That was Vincent van Gogh, freshly arrived in southern France, with its aromatic fields and star-spilling skies, in 1888. He was writing to his artist-friend Émile Bernard, 15 years his junior.

And he kept writing. On the train through Provence from Paris, his eyes glued to the window, he saw countryside “as beautiful as Japan for the limpidity of the atmosphere and the gay color effects.” Settled in the town of Arles, he stood all day in wheat fields painting “in the full heat of the sun, without any shade whatever, and there you are, I revel in it like a cicada.”

After a year in ashen Paris, he was in a chromatic delirium. He couldn’t stop cataloging the colors he was seeing and using. A painting of an orchard has a “white tree, a small green tree, a lilac field, an orange roof, a big blue sky.” His description of his painting of a sower in a field reads like Gertrude Stein:

“The chrome yellow 1 sky almost as bright as the sun itself, which is chrome yellow 1 with a little white, while the rest of the sky is chrome yellow 1 and 2 mixed, very yellow, then. ... There are many repetitions of yellow in the earth, neutral tones, resulting from the mixing of violet with yellow.”

If verbal accounts seemed inadequate, he drew ink sketches of paintings — of the sower in the field, of the orchard — right in the body of a letter, with the names of colors added. And when the descriptive circuits are overloaded, there are detonations. Frustrated at how to convey the reality that even transparent elements — water and air — have complex color ranges, he ends up shouting on paper: “No blue without yellow and orange.”

All these words, ideas, sensations and images are packed into “Painted With Words: Vincent van Gogh’s Letters to Émile Bernard” at the Morgan Library & Museum, a display of manuscripts that is also something more. Although 20 handwritten letters, given to the Morgan by Eugene and Clare Thaw, are at its center, they are surrounded by nearly two dozen paintings and drawings, half of them by van Gogh, including a splendid self-portrait.

It was done before he moved south. With his red hair and beard, taciturn lips and untrusting eyes, you already know him on sight. And you will come to know him in some depth in a show that is itself a self-portrait in many parts.

You will encounter Bernard, too, though far less directly. A minor French painter, prolific writer, tireless networker and van Gogh advocate, he’s present in a few early paintings and prints and a book, but primarily in van Gogh’s salutation, which opens nearly all the letters: “My dear old Bernard.”

The two men met in studio classes in Paris. Van Gogh, a 30-something Dutch ex-art dealer and ex-preacher, was trying to figure out a place for himself in contemporary art. Bernard, a precocious Paris teenager, was trying to do the same. Despite their age difference, they became friends. He would establish such a community elsewhere with the help of like-minded colleagues, Bernard being one, Paul Gauguin another. He would be the pioneer, paving the way for the others. So he headed south alone, keeping in touch with Bernard by mail.

In fact, he kept in touch with several people, but the letters to Bernard, written in French between 1887 and 1889, are unlike many others. With his brother Theo, van Gogh observed a certain decorum; this was, after all, family. But Bernard offered a different sort of audience, a different relationship, one without a history, ready to be built from scratch.

This didn’t mean the relationship was clear or easy. You can sense van Gogh feeling his way into it, trying on different roles in the letters. At first he is older-brotherly, advising Bernard to eat better, to ease off on visits to brothels. This is guy talk, and there’s a fair amount of it. Then he is a mentor; he urges Bernard to study certain painters; he promotes his career. Gradually, as differences arise, he becomes an antagonist, and the correspondence ends.

It’s when van Gogh addresses Bernard as an equal, artist to artist, that he is at his most eloquent. When he speaks from love — of art, of an exalted ideal of the artist, of an art fellowship — wonderful things are said, and, as the Morgan show demonstrates, wonderful art was made.

In June 1888, van Gogh traveled to the coastal village of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer and caught his first glimpse of the Mediterranean. The sight was a pure thrill for him, and he wanted to share it with someone who he thought would be equally thrilled. So he wrote Bernard a vivid account of the trip, and sent it with a set of vivacious, color-annotated sketches of ships and cottages, which he turned into large-scale drawings — three are in the show — and into oil paintings.

“Painted With Words: Vincent van Gogh’s Letters to Émile Bernard” remains through Jan. 6 at the Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street; (212) 685-0008, www.morganlibrary.org . Article by . . Holland Cotter