Exhibit of the week: Van Gogh Up Close

Philadelphia Museum of Art

Through May 6

Nothing moved Vincent van Gogh the way nature did, said Edward J. Sozanski in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Witness the 45 rather small paintings in this new show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Trees, flowers, forest floors, and landscapes—rendered in eye-popping detail—practically vibrate within their frames. Produced during the last four years of Van Gogh’s life, the canvases contain barely a human figure among them. They instead often suggest a painter fueled by “a feverish impulse to record as much of nature as possible” before time ran out. By foregrounding Van Gogh’s “devotional” connection to the natural world, the show “reveals the essence of the artist’s mystique and of his enduring popularity more effectively than any other exhibition I can recall.”

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Time spent outdoors apparently can soothe even the most savage artist, said Roberta Smith in The New York Times. The show’s catalog contends that Van Gogh consciously spent time focusing on the minutest details of the natural world—a blade of grass, the wing of a moth—as a way to settle his unstable mind. In a section of the exhibition labeled “Blades of Grass,” sheaves of wheat and patches of grass are painted in brushstrokes that mimic the textures of nature, “one stalk, leaf, or blade at a time.” In the “High Horizons” section, “we see at least a dozen different pale greens, mint greens, and yellow greens that are wildly artificial and yet approximate, in their own way, the variety of color in nature.” Throughout, a viewer senses Van Gogh’s “restless intelligence, always looking, always striving” to glorify nature’s work.

“It diminishes Van Gogh a little” to view the work as primarily the product of self-therapy, said Dan Neil in The Wall Street Journal. We’re meant, it seems, to imagine him “rushing out with his easel to stare furiously at some clumps of grass, trying to silence the demons in his head.” Still, this show is “full of revelations.” Though you usually wouldn’t think of Van Gogh as a painter of “botanical realism,” the meticulous close-ups here, like Almond Blossom (1890), prove that he sometimes was. He also liked to bring his landscapes “right up to the viewer’s toes, painting with painstaking detail the bark of trees, the twists of vines, the striving thistle.” It’s easy, in fact, to imagine that these paintings gave Van Gogh “brief moments of peace in a turbulent life.” More than a century later, “they have the same effect on us.