New Van Gogh present in Paris focuses on artist terribly productive and tragic closing months

PARIS – Planted in a area, Vincent van Gogh painted furiously, bending the thick oils, riotous yellows and luxurious blues to his will. The ensuing masterpiece, “Wheatfield with Crows,” bursts off the canvas like technicolor champagne. Artwork historians imagine the Dutch grasp painted it on July 8, 1890.

So far as they’ll inform, Van Gogh then churned out one other gorgeous work the very subsequent day, July 9, of extra wheat fields below thunderous clouds. Within the portray’s vibrant greens, the thoughts’s eye can think about the artist working frenetically amid the sashaying stalks.

On or round July 10, then got here yet one more Van Gogh marvel — a portray of a tidy backyard with a prowling cat. And the day after that, July 11, the artist seems to have headed again to the fields, probably having risen early as was his behavior, portray them noticed with blood-red poppies, below skies of swirling blue.

At age 37 and the peak of his powers, Van Gogh was splurging out genius at a fee of a portray a day. However lower than three weeks later, he was lifeless, shot by his personal hand.

A brand new exhibition at Paris’ Orsay Museum that focuses on Van Gogh’s final two months earlier than his loss of life on July 29, 1890, is extraordinary and terribly painful — as a result of this closing interval within the artist’s life was additionally one in every of his most efficient. The tragic paradox of the unprecedented assemblage of work and drawings is that it exhibits Van Gogh on fireplace creatively simply as his life was tick-tick-tocking to its fateful finish.

After a 12 months’s keep in a psychiatric hospital, which he entered voluntarily a number of months after slicing off his left ear, Van Gogh had resettled within the French village of Auvers-sur-Oise, north of Paris. It had picturesque landscapes that additionally impressed Paul Cézanne, Camille Pissarro and different artists. And it had a health care provider who specialised in melancholy, Paul Gachet, who took Van Gogh on as a affected person.

Adhering to the physician’s recommendation, Van Gogh went into artistic overdrive, throwing himself into his work to not dwell on his psychological sickness. He churned out an astounding 74 work, together with a few of his masterpieces, and dozens of drawings in 72 days.

After arriving Might 20 in Auvers and checking into an auberge, Van Gogh instantly bought busy along with his brushes and paints, apparently sprucing off no less than seven work of homes, flowering chestnut bushes and Dr. Gachet’s backyard in his first week.

“Painting quickly was important for him, to capture a feeling, to capture a vision,” Emmanuel Coquery, one of many present’s curators, mentioned.

“He’d get up very early in the morning, around 5 o’clock, have his coffee, go out with his easel, canvas and brushes, and set up in front of the subject he’d identified. He would paint all morning and go back to work in the studio in the afternoon,” Coquery mentioned.

“He’d spent his whole days painting, perhaps 12 hours a day.”

For the exhibit titled “Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise: The Final Months,” the Musée d’Orsay, which boasts the world’s richest assortment of Impressionist and post-Impressionist artwork, has assembled round 40 of Van Gogh’s work and about 20 drawings from this fleeting, tragic interval. It took 4 years of analysis and persuasion to liberate priceless works on mortgage from different museums and collections, with the Orsay clinching offers by additionally loaning a few of its items in return.

The exhibit consists of 11 work that Van Gogh painted on uncommon elongated canvases, experimenting to gorgeous impact. Their dimensions — 1 meter lengthy, 50 centimeters tall (30 inches by 19.6 inches) — give the work a dramatic, wide-screen, panorama look.

Loaned from eight museums and collections, it’s the first time the 11 work have been proven collectively. One other model of the exhibition, with 10 of the elongated canvases, was first proven at Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum earlier this 12 months.

They embrace the masterful “Wheatfield with Crows,” loaned from Amsterdam, with its foreboding black birds that may virtually be heard caw-cawing as they take flight.

Equally poignant, but additionally unnerving, is “Tree Roots,” partially as a result of it’s regarded as Van Gogh’s final work.

He’s thought to have painted it on July 27, 1890, earlier than taking pictures himself within the chest that night. Van Gogh managed to get again to his room however died two days later. Two American authors solid doubt on this account in 2011, suggesting the artist was shot by two teenage boys. However the finally deadly suicide try is the model extra broadly believed.

Within the portray’s jumble of tree roots in blues that wrestle for consideration with the greens of shaggy undergrowth and the browns of soil, the viewer imagines confusion, angst and ache. In 2020, a Dutch researcher pinpointed the precise location the place Van Gogh painted the work, a discovery that shed new gentle on the anguished artist’s closing hours.

Just like the music of rock god Jimi Hendrix, the poetry of Sylvia Plath or the graffiti wildness of New York artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, the Van Gogh present forces the query: What different marvels would he have left had he lived longer?

But having the ability to expertise the world by means of Van Gogh’s eyes, along with his colours and scenes so alive that they appear to breathe, can also be a present that retains on giving. For the viewer, the present is a mind-blowing mixture of remorse and awe.

“The quality is dazzling,” mentioned Coquery, the curator. “It’s a real fireworks show.”

“Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise: The Final Months” runs on the Musée d’Orsay by means of Feb. 4, 2024.