2023-10-03 06:48:06
Some trees, just before dying, give exceptional flowering. Like these struck-down giants with whom he identified, Vincent Van Gogh produced, during the last two months of his life in Auvers-sur-Oise in 1890, an exuberant set of 74 paintings, including a number of bouquets. After the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, Orsay now exhibits two thirds and around thirty drawings. The alliance of these two flagship institutions has enabled this remarkable meeting of works from the four corners of Europe and the United States.
A melancholic hue
The portrait of Doctor Gachet sets the tone from the start of the journey. Placed next to a Self-portrait of the artist, painted a few months earlier during his depression in the Saint-Rémy-de-Provence asylum, this doctor from the village of Oise – also a redhead – appears like his twin in melancholy. He leans his head on his hand, staring into space, in front of the same blue background matching their mood… This color will also dominate this last period of Van Gogh, contrasting with the sunny canvases of Arles. Modulated from cobalt to turquoise via ultramarine, it intensifies its Île-de-France skies, shades the facades, the slate roofs and the bays of The Church of Auvers whose clock has lost its hands. She draws a night curtain over certain portraits, like that of Adeline Ravoux, the daughter of the innkeeper with whom the painter was staying.
A swell that rocks the horizon
Before taking refuge in this countryside, Van Gogh stopped in Paris to see his brother Théo. He took the opportunity to visit an exhibition of Japanese prints. Tinted with Prussian blue, did the landscapes of Hokusai and the monochromes of Hiroshige influence him? It’s possible. Several of his drawings from Auvers, in oil and watercolor, play on this restricted range. As if driven by a feeling of urgency, the artist also openly borrows from “ukiyo-e” to dare radical paintings, such as this Acacia branch brushed in a mad frenzy of touches or like this Landscape of Auvers in the rain, whose longitudinal landscape is streaked with royal blue stripes.
These panoramic paintings are the revelation of the exhibition. In the last month of his life, Van Gogh passionately experimented with this format of 50 cm high by 1 m long, hanging these canvases himself because he could not find them commercially. He painted more than a dozen. Did he imagine assembling them into a frieze? In any case, he dreamed of an exhibition project. Often empty of characters, unlike his first views of Auvers, these landscapes, both wide open and as if enclosed in height, combine a “aspiration to infinity” and, paradoxically, a “tightening anxiety”, notes Emmanuel Coquery, deputy director of conservation at the Musée d’Orsay (1). In certain paintings, the horizon sometimes rises very high, then descends very low in others, as on a stormy sea. “These are immense expanses of wheat under troubled skies, and I did not hesitate to try to express sadness, extreme solitude”, wrote the artist on July 10, 1890.
Compositions as if carved in bas-relief
His touch appears freer than ever. In the form of a spike, a stick, a horseshoe, a dotted line, inclined to the left or right, it actively participates in drawing the patterns. In a mediation space, an astonishing white 3D reproduction of the Auvers church, produced by the publisher Lito, proves it: carved in very light relief by the artist, the monument remains perfectly readable, despite the total absence of colors!
The French and Dutch curators of the exhibition have patiently reconstructed the chronology of this Auvers production, by going through Van Gogh’s correspondence and analyzing the nature of his paintings, including four tea towels borrowed from his innkeeper! Long considered the artist’s testamentary painting, The Cornfield with Crows is thus reduced to the date of July 8, followed in reality by around fifteen other paintings. Preserved in Amsterdam, the ultimate tree roots, completed on July 27, a few hours before Van Gogh shot himself in the chest, made the trip to Orsay. This time the sky faded. All that remains of the artist are blue branches plunging their large arms into the soil and which touch our hearts, too.
——
Four paintings reframed at the Musée d’Orsay
Fin 2021, Wouter Van der Veen, scientific director of the Van-Gogh Institute in Auvers-sur-Oise, unwraps, in newspaper, a pale green frame bearing the label “Montcel cottages, Dr Gachet collection”. By going through the archives, he discovered that the painter had a similar “pale Veronese green” frame and made the connection between these “thatched cottages” and the Thatches of Cordeville by Van Gogh, kept at the Musée d’Orsay. The dimensions of this canvas and the old frame – unfortunately curved – match.
In March 2023, the president of the Musée d’Orsay therefore courageously chose to deframe the work to restore a copy of this original setting. He even removed their gilded molded frames from three other Van Goghs in the museum, including The Church of Auvers, to give them a frame identical to pale green, but white. If the color deserves to be refined, this bias gives a really old look to the numerous flashy frames imposed on the artist, post mortem.
#Van #Gogh #blue #period #exhibited #Musée #dOrsay