Updike on Van Gogh

One of this blog’s aims is to note new books by New Yorker writers. Over the past nine years, I’ve reviewed at least twenty of them here. But, for whatever reason, I neglected to notice John Updike’s great posthumous essay collection Higher Gossip, when it appeared in 2011. I want to try to correct that oversight now by considering two of Higher Gossip’s best pieces: “Uncertain Skills, Determined Spirit” and “The Purest of Styles.” Both are on van Gogh, my favorite painter.

“Uncertain Skills, Determined Spirit” is a review of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2005 exhibition Vincent van Gogh: The Drawings. It abounds with beautiful descriptions of van Gogh’s art:

The foreground to the otherwise staid Nursery on Schenkweg (1882) shows the weedy, reedy edges of a ditch with the calligraphic energy, the half-suppressed violence, that would become the hallmark of his mature style.

The somewhat damaged and time-altered Landscape in Drenthe (1883), of utterly flat country in the northeastern Netherlands, is strikingly minimalist, piling upon the twilit moors a nearly empty sky lightly laden with reckless scribbles, in early premonition of van Gogh’s insistence that the sky is never really empty.

The Blute-Fin Mill (1887) is dashing in its application of soft graphite to the paper; the swift parallel horizontal strokes of the stairs and the kindred vertical strokes of the low building beside them invite the viewer to relish the artist’s virtuosity.

Public Garden in the Place Lamartine… and Orchard with Arles in the Background possess a nearly full set of the calligraphic gestures – quick hatchings and zigzag scribbles, small circles and specks – that are evolving alongside remnants of his Dutch literalist manner, most noticeable in the carefully traced branchings of foreground trees.

Everything squirms and twists. Clouds and hills, mountains and vegetation appear moulded from one wormy, resistant substance (Wheat Fields with Cypresses, 1889).

In Walled Wheat Field with Rising Sun– a drawing that, the catalogue shrugs, might have preceded or followed its partner painting – the field hurtles toward the wall while a swollen sun emits concentric waves like a struck drumhead.

Looking at the “sinuous parallel arabesques” of van Gogh’s three reed-pen copies of his turbulent oil Boats at Sea, Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, Updike comments, “The flamelike dark cypresses, writhing olive trees, blaring oversized suns, convulsed mountains, and vortically churning stars of van Gogh’s visionary madness are not far off.”

Vincent van Gogh, "Boats at Sea, Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer" (1888)

My favourite passage in “Uncertain Skills, Determined Spirit” contrasts van Gogh’s two pen copies of his superb Harvest in Provence:

At the Metropolitan exhibit, the crowds, their eyes made bleary by dimlit chambers of pen-work, stood back with relief from Harvest in Provence (1888), a large golden oil canvas preceded by a detailed, lightly tinted drawing and followed by two rather differing pen versions for Émile Bernard and John Russell. The one for Bernard takes more liberties with the painting, and is freer in its use of van Gogh’s shorthand of hatching, squiggles, and dots. In the version for Russell, specks appear in the sky where the painting has a blank blue, and these, and concentric lines encircling the sun (A Summer Evening, 1888), become an almost compulsive feature of the drawings, as if van Gogh is saying that no space of nature is truly blank, devoid of color and of divine activity. The drawings brim with latent color.

That last line is inspired.

Vincent van Gogh, "Harvest in Provence" (1888)

Updike’s other van Gogh piece, “The Purest of Styles,” reviews the Morgan Library and Museum’s 2007 exhibition Vincent van Gogh – Painted with Words: The Letters to Émile Bernard. It contains, among other felicities, a wonderful description of two of van Gogh’s late paintings – Enclosed Field with Young Wheat and Rising Sun and A Corner of the Asylum and the Garden with a Heavy, Sawn-Off Tree (both 1888):

The latter is the very painting described as a picture of anxiety in his last letter to Bernard—circular swirls and flame-shaped arabesques move like a wind through the branches of the olive trees, against a yellow and blue sunset, while small human figures slowly become visible on the asylum grounds. In the former, the undulating field, blue and golden and green, rushes toward the viewer, and the blue mountains beyond seem a roiling river, under a bright yellow sky where the white sun is pinned like a medal. His impasto has become terrific—ridged ribbons of color as in a heavy brocade. 

In “The Purest of Styles,” Updike quotes a passage from van Gogh’s last letter to Bernard:

And by working very calmly, beautiful subjects will come of their own accord; it’s truly first and foremost a question of immersing oneself in reality again, with no plan made in advance, with no Parisian bias.

Updike identifies with van Gogh’s immersion in reality. He writes, 

Van Gogh’s achievement was to sublimate his own mysticism in the representation of reality, rather than inventing symbolic images. He made things themselves—worn shoes, a rush-seat chair, sunflowers—symbols, bristling with wordless meaning.

This accords with Updike’s own credo: “to give the mundane its beautiful due” (“Foreword,” The Early Stories: 1953 – 1975).