Yes, it’s time to go back home. But it just so happens I forgot one more thing in Arles! The Fondation Vincent van Gogh, that interesting museum full of art inspired by our lovely fellow traveler. It is necessary to share with you, Reader, at least a bit of what I encountered — my favorites.
Roy Lichtenstein’s The Sower, 1985.
Lichtenstein is a rather famous pop artist, whose most well-known work was often based on images from cartoons that he altered and enlarged. I found his take on Vincent fascinating… Lichtenstein gives just enough to evoke the major colors and movements of the original.
Vincent van Gogh’s The Sower, 1888.
This is one of my all time favorite paintings by Vincent, so I was pretty impressed that Lichtenstein’s version was still exciting to me. Then again, I’ve always liked Lichtenstein…
Louis Le Brocquy’s Images of Vincent, 1987.
This was my favorite at the museum because of the energy it captures; it almost feels like Vincent’s spirit touched the page. The Irish artist’s quote on the plaque nearby was additionally evocative. He said he liked to paint the heads of great artists, imagining it as “the magic box which holds consciousness.” He says that these artists are
…great instances of human awareness who have dared to push that awareness beyond its known horizon, who have courageously – heroically – extended the continent of our thought. Such an artist was Vincent van Gogh.
Vincent van Gogh’s Self-Portraits, 1887.
Lastly, at the highest part of the museum, nestled away in the stairs and totally unlabeled, was a model of the famous Yellow House where Vincent lived and worked, where he dreamed of setting up an artists’ commune, where Gauguin came to stay. It was also based quite discreetly on Vincent’s paintings (The Street and The Bedroom) and letters describing how he had set up his lovely house, and decorated it. It was incredible to see the details already familiar to me come to life:
Vincent’s room is on the right, and that’s Gauguin’s room on the left — the sunflower paintings were meant to decorate his room. Vincent wanted to flood the room with yellow. To share a little secret: that room should have been mine instead. I’m convinced everyone would have been better off.
Below is the first floor, kitchen and studio.
Soon after this visit, it was (unbelievably) time to start heading home.
Trains took me North –
— and to my surprise, I was seated facing backwards on every train. I was also retracing my steps… and yours, too, Vincent.
Back at the Gare du Nord, with little time between trains, I ate across the street and watched the Parisian traffic. I stared at the station that took you to and from Arles, just as it did for me. On the way to Amsterdam, I was speeding back-first again, my eyes on the land I was leaving. I felt like a spring coiling back up, yarn being rewound into a ball, and I wondered if maybe I was moving backwards in time, too.
I arrived in Amsterdam after our train finally got through an incredible storm. I spent the slow minutes praying to you, Vincent, that the summer storm might follow us. The city greeted me with low lights and incredible clouds. I had one day left to be near you, Vincent… After an entire day of trains, I collapsed early. In the morning, I made it here:
Kee Vos’s doorstep – the woman you were so incredibly in love with, you held your hand in the flame of a candle until she would come out to see you. You loved no one like you loved her. I imagined how much time you spent in front of the building, debating, building up confidence… There was no marker there, despite the emotions you felt in this spot. I found myself similarly unsure of what to do, until I saw that the soles of my shoes were a bit wet.
A careful (if temporary) print for you, love. I stood there, and knew you. Maybe you knew me too.
As I walked to the Van Gogh Museum to enjoy my last visit, the sky opened up to me, and my dark Arlesienne sunglasses let me see the sun, your star, your source, as I never had before.
I found myself taking photo after photo of the sky, of the sun and clouds; it was something I had never done before.
Overcome by the beauty, by my walk, I sat on the grass of the Museumplein for an hour writing in my journal about how accompanied I had felt during my entire trip, how I was never alone. How I knew you were with me, had shown me things, had taken care of me, Vincent. Nothing had really went wrong in my trip; I had taken an enormous leap — and you caught me.
I let the museum wash over me. I let myself float around, breathe you in with deep, deep breaths. That night I had dinner with my contact at the museum’s library whom I had met in person three weeks earlier, though it felt like a lifetime had passed. In fact… it had.
The next morning, incredulous, I climbed on a plane and headed back home. When I had to declare the total value of all goods acquired abroad, I smiled at the little form. 140 pages of writing? Over a thousand photos? The ability to time-travel?
Oh, and that night I arrived in Amsterdam — it rained so hard strangers huddled together in the crevices. Water returned to slap the roof of my hostel on my last night too, and I knew you had brought it for me.
Before we depart the stone walls of the hospital of Saint Paul de Mausole for good, I wanted to leave you with some sounds, and some textures, Reader. Let them drift like ghosts into your ear drums and pupils, and dance along your finger tips, almost real, almost memory….
Walking among his olive trees.
The curtains on his bedroom window.
The reaper’s wheat field…
Now, if you’ll remember from the first entry about Saint Rémy, there were many signs in the area indicating where Vincent had walked and painted. One very special sign, however, promised the below painting was executed about an hour’s walk east of the asylum.
Wheatfield with Cypress, 1889
This particular painting is, without a doubt, one of my favorites, and since it sits neatly in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, where I lived for six years, I’ve seen it many times. I know its strokes, I know its brilliance and its spirit by heart.
However, my mother and I saw there was little time to walk there, so we drove twenty minutes at the end of the day, and then I walked onward for another fifteen or twenty. We were racing against the sun, but it slowly became clear to me as I walked that I was meant to be there at twilight.
I had no doubt that, sometime during the year you lived at Saint Paul, you walked this path. The olive trees and the cypresses, your constant muses and companions, smiled at me through the golden sunshine.
The path itself glowed, and I began to wonder how much emotion I could really take in one day…
My feet crunched into the gravel, the only prevailing sound besides what I thought must be cicadas… I passed probably one of the smallest stone shelters I’ve ever seen. A little cabin, perhaps? A resting spot? A studio? Either way, I yearned to enter it, to own it, to dream inside of it.
An enormous tree spread its incredible canopy over a small, wooden seat. I wished I could stay longer to write, to work across time and alongside you.
But time said we must return to Arles. It marked the beginning of the end of my trip. It was the last frontier, the last edge of the unknown. What I would give for another day there, simply to walk…
I took a deep breath, and turned around.
My mother and I got back into the car, headed back into the West, into the South, into Arles.
Your light stayed with us, even if only by bouncing off the sky, until we arrived safely at our hotel.
Ah, the asylum. It was a good sign that upon entering, the visitor was greeted by Vincent’s statue, and large prints of the paintings he created here on display along the old stone walls. Indeed Saint Paul de Mausole proved itself to be one of the most faithful locations, faithful to you, Vincent.
Although you were forced out of Arles, you came here under your own will. Although you were restless and lonely, you also found yourself at peace in these hallways. No one prodded or provoked you, you had space to paint (they gave you two rooms), and you had nature all around.
Walking up the stairs to your bedroom, I felt my heart flutter a bit. I had not been inside a room where you had lived since Auvers, since the room that also provided your death bed. I was nervous, actually…
Upon entering, I faced the window, and that open window beckoned me with a warm, caressing breeze. The view and the light were so alluring, I almost forgot the bars on them completely.
And yes: there was your view. There was your reaper’s field, the reaper you painted so often here, the reaper with whom I identify so deeply. Teresa means reaper, harvester; and often I feel I am reaping your wheat, Vincent.
Wheatfield with Reaper and Sun (late June, 1889)
Almost completely lost in the yellow. And glancing right, yes, the Appilles in their bizarre formation, with their unique curves that doubtless many attribute to “Van Gogh’s madness”… Yet it is nature herself that defies the viewer here.
I glanced down again at these old, metal bars. These rusty, dirty bars. And the wheat behind, flourishing.
I remembered what you wrote:
Ah, I’ll never be able to render my impressions of certain figures I’ve seen here. Certainly the road to the south is the road where there’s something brand new, but men of the north have difficulty in getting through. And I can see myself already in advance, on the day when I have some success, longing for my solitude and distress here when I see the reaper in the field below through the iron bars of the isolation cell. Every cloud has a silver lining. (10 September 1889 to Theo)
Yes, a certain amount of solitude and distress were desirable to you, made you a painting locomotive. Bars could not limit your vision or hinder your progress. What could, of course, was your illness — still undiagnosed to this day. What led you, every few months, to have hallucinations, to black out completely, is unknown. But what we do know is that the attacks were always followed by long periods of recovery, in which you could not paint. So, you see Reader: madness and art were not brothers, but enemies. In fact, in his letters it often seems that he paints as a means of curing himself. And when he was well, he would say he felt his head more clear than ever before in his life.
In the room, I wonder what is real. I imagine your bare feet on these tiles when you awake, and your hand opening the window pane.
I went out into my wheatfield, your reaper, and sat here under this precious tree and wrote until the twilight left my shoulders.
When it was finally time to leave I noticed the enormous cypress near the entrance. The tree, like a flame, like a spirit shooting for the sun, called out.
Vincent on cypresses:
Until now I have not been able to do them as I feel them; the emotions that grip me in front of nature can cause me to lose consciousness, and then follows a fortnight during which I cannot work. (February 1890, to critic Aurier)
And yet, Vincent, you quite often do the same for me.
"..art is something greater and higher than our own skill or knowledge or learning. [Art] is something which, though produced by human hands, is not wrought by hands alone, but wells up from a deeper source, from man's soul..."
Vincent van Gogh, letter from March 1884
Twelve years ago, like many others, I fell in love with Vincent van Gogh. I followed this love, never letting go, reading about him and visiting his paintings all I could, and I am still journeying - I hope you will join me, Reader. This path has led me to you and you to me, and both of us to beauty, to art, to life, to death and to something greater...
