AMSTERDAM – A doctor can be a comforting presence in the life of any struggling human being. Such was Dr. Paul Gachet, physician, phrenologist, artist and art collector (yes, he was a multi-faceted man) who became an intimate – or, as van Gogh himself once described in a letter to his brother, a “perfect friend and something like a new brother”—at the end of the painter’s life.
They met in the village of Auvers-sur-Oise, where van Gogh stayed in an attic room above the Café de la Mairie for 70 days in 1890, before killing himself on July 29. In part, van Gogh was on the run from himself and the terrible experiences of asylum life in Saint-Rémy, where he had spent the previous year. He was looking for a place of calm and rural solace. The doctor invited him to lunch and for a time became a kind of trusted spiritual adviser. Dr. Gachet urged van Gogh to return to painting because through his art he would find ways to discharge himself.
Van Gogh has indeed returned to work, and much of what he did, at a truly frantic pace during those 70 days, is on display in Van Gogh in Auvers: his last months at the Van Gogh Museum, organized chronologically in order to follow this period of his professional life, its changing themes and moods, as never before.
He made 74 paintings, as well as works on paper, during those 70 days, and 49 of them are in this exhibition. The rest fall into three categories: too fragile to travel, too loved to be separated from their secret owners, or they live in Russia.
At the emotional center of it all is the remarkable and typically crude portrait of Dr. Gachet himself, his clenched fist supporting his head, staring at us intently with a gaze that van Gogh described as wistful. (Others, as he conceded, might have taken the expression as something of a grimace.) His whole body tilts, as if sadness had its way with him.
Van Gogh demanded a lot of portraits, this very particular and limited way of capturing the human presence, and he repeated many times that one of his tasks as a painter was to create works that would be considered the embodiment of modernity. portrait.
What exactly does this mean? For van Gogh, a modern portrait is one in which mimetic representation is of secondary importance. It is a portrait that pushes formal boundaries, using strong color contrasts to heighten its impact. It is a portrait that sees and sees at the same time, exposing the very soul of its model. It is a portrait whose immediacy will shock, but which will have an enduring spectral presence so that, in this case, future generations will recognize the portrait of Dr. Gachet as a universal representation of melancholy.
But it will perhaps above all be an extraordinarily handled portrait because it has been sifted through the feverish instability of the painter himself.
Yes, it will also be, in part at least, a portrait of the portrait painter, as indeed are so many paintings in this extraordinary and painfully intimate exhibition, whether they present themselves as a turbulent landscape with swooping crows or the withering casually moving carnations in a glass.
Van Gogh in Auvers: his last months continues at the Van Gogh Museum (Amsterdam) until September 3. The exhibition was organized by the Van Gogh Museum and a team of researchers and curators in collaboration with the Musée d’Orsay.
