THE INTENSE LIFE OF VINCENT VAN GOGH

On Saturday, 25 May 1890, Vincent Van Gogh wrote to a critic who had praised his work urging him to keep any further comment to a minimum, “Because it is absolutely certain that I shall never do important things.”

Two months later the artist walked into the Auvers countryside, leaned his easel against a tree and shot himself below the heart. Despite the gravity of the wound, he walked back to his lodgings at Ravoux’s inn on Place de la Marie and went to his attic room saying nothing to anyone of his injury. He died on Tuesday, July 29, at the age of 37.

Ever since, the world has been trying to decide precisely what to make of this son of a Dutch Protestant pastor. Failed as an art dealer, disappointed in love, too zealous in his post as a lay preacher among the coal miners of the Belgian Borinage, Van Gogh turned to art. In 10 years he painted 800 pictures and made nearly 850 drawings while living from hand to mouth supported by his saintly art-dealer brother Theo.

The voluminous correspondence between the brothers makes up one of the most illuminating and touching chronicles in the annals of art. The story of his life has been popularized in Irving Stone’s “Lust for Life,” a bad movie with Kirk Douglas and a lovely ballad by Don McLean:

Starry starry night. . . .

Van Gogh has been romanticized as the very model of the Mad Genius and made the focus of rationalization for every pathetic unknown artist who labored in unrewarded obscurity. (They’ll be sorry when I’m gone. Vincent only sold one picture in his lifetime.) His legacy to the art world fashioned it as a place full of passionately sincere devotees who cared for nothing but the transcendent value of art, a reputation it does not deserve most days.

Now the fruits of the final chapter of Van Gogh’s intense life are under review until March 22 in a remarkable exhibition of 90 works at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The show was sensitively organized and minutely documented by Ronald Pickvance. It traces the trajectory of Van Gogh’s art during 14 months when he painted writhing landscapes of olives and cypresses, still lifes of irises and roses, pulsing copies of admired artists like Millet and Daumier and portraits that appear to be made from the inside out. First he worked in the mental asylum at Saint-Remy under the care of Dr. Theophile Peyron and then at the village of Auvers where he was a kind of outpatient of Dr. Paul Ferdinand Gachet, an art lover and amateur painter whom Vincent characterized as in the grip of, “Nervous trouble from which he certainly seems to me to be suffering as seriously as I.”

The observation brings up the persistent--and somehow persistently silly question of Van Gogh’s sanity. The artist consigned himself to the asylum in Saint-Remy after he broke down in Arles in a ghastly and notorious incident where he severed one of his ears and sent it to a local prostitute.

That sounds pretty crazy, as do the artist’s subsequent attempts to eat his poisonous paints when attacks came upon him at the asylum. Yet Dr. Peyron and most serious writers on art are at pains to describe Van Gogh’s affliction as a form of epilepsy rather than one of mental illness, and are almost nervous in their haste to point out that the artist worked only during periods of lucidity. It is as if an ancient stigma attached to the idea of madness becomes doubly unacceptable when associated with the art of a man regarded as a genius and one of the inventors of modern art.

Judged by his art, Van Gogh was certainly not psychotic in any ordinary sense. Psychotics have characteristic ways of picture-making and Van Gogh’s work has virtually none of them. But--also judging by the art--this man’s head was scarcely in the same place ours is as we go about our ordinary business. Van Gogh was not mad, but he reminds us of the psychiatric dictum, “The mentally ill are just like us, they are just more human.”

We are enthralled by this art because it cooks on all burners at once, simultaneously expressing modes of thought and feeling that most people can only experience one at a time. Of all the icons on view here, “Starry Night” is surely the most beloved. Vortexes of deep azure whorl around stars and crescent moon. A giant green-black cypress blows in the wind like the flame of a soul aspiring to paradise. Below, a village rests cozily under the church spire, comfortable in its ignorance of the cosmic events passing in nature and in the artist’s soul.

There is frenzy here, no doubt, but that is a fairly commonplace emotion that usually indicates a mere loss of ordinary control. But Van Gogh did not lose control. Every brush stroke is clear and functional, describing the nimbus of the heavenly bodies, the contour of the land, the angle of rooftops. While it is clearly an authentic recording of a real landscape, it is limpidly the projected picture of a man’s inner being. If there is agony here, it is tempered by the rich, decorative cloisonne surface of the paint. No, the overriding note here and elsewhere in Van Gogh’s last chapter is ecstasy.

It’s surprising how often the phrases that seem to fit Van Gogh’s art float back not out of the fin de siecle but out of the hippie era of the 1960s, the last time this culture had an optimistic vision of man’s capacity to live a rich and expanding inner life that improved both the self and the world. If the ‘60s failed, it was probably for lack of discipline but its quest for a “heightened state of consciousness” was the right idea and perfectly describes the aura of Van Gogh’s art.

At Saint-Remy the artist was certainly calmer than at Arles (that sojourn of heavy drinking and idealistic hopes for his yellow house and friendship with Gauguin was the subject of the Met’s last great Van Gogh exhibition in 1984). At Saint-Remy, Van Gogh’s inner being seems to have fused with the landscape. In “Green Wheat Field,” he is the wind bending the grain. In “Olive Orchard,” he fixed himself in the ground and felt the wholeness of the process of nature weaving roots and soil to trunk and branches that put their fingers into the sky and clouds until it is clear that it is all made of a single vital substance. Mere brushwork is transmogrified into visionary poetry revealing the truth that stands just behind the veil of reality.

But the pictures make it clear that becoming part of a transcendent unity is neither an easy nor pleasant matter. The tunneling space in the cloister of the asylum threatens to suck the artist in like a sworling vortex. He hacks out the boulders of a quarry with his brush. Their weight is monstrous but no less so than the crushing empty space between great bare trees in the village square. In a view of an enclosed wheat field, a little reaper resists a maelstrom of matter, scything with futile valor.

One reads of such exquisite and terrifying states of exaggerated physical identification in the accounts of both drug users and psychotics. We don’t know what caused Van Gogh to have them. We do know he uniquely resisted their omnivorous onslaught to set down the beauty and terror of their effects with unparalleled completeness. (Later artists like Pollock and Rothko got down wonderful dramatized fragments.) Rather than wonder if the poor soul was crazy, we ought to marvel that he was not.

What kept him from it then? Well, for one thing, Van Gogh, for all his sensitivity, had a constitution like an ox. By all accounts he was a robust and chunky fellow. That certainly helped, but even more we know Van Gogh to have been a man deeply nourished by faith. It started as religious faith and was transmuted into other kinds of faith.

He is the very symbol of humanism. His cascading portrait of Dr. Gachet takes the image of an odd, ennui-riddled man and finds in him the model of puzzled compassion nurturing a cutting from a plant. A rarely shown self-portrait depicts Vincent clean shaven. It is all the more touching when we learn this slightly rejuvenated image was made to reassure his octogenarian mother on her birthday, even though he could not hide the anxiety in his eyes. And he painted a sour old asylum attendant named Trabuc with the unflinching dignity that Ingres would have bestowed on a duke.

Which brings us to Van Gogh’s faith in art. He copied a Daumier scene of men drinking with the animation of a real subject, outdoing the original in capturing the gesture of imbibing, this man leaning politely over the mug, that one mashing the outer mug hungrily onto the inner mug.

And in his own work the process of composing structures that are clear visual grammars was ever present just behind the need to convey feeling. It is almost ludicrous to talk about this quintessentially ecstatic artist in the formal accents that are usually reserved for Cezanne, but after one’s sixth or seventh hypnotized turn around the gallery, it dawns that part of the struggle going on here is the titanic birth pains attendant to bringing modern art into being.

Van Gogh was far too modest and too intuitive to speak or even think of himself in such terms, but we are free to realize that that couple walking alienated in a grove of trees pretty well provided Edvard Munch a whole career and fueled the development of German Expressionism. Every artist of subjective passion from Soutine to De Kooning and Keifer owes Van Gogh.

His last pictures painted at Auvers are more lyrical, resigned and a bit old-fashioned. They hark back to classic Impressionism’s subjects of poppy fields, gardens and boats on the river. They are a bit tired, maybe too tired to resolve their formal problem of a double-square format that seems to split down the middle of its own repose.