ART REVIEW : Van Gogh : Simon Collection Traces the Inspirations of the Man and the Genius

Vincent van Gogh’s work amounts to more than a $53.9-million patch of irises or an $82.5-million portrait of his doctor--beautiful as those record-making paintings may be. And the Norton Simon Museum’s Van Gogh collection consists of more than three late, great paintings--compelling as these works may be.

“Van Gogh: Painter, Printmaker and Collector,” at the Norton Simon Museum (to Dec. 30), reminds us of these basic facts in an engaging show of works from the museum’s collection, enhanced by photographs, reproductions and explanatory text. The three prime paintings--”Portrait of the Artist’s Mother,” “Portrait of a Peasant” and “The Mulberry Tree”--dominate the show by sheer aesthetic force, but they also fit into an investigation of influences on his art.

Visitors who enter the show with a narrow view of Van Gogh as a mythic figure are likely to emerge with the realization that, in many ways, his development was quite ordinary. For one thing, he had heroes whose work he collected and copied. His unique vision was influenced by a wide range of art, from French still lifes to British engravings and Japanese woodblock prints.

Furthermore, the quintessential mad genius did not create masterpieces the first time he picked up a pencil or brush. Before there were intensely emotional, vibrantly colored artworks, there were stiff drawings and murky paintings. In short, the exhibition brings Van Gogh down to size without diminishing his accomplishments.

Van Gogh never had the means to collect art in a big way, but he had the instinct. From 1873-75, when he lived in London and sold reproductions at the Goupil Gallery, he bought inexpensive popular prints and collected wood engravings by British illustrators for such magazines as Graphic and Illustrated London News. Buying single issues and entire volumes of these publications, he eventually amassed a collection of 2,000 wood engravings by such artists as Gustave Dore and Sir Hubert von Herkomer.

Some of their images became Van Gogh’s subjects. Jean Francois Millet’s etching, “The Diggers,” for example, inspired a Van Gogh drawing by the same name. A similar image of a man digging in a cemetery turns up in the 1885 painting, “The Parsonage Garden in the Snow,” in the Simon museum’s collection.

Prints of miners, seamen and other workers apparently fired Van Gogh’s social conscience and contributed to his dark paintings of noble peasants and the trappings of their grim lives. A plain still life of peasant crockery and “Head of a Peasant Woman in a White Bonnet,” one of many studies for his celebrated painting “The Potato Eaters,” crystallize this influence. But in “Peasant Woman,” Van Gogh has created an intensely human likeness with chiseled features. It is a far more expressive image than those of his mentors--and a picture that is clearly his own.

“I have wanted to give an impression of quite a different way of living man than that of us civilized people,” Van Gogh wrote in a letter to his brother, Theo. “Therefore I have no wish for anyone to consider this work beautiful or admirable . . . He who prefers to see the peasants in their Sunday best may do as he likes. I for my part am convinced I get better results by painting them in their roughness.”

Van Gogh never lost this conviction, but his palette burned so much brighter in his final years that the dour tone was transformed. The exhibition tracks this change, in part, to Van Gogh’s interest in Japanese prints. Fellow artists Edouard Manet, Paul Gauguin and Claude Monet also bought these colorful woodblock prints, but Van Gogh appears to have been the greatest enthusiast, building a collection of 400 sheets and circulating two exhibitions of prints.

Images of Japanese prints occasionally appear in his paintings, and their influence permeates his late work. As exhibition notes indicate, Van Gogh assimilated Japanese artists’ brilliant color, flat planes, intuitive treatment of space, energetic line and extreme emphasis on the foreground. He was so entranced with the Japanese way that he fancied himself a Japanese monk and painted a self-portrait in that romantic guise.

Adopting a foreign persona didn’t strip Van Gogh of his identity, however; it seems to have helped him find himself as an artist. In the exhibition, four prints by Hiroshige bear a stronger relationship to the museum’s late Van Goghs than a dark still life by Adolphe Monticelli that may have been a precursor to his paintings of sunflowers.

Van Gogh worked from a lifeless, black and white photograph for the 1888 portrait of his mother, but you would never know it. He has given the old woman a quizzical expression and pushed her jaundiced face right up to the front of the picture. Instead of dissolving into a gray photographic blur, she confronts viewers with a lively presence, crisply outlined against an insistent green background.

The 1888 “Portrait of a Peasant,” portraying a gardener in a bright yellow, wide-brimmed hat, is even more powerful and no less equivocal. The peasant has a penetrating gaze and a rather ominous expression that can be interpreted as wisdom, anguish or rage.

It is difficult for a landscape to compete with such expressive portraiture, but “The Mulberry Tree” (1889) easily holds its own. “I think it’s dynamic as hell,” Norton Simon said in a recent interview, and he’s right. With yellow corkscrew foliage shooting sparks into a brilliant blue sky, this is a landscape with an electric charge.

Norton Simon Museum, 411 Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, (818) 449-5101. Thur.-Sun., noon-6 p.m., to Dec. 30.