A new view of an artistic revolution

Vincent van Gogh is among the most closely studied artists in modern history. We know more about the painter, where he went and what he thought, than we do about most other artists of his stature.

His career was brief -- just one decade separates Van Gogh’s suicide from the moment he determined to become a painter. More than 800 paintings and 1,100 drawings are identified, although his great work was made during a scant period of three years at the very end. And as a prolific correspondent, he left a detailed paper trail. It has helped historians trace the contours of his life with unusual specificity.

Given all this, it’s something of a surprise to encounter “Vincent van Gogh: The Drawings.” According to the organizers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the exhibition remains on view through December, and at Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum, where it had its premiere last summer, this is the first thorough retrospective of the Dutchman’s drawings ever assembled. The show brings together 113 works in ink, graphite, watercolor, crayon, chalk and, occasionally, oil paint on paper.

All the precise and explicit information we have on Van Gogh’s life and art has now been brought to bear on the works he made on paper, rather than on canvas. The hefty catalog that accompanies the exhibition is filled with acute documentation and revealing insights.

For several works, advanced technology has even been applied. Infrared techniques were used to bring out the pencil lines beneath dark ink, while fascinating chemical analyses are also provided for the various inks he used.

Drawings are paired with excerpts from letters written to his brother, Theo; sometimes the drawing and the letter were penned on the same day. A number of drawings are akin to letters, since Van Gogh often drew copies of his oil paintings to send to Theo.

A descriptive drawing was a meticulous way to keep Vincent’s art-dealer brother abreast of the rapid evolution of his painting. And seven paintings have been installed in the galleries to show correspondences between the different mediums.

Still, no visitor will need a degree in history (or chemistry) to recognize that something profound happened in Van Gogh’s art. The show cleaves neatly in two. The difference between the parts is dramatic.

The first third of the show covers seven years, as the largely self-taught artist flailed about in an effort to find his way. When he did, the event was a virtual light-bulb moment. The drawings, hitherto bleak and dreary, suddenly seem illuminated from within.

He came to that moment in 1888, while working in Provence, but everything that happened before prepared him for it. From the slate-gray expanse of “A Marsh,” drawn in ink and graphite in June 1881, to the wintry and barely populated cafe called “A Guinguette” from 1887, Van Gogh gives almost no hint that his art will ever be anything more than routine.

The first rooms of the show are therefore rather tedious. Only looking backward do these serviceable drawings, otherwise methodical and dull, become absorbing.

They are marked by a sentimental conviction that, to be taken seriously as an artist, desolation is essential. Van Gogh was 27 -- a grown adult -- when he finally decided to become a painter, after failed efforts to be a teacher, a lay preacher and an evangelist. Imbued with the Calvinist sensibilities of his father, a Dutch Reformed pastor, he not surprisingly rejected the centralized authority that came with formal art training at an academy.

Instead he identified with the plight of ordinary peasants. He worshiped the hardscrabble imagery of Jean-Francois Millet, drawing with stalwart poignancy the farm laborers, weavers and washerwomen of the Netherlands. He admired the theological subjects and social realism of Rembrandt, his celebrated countryman. He meant to use his art to preach.

The early drawings, mostly joyless in subject, tend to be dark, heavy and plodding in style. He even claimed a correspondence between his thematic aims and his choice of humble materials.

“Very fine pens, like very fine people, are sometimes amazingly useless,” he wrote to a friend in 1883. He believed his tools had to be coarse, like his subjects, to capture empathic feeling.

Theo van Gogh was also hovering in the background giving advice, as when he suggested that Vincent stop isolating his figures on a blank sheet and instead integrate them within a recognizable setting. As an art dealer, Theo knew that isolated figure studies were a tougher sell -- too arty -- than familiar scenes of daily life.

Vincent also turned to popular sources to learn how to draw. In addition to books and how-to manuals, several of which are helpfully shown in a side gallery display case, perhaps the most important one was a simple yet effective homemade tool called a perspective frame.

A small wooden rectangle was affixed with a handle, and two strings were drawn taut across the horizontal and vertical centerlines. Two additional strings were stretched from corner to corner.

When held up to the landscape, a perspective frame helps the eye to visually organize a scene -- identifying the horizon line, sorting out perspective, establishing size relationships and more. Surface pattern is also emphasized. The world becomes literally picturesque.

Still, however important a learning device the perspective frame clearly was to the aspiring artist, its use does not explain the remarkable transformation in Van Gogh’s drawings in the spring of 1888. Ironically for a medium characterized by black and white, what explains it instead is color.

Van Gogh had spent most of the prior year in Paris, where the chromatic intensity of Impressionist painting was at a sharp remove from the mud-toned canvases he had been equating with artistic seriousness. (Think of the thick gloom in his 1885 painting of a farm family’s supper, “The Potato Eaters,” all dun-colored and grim.)

The pursuit of color was instrumental in propelling him to Provence, in the sun-filled south of France. It made all the difference in what he was soon to accomplish.

A reed pen and brown ink might not seem quite the right tools with which an artist might engage color. In the exhibition, however, two things become clear.

One is the delirious range of marks Van Gogh began to make -- lines, dots, hatch marks, commas, loops and more fill the page, creating optical texture and visual movement. The other is the equal significance assumed by the paper, conceived as a blank field. Now the marks don’t cover up the blankness; they embrace it.

Paris had given Van Gogh color, and his brother had taught him that not just the figure but the ground was critically important. (The popularity of Japanese prints among avant-garde artists reaffirmed that figure-ground lesson.)

The blank plane of a sheet of paper, tacked onto a board so that Van Gogh could draw the landscape outdoors in the wind and sun, began to embody Mediterranean light.

For the first time in his work, the whiteness of the page assumes an importance commensurate to the marks made with ink. You can’t imagine one without the other.

Some lines crisscross, some are parallel. Some radiate. Stippling appears. Floods of tiny circles cascade across the page. They combine to create a recognizable scene.

Whatever the shapes drawn with the pen, however, the creamy paper is an integral element of the composition. Suddenly the drawings are infused with light, from the inside out.

The curators’ decision to include a few paintings in this drawing show operates against the several watercolors and oils on paper Van Gogh made. The latter seem experimental, but they also look washed out or clumsy by comparison.

And if the exhibition goes too far in asserting that Van Gogh’s drawings are as revolutionary and exquisite as his paintings -- well, one can admire the curatorial enthusiasm without accepting the claim. Van Gogh arrived in an art world where the stature of drawing had already risen, and he contributed to its prominence.

Through the 19th century, works on paper generally went from supporting player in the evolution of a painting to an independent medium with its own strengths and purposes. Like his paintings, Van Gogh’s drawings suddenly burned hot -- and then flamed out.