Ahhh Van Gogh…
You were a lifeline to this teenager living in Utah with a moonlit longing impossible to put into words. …
As a voracious reader who devoured every book I could get my hands on, I read Lust for Life about Van Gogh at age 16 and was thunderstruck by the passion, the romance, the tragedy, of the life of Van Gogh. Written in 1934 by Irving Stone and based on the hundreds of letters written between Vincent and his beloved brother Theo, the book brought to life the mind of an artist, the overriding yearning for truth and beauty, the feelings of madness showing up in ecstatic joy and despair, the compulsion to create beauty even in the depths of pain.
My love for Van Gogh grew over time as I was compelled to read the actual letters between Vincent and his brother Theo. Long before phones and home computers, my only access to learning about art was to read about it, study it, and experience it for myself. So the day I stepped on a flyer at my community college advertising a study abroad in Paris changed the course of my life. Paris… teeming with legendary art, literature, and romance, was a city I had always dreamed of ever since I taped an ad for Paris perfume to my wall after watching Gene Kelly dance around the city in American in Paris, Audrey Hepburn do her beatnik dance at the poetry clubs in Funny Face, and of course, after reading Lust for Life. Paris was my destiny. Working 5 jobs over 5 months to save the money to go was challenging, especially as I decided the best course of action was to skip food (to save money) and sleep (to work more)… but that’s a different story.
So imagine my delight when I arrived in Paris to learn one of our central topics of study would be Van Gogh. It was the 100th anniversary of his death, and as a class, we went to Amsterdam to see more than 100 of his paintings in one glorious place. I stood at that museum looking at painting after painting, marveling at the thick strokes of paint standing inches off the canvas, the riotous colors, the swirls and electric vibrancy twirling right off the canvas.
I cried when I saw Starry Night, imagining the artist in his room at the insane asylum, painting as he looked out at the night sky through the bars on the window.
In Otterlo, I studied his earlier paintings and drawings like The Potato Eaters, the darker earthier colors of people who live most of their days deep in the earth.
And then we visited Auvers-sur-Oise and I stared at the little plain stone church he painted as a swirling magical holy place. I stood in the wheat field where Vincent shot himself, the small room where he lay dying, where his brother rushed to his side from Paris, and their graves side by side. Theo died 6 months after Vincent, they say of a broken heart. My teacher pointed out the ivy planted over the two graves so the brothers could be intertwined in death like they were in life. She said this heartachingly beautiful thing and then marched off back to our bus, while I fell to my knees next to their graves and marveled at the sheer sublime beauty of love.
Years passed and soon I was taking my own children on pilgrimages to see Starry Night at MOMA in New York. It was my touchstone, my way of remembering the beauty swirling all around us, the one thing I want them to know above all else.
So imagine my next delight when I saw a new Van Gogh exhibit was coming to Boston, and when I say new I don’t mean new paintings, I mean a new gathering of paintings –the paintings of the Roulin family. I walked into the exhibit and saw those swirls and colors and was swept right back to that feeling of being across the world at the age of 20 seeing my favorite flower–the sunflower–turned into a wild passionate aching joy on canvas.
These paintings were not of sunflowers, or starry nights, but instead they were of a family–another kind of passionate aching joy. Vincent had moved to the yellow house in Arles to paint when he became friends with a local postman and his family, the Roulin family. He wanted to work on painting portraits and each member of the family sat for him.
Knowing how Vincent longed for love, he wrote “It’s so easy to love, the hard thing is to be loved,” these paintings seem so poignant, especially the multiple paintings of the mother, Augustine Roulin. In his paintings of her she always has a rope around her wrist because while sitting, she is using the rope to rock the cradle of her newborn child. Van Gogh called the painting “La Berceuse” which means both “lullaby” or “she who rocks the cradle.”
Vincent wrote to his brother about this painting, “I would like to see this painting “in the cabin of a boat” where fishermen “in their melancholy isolation, exposed to all the dangers, alone on the sad sea… would experience a feeling of being rocked, reminding them of their own lullabies.”
Van Gogh painted 5 versions of La Berceuse, the last in January 1889. Four months later, after suffering a breakdown that led to cutting off a portion of his own ear, he entered the mental hospital in Provence in an attempt to heal. He said, “I put my heart and soul into my work and lost my mind in the process.”
I found this so beautiful, this longing to comfort those who feel isolated and melancholy, those “alone on the sad sea,” and I imagine he was longing to comfort himself as he struggled with his own turbulent mind. He painted more than 150 paintings during his stay at the asylum, including Starry Night which he painted while looking out his bedroom window covered in bars.
The Roulin mother shows up again in a painting entitled Lazarus as one of the two grieving “sisters,” and Van Gogh painted Lazarus with red hair and a beard like himself. I like to think Augustine Roulin gave him comfort as he tried to bring himself back from despair, almost like bringing himself back to life. It didn’t work.
He painted Lazarus in May of 1890 and died two months later in July of 1890.
Van Gogh said, “I don’t know anything with certainty, but seeing the stars makes me dream.” Me too Vincent, me too.
