The first time you see "Almond Blossom" (1890), the centerpiece of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s stunning new exhibition, "Van Gogh Up Close," you are still a full two rooms away. You turn a corner, lift your eyes to see where you are headed off to, and there it is— hovering front and center in the distance, a turquoise haze with a crowd buzzing around it, the prize that awaits you, the answer to some question you sense is being asked. By this point you are some 30 canvases deep into the story, and have spent the last hour or more looking— reveling in the visual pleasure of scrutinizing and pondering bits of nature so common and ubiquitous that perhaps you never considered they were worth appreciating. Oh, there are show stoppers of the kind one expects from Van Gogh’s oeuvre. Those sets of gorgeous sunflowers— the ones from this museum’s own collection, eleven stems set in a simple earthen jug, each a distinctive act of creation, each in search of its unique sun, and the ones that normally live in NY at the Metropolitan, their droopy brown heads thrust so closely in front for our inspection that we can almost feel that if we get too close seeds and petals, all so delicately balanced on the canvas, will dislodge and fall onto the floor. There are vases of luminous red poppies and sapphire blue cornflowers, sunlit patches of slender irises and copper potfuls of fritillaries, radiant golden pears that seem to have just been spilled from a fieldhand’s wicker basket onto a dazzling swatch of table cloth.
But, there are also appreciations of spiny blades of grass, clumps of lawn covered in dandelion, pastures sewn together like quilted blankets, fields of flaxen wheat brushed with just a hint of sunlight, waving gently in slender bands of sky that seem filled with air that is alive. "I…am always obliged to go and gaze at a blade of grass, a pine-tree branch, an ear of wheat, to calm myself,” the artist wrote his sister, Wilhemina. It is clear from these canvases, even if we didn’t already know it from his biography, that the urge for looking— and for calm too— animated much of Van Gogh’s abbreviated life.
A lack of calm is palpable. It is there in a canvas depicting two haunted figures paused in a plot of forest, where rows of tall lean tree trunks seem to stand in for his asylum walls. Or, in dense tracts of sylan undergrowth, thickets drawn so nearly impenetrable that they barely allow a pathway for the eye. It is heartbreaking to hear in the audio commentary that some of the vistas depicted from Van Gogh’s time at Saint-Rémy (the hospital near Arles, where he committed himself and spent almost a year recuperating) omitted the bars in the windows that would have framed his view.
But, whatever disquiet and loneliness lurked within him, there are moments of supreme calm and breathtaking beauty in Vincent’s work, moments of serenity that, no matter how transient they ultimately were for him, transcend time and touch us all these years later by virtue of having been depicted with his brush. “Almond Blossom” (1890, painted in Saint-Rémy) is surely such a moment. Gnarled and knotty branches, scattered and drifting like wisps of smoke against a luminous, tranquil turquoise sky. The scrap of text next to the canvas notes that the painting was made after Van Gogh learned of the birth of his nephew, Vincent Willem, named for him. It might well have been a bittersweet moment— the vitality of new life and pride at having a namesake from his beloved brother Theo tempered by the immediacy of his hospitalization, an omnipresent confusion and uncertainty that riddled him and kept him locked away.
I’ve admired this painting since I saw it in Amsterdam about a dozen years ago, and have been lucky enough to see it again a time or two in the intervening years. I’ve had instincts about what experience the painting might be trying to capture, ideas that came back to me as I stood in front of it here. As I imagine it, the perspective is one of the artist laying on the ground, flat on his back, connected to solid earth beneath him, eyes turned heavenward into the infinity of a lushly lit morning sky. Between him and that limitless expanse are these branches, covered in the most beautiful pink and white flowering blossoms, that occasionally emit a shower of tiny petals that dance in the breeze like butterflies before drifting down on the artist’s face. But, beautiful though they are, the blossoms are only for a season, and from the ground the branches are just out of reach. The artist is resigned to that. And, still, he chooses to hold his gaze and be grateful for the moment. Perhaps, all those years of looking at the details around him, capturing a sense of rootedness and grounding, allowed Van Gogh the courage to acknowledge his own impermanence and to stare deep and full into the vast unknown.
“Van Gogh Up Close” opened today and runs through May 6. After its run in Philadelphia, it will move to The National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.
Almond Blossom, 1890. Vincent Willem van Gogh, Dutch, 1853 ‑ 1890. Oil on canvas, 28 15/16 x 36 1/4 inches (73.5 x 92 cm). Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Image courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
