Van Gogh’s Cypresses

At this point, is there anything new to say about Vincent van Gogh’s art, much less his most famous painting, Starry Night (1889)? After all, a constant stream of noteworthy exhibitions are held every year promising the latest insights and revelations about the Dutch Post-Impressionist painter’s work. In this crowded field, however, Van Gogh’s Cypresses at the Metropolitan Museum of Art stood apart. Refreshingly, beloved paintings were hung near unfamiliar landscapes owned by private collectors, and works not considered the usual suspects were borrowed from other institutions.

Though the show was very much about the trees the Dutchman admired during the years he spent in the south of France, the title of the exhibition is somewhat deceptive. The focus was primarily on the brief period—March 1888–May 1890—that the painter lived in Arles and Saint-Remy.

As for Starry Night, it temporarily left its long-time home at MoMA on West 53rd Street for display on Fifth Avenue and 82nd Street. If you were lucky, when you saw it, you were not surrounded by gawking tourists. The afternoon I went, I stood alone in front of this van Gogh even though, as the Mona Lisa of Modern Art, it’s ordinarily a crowd magnet. Viewed among other paintings, drawings, and illustrated letters that feature tall cypresses, the trees occupying Starry Night’s foreground for the first time grabbed my attention more than the dramatic nocturnal skies or the distant village. I guess I’ve attended one lecture too many elucidating the possible event that might have caused the celestial swirls the artist depicted. I always thought that was the point of the painting. Based on this exhibition, I’ve changed my mind. The cypresses that are represented front and center in this work are more meaningful than I ever realized. Indeed, reading the catalogue, I discovered that the artist waited patiently for almost a year after he conceived the idea of rendering cypresses and an ebullient evening sky before he executed it.

Until van Gogh painted Starry Night, cypresses functioned as if they were minor characters in a play by, say, Henrik Ibsen or Anton Chekhov. When the Dutchman depicted them, they tended to be in the background and off to the side. And they will return there in the last paintings in the exhibition. That’s how they were planted: they were meant to protect fields and gardens from strong winds.

Featuring landscapes, the Met show was dominated by paintings that were predominantly comprised of greens and blues. Eventually, to be sure, white clouds appeared as well as ochre wheat fields. For the most part, museumgoers were surrounded by parks, gardens, meadows, hilly expanses, and captivating skies. If you stood back at a distance, van Gogh’s assertive brushstrokes created sculptural passages. The flowers, for example, felt dimensional.

Once the Dutchman painted the cypresses in Starry Night during June 1889, these trees continued to be ready for their close-up. They were durable, steadfast, protective. They reached for the sky. As verticals, they were wonderful counterparts to curvaceous clouds. In a letter to his brother Theo, the artist even suggested that the cypresses were “beautiful as regards lines and proportions, like an Egyptian obelisk.”

The cypresses proved to be subjects that inspired van Gogh to be incredibly inventive. The show at the Met could not have been more astonishing in terms of the many ways the artist represented them. There was more variety than anyone could imagine. What a thrilling gift for scholars and casual onlookers!