Waiting for Van Gogh

by Jim Steichen

photo courtesy of the National Gallery of Art

So I saw the Van Gogh exhibition, and yes it was fabulous. Tell us something we don't know, you plead. That's always the problem with shows like the National Gallery's current Van Gogh's Van Goghs: Masterpieces from the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam -- it's difficult to tell whether the show itself is indeed "fabulous" or whether it is "just" the works themselves that are truly "fabulous." It's like this: if you reach some new level of humanistic ecstasy listening to Beethoven's Ninth on a cheap car stereo, you don't want to credit your dilapidated Volvo for the experience. You don't give every production of King Lear a glowing write-up just because Shakespeare was, is, and always will be the man. You need to be sure that in ravingly reviewing you're not just being carried away by the brilliance of the creator, and nowhere is this danger of such a critical blind eye more prevalent than with artists as beloved as Van Gogh or with shows as hyped as Van Gogh's Van Goghs. After all, a Van Gogh in a crowded, stuffy, poorly-lit gallery would still be a Van Gogh. But we'll have to save these caveats for another day. Fortunately for all parties, not the least of which being the public persona of the lamentably-kitschified Luster for Life himself, the National Gallery has really got this exhibition right.

First of all, you can get in. Unless you've been living in the proverbial cave with your proverbial digit up your proverbial orifice (or if you just happened to miss all of the twenty-odd Washington Post Style page cover stories, or the Washington Post Magazine issue that sold almost all of its pages, if not its soul, to the Van Gogh Publicity Succubus), you already know that there are no advance tickets available for Van Gogh. Short of mooching off of one of your Ticketmaster-savvy friends, the only way in is to obtain a same-day pass, that is, to wait in a very long line.

Let's get personal: I went to Van Gogh on a Monday, October 12. (It's generally agreed that going on a weekday is your best bet. I was pushing my luck going on a federal holiday.) There are 2000 passes available each day, and the Gallery begins to distribute them at 10 a.m. Each person in line can obtain up to six passes apiece, and since it's impossible to know how many each person in line will want, guessing the end of the line is something of a crap shoot. The Gallery has a security guard who estimates the end of the line and walks down telling everyone past that point that there's a good chance they won't get in. I took my place in line just after eight, probably a good 200 people past the "end" of the line, and got a pass by the skin of my nail-biting teeth -- I was probably one of the last 50 people to make it in for the day. The line forms at the north entrance, and by 8:30 it had wrapped all the way around past the entrance facing the Mall (literally halfway around the building, and quite a sight to behold). If you want to weigh your odds by my experience, know that I got in line just in front of the west fountain of the Mall entrance. So go early, bring a friend or some reading material, and prepare yourself for a heartbreak if you take your chances past the "end" of the line. If you're lucky like me, the couple waiting in line behind you will buy you a mocha for saving their place in line when they head off for some warm provisions at Starbucks.

On to the show. The exhibition itself consists of around seventy paintings spaciously dispersed throughout ten rooms, arranged in a biographical chronology and grouped by subject matter and general theme. Predictably, the first room is the "early" room, which is followed by the "peasant" room, containing not just the monumental Potato Eaters but several smaller studies that led up to this first major work. But thankfully not all of the rooms are so patly themed, acquitting the layout of any charges of clunkiness or contrivance. This certainly won't stop you from coming up with your own labels, though. I thought I might have a bit too much Spice on the brain when I found myself dubbing the third room, for lack of a better word, "scary."

Another factor at work in saving Van Gogh from the thinly veiled contrivance and totalization that too often plagues big shows such as this one is the straightforward tone of the self-guided audio tour. At a mere five dollars (four for students) the tour is a good buy, especially considering that your pass to the exhibition is gratis. The tour doesn't tell you to turn to the right or left or proceed to the next gallery or to look for the large canvas with the such and such on it, but rather allows you to hear narration on only those paintings you would like to hear about, in whatever order you come to them. The apparatus is not a frumpish headset, but a chic wand-looking thing with a keypad to punch in the number of the painting you want to hear about. Roughly a third of the paintings have audio narration. The narrators do not indulge in fulsome effusions but stick to a just-the-facts-ma'am style: offering pertinent biographical info, pointing out a prevalent technical influence or innovation, or quoting letters written by Van Gogh to his brother Theo. Perhaps most refreshing of all is the absence of any Alex Trebek-styled hyper-pronunciation; you need not give your ear some more distance from the speaker when the narrators mention locales such as Saint-Rémy-de-Provence and Auvers-sur-Oise.

Largely due to the format of the audio tour, the exhibition skillfully avoids what novelist Jeanette Winterson calls "art at a trot" and what others would more bluntly term the "cattle effect." At any semi-crowded event you're invariably going to feel a bit bovine at moments, but at Van Gogh you decidedly don't get the feeling that you're being led through invisible chutes or being guided in a steady stream past the paintings for the obligatory 10- to 20-second look. It is crowded, but not unbearable. (In the sixth room I actually had a good 30 seconds alone with a landscape. Yes, I counted.) You aren't able to stroll up to the Wheatfield with Crows and stretch out your arms in an imaginative embrace, but neither do you have to elbow your way to the front of the crowd just to get a peek. The paintings are arranged to accommodate large numbers of viewers, e.g., wall information printed on both sides of the larger works, and things move along smoothly except for the bottleneck in the eighth room, in which The Bedroom and The Yellow House are hung on adjacent walls.

I just can't compliment the organizers enough on presenting in Van Gogh a portrait of the artist as an artist, and not as some unassailable cultural icon or stereotypically tortured soul. It would have been so easy, for example, to gloss the roomful of multi-faceted self-portraits as evidence of some instability of character; instead the tour points out that by painting himself Van Gogh spared himself the expense of a model. Imagine that -- Van Gogh as a regular old practically thinking person. In the information on the Japanese-inspired Courtesan we learn that the Great Master has a sense of humor, evidenced by the visual pun of placing in the background of the work cranes and frogs, words for which were slang terms for prostitutes. The masterpieces The Yellow House and The Bedroom are presented on one level as nothing more than testaments to Van Gogh's hopelessly bourgeois contentment at having a home and room of his own. (The tour thankfully makes only one passing reference to the ear incident.)

I could go on for several more pages, if not forever, discoursing on this or that observation inspired by seeing Van Gogh's paintings live, albeit under barely perceptible glass. But you don't need nor do you probably want to hear about too many of my amateurish epiphanies. This is a review, not an art history term paper, so I'll limit myself to a few comments on Van Gogh's trademark thickly-layered brushstrokes: is it painting pushing the limits of its medium? Painting trying to become sculpture? Painting demanding a literally larger presence? Painting aiming for tactile and not just visual effects? I could say more, but you have to, pardon the cliché, see it for yourself. After all, the whole point of going to see art in person is that you're there in person. And when you're there in person, things can get personal. Just don't take it personal if the same-day pass gods frown upon you and your late-sleeping self ends up taking a dejected Metro ride back to the burbs and the only Van Gogh you see is the Wheatfield with Crows reproduced on the banners and signs outside the Gallery. There's Van Gogh and there's Van Gogh, and this is Van Gogh we're talking about.