It might seem logical that Vincent van Gogh, the most famous depressive in all of art, would adopt the Mediterranean cypress as a motif. The tall, tapered, cone-shaped periwinkle has always evoked associations of mourning and death. It stands as a guardian in Christian, Jewish and Muslim cemeteries throughout Southern Europe and the Middle East.
But van Gogh, judging by his own writings, saw the tree differently. “The cypresses still concern me,” he wrote in June 1889 in a letter to his tirelessly devoted brother Theo. “I’d love to do something with it, like the canvases with the sunflowers, because I’m amazed no one has made them the way I see them.”
The tree actually inspired him to new tree heights, as we see in Van Gogh’s Cypresses, an insightful and appealingly green exhibition that previews next week at the Metropolitan Museum of Art before opening to the public on May 22. The exhibition seems particularly relevant at a time when the catastrophe of climate change is prompting many contemporary artists to put nature at the center of their work and to reflect on the “comfort” (a favorite of Van Gogh’s) that trees bring.
The Met brings together 24 paintings, as well as a dozen drawings and four illustrated letters, in which the cypress appears – not always as a main subject. The show includes ‘Starry Night’ (from the Museum of Modern Art), which alongside the hypnotic rhythms of its swirling sky also features a pair of cypress trees that have long gone unnoticed and unnoticed.
Van Gogh, who committed suicide at the age of 37, began painting cypresses towards the end of his life. At the time, the Dutch-born artist was living in southern France and creating some of his strongest work. The Met exhibition slowly unfolds, with cypresses initially emerging as generic foliage in the distance of his landscapes from Arles. But in the summer of 1889, after suffering a nervous breakdown and voluntarily entering the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, he concentrated on the subject. Initially confined on the hospital grounds, he painted views of fields outside his iron-barred bedroom window and studied blue irises in the garden.
Within weeks, it was determined that he was well enough to leave the hospital walls. With his portable easel and paint box, he strolled to nearby fields and was struck by the sight of solitary cypress trees growing in the wild. He wondered how he could capture, as he later put it, this “dark spot in a sun-drenched landscape.” (Incidentally, the cypress trees he saw in Provence should not be confused with the American bald cypress, a staple of Louisiana swamps and Gothic films.)
In a way, van Gogh’s cypresses might sound like a tenuous premise for a show. Just last year came Van Gogh and the Olive Groves, a similarly hyper-focused look at the artist’s time in hospital in Saint-Rémy, the Dallas Museum of Art, and elsewhere. Such niche exhibitions may reflect the post-pandemic cutbacks, but they also represent a welcome aesthetic trend that offers an alternative to the blockbuster parade of the past and allows for the macro-pleasure that comes from viewing art at the micro-level, one painting at a time , gives time.
Mystery of the Pebbles
I visited the Met’s Conservation Studio one afternoon in April after receiving an interesting lead: some real pebbles had been found on one of his cypress paintings.
The Sherman Fairchild Paintings Conservation Center, as it is officially called, is housed in a huge semi-detached house with high mezzanine ceilings. When I arrived I found two of Van Gogh’s best-known paintings – both from the Met’s collection – resting upright on wooden easels. Their frames had been removed, and the sight instilled the mild shock of seeing a masterpiece return from its gilded life into a plain handcrafted object. Charlotte Hale, a curator of fine arts, and Silvia A. Centeno, a scholar, explained with visible enthusiasm that the two paintings were painted just days apart in June 1889, “an explosive month,” as Hale emphasized in her English Accent.
The canvases could not be more different. “Wheatfield with Cypresses” which is 29 inches high and 3 feet wide offers a brilliant view of the Provencal countryside on a gusty day that’s sure to hold on to your hat. stalks of yellow wheat bend in the wind; clouds crash across the sky; In the distance the purple-blue limestone hills known as the Alpilles undulate. And then, on the right, there it is. The cypress tree, whose dark emerald green foliage contrasts with the bright sky. Actually make two cypresses. It can be frightening to see a smaller tree leaning against a larger one, like human figures with their sides touching.
The painting on the other easel, “Cypresses,” also offers a view of two cypresses, this one in dramatic close-up. The canvas is rotated vertically and the top of the taller tree appears to be chopped off to condense its form into a bulky, churning mass. Again I thought of two figures and wondered if van Gogh had chosen to paint a pair of cypresses to suggest a cozy sense of togetherness.
While engineering “cypress trees,” Hale and Centeno used a microscope and a chemical process known as XRF (X-ray fluorescence mapping) to discover some new things. These included the surprising presence of rock material in the pigment. Sand and limestone pebbles – the largest being a quarter inch in diameter – are embedded on the surface of the canvas, particularly in the impasto foreground.
The discovery confirmed what scientists already knew: most of the “cypresses” were painted outdoors, “in situ,” as Hale put it, adding that van Gogh put the finishing touches on the painting in his studio. Using a wooden pointer, she marked four pebbles visible to the naked eye. “We know they are there,” she remarked, “but we can’t know exactly how they got there.”
Was it possible that van Gogh intentionally mixed handfuls of sand and pebbles into his paint to thicken his impasto paint and give it a grittier texture?
“Absolutely not,” Hale replied. “I think it could be that his easel fell over. The wind was so strong.”
But that’s just a theory, as both restorers emphasized. And no doubt other theories will emerge as well, particularly as most of us prefer to see beloved paintings as reflections of an artist’s will rather than mere fluke of the weather.
A few days later, I mentioned the pebble story to an artist friend, who hastily suggested, “I think what happened is that van Gogh was disgusted with the painting and threw a handful of dirt on it.”
Van Gogh’s devotion to nature and daylight painting was controversial in the late 1880s, as avant-garde artists turned their works away from Impressionism and towards the more subjective styles of Symbolism and Expressionism. A strong challenge came from Paul Gauguin, a friend or rather enemy of van Gogh. The story of how van Gogh, a lonely spirit longing for company, invited Gauguin to stay with him in the Yellow House in Arles has often been told. Rather than elevating van Gogh’s spirits, the visit was a disaster, leading to the alarming deafening incident and his incarceration at the asylum.
The tensions between the two were partly philosophical. Van Gogh’s muddy and choppy brushwork irritated Gauguin, who favored a decorative style based on smooth areas of color. Gauguin kept urging him to be more contemporary – to depict the contents of his imagination rather than chronicle the everyday wheat fields and other visual facts. A painting of what you see can be far more imaginative than what you imagine, but Gauguin didn’t want to hear that.
At the same time, Van Gogh wanted to experiment with Gauguin’s approach – the novel idea of working indoors and synthesizing forms into a composite that has no equivalent in nature. The experiment led to a colossal project, “Starry Night”, arguably the most famous landscape painting in all of art history.
Admittedly, you might not think that “Starry Night” is about a cypress painting. It is commonly known as an image of a night sky glittering with stars. But the tops of two trees in the left foreground of the painting provide a surge of vertical energy and the all-important symbolic connection between earth and sky. Van Gogh borrowed the image of the trees from another painting of his, a canvas not from the National Gallery in Prague.
For Susan Alyson Stein, curator of the Met exhibition, “Starry Night” is “a composite in the truest sense of the word,” as she writes in the catalogue. Perhaps that is why the painting seems less like a tangible landscape and more like an inky blue hallucination.
A noticeable mother-child bond
Why did van Gogh often paint two connected trees and not a single one? Did he find her like that in the fields? The catalog doesn’t say it.
Looking for an answer, I called the New York Botanical Garden and was referred to Damon Little, a 47-year-old botanist who holds the title of Bioinformatics Curator. As it turns out, Little wrote his dissertation on the 31 species of the genus Cupressus – the cypress. I emailed him reproductions of four well-known van Gogh paintings and we spoke over the phone. He said that each of the paintings, including the less naturalistic and more abstract “Starry Night,” featured a pair of cypresses, one tree taller than the other. It was certainly a sight, he added, that van Gogh could have seen in the landscape.
Cypress seeds are eccentrically shaped, with centers resembling “thick pancakes”. “Their seeds don’t disperse very well, so you often find a mother tree and the offspring around it,” he said.
A mother tree with her offspring? Little’s comment suggested new interpretations, and for a moment the cypress seemed to be a different tree. Van Gogh had stripped it of its centuries-old funerary associations and reinvented it as a masterpiece of emotional connection and caring. Is that what Van Gogh meant when he described his astonishment that “nobody made them the way I see them”?
Impossible to say. The air around his cypresses continues to be teeming with contrasting approaches, from the metaphysical to the seriously botanical to the suddenly topical question raised by the case of the embedded pebbles. Let van Gogh transform a tree he spotted in the landscape into a deep mystery and breathe new life into an ancient symbol.
Van Gogh’s Cypresses
Previews May 16; Open from May 22nd to August 22nd. 27, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave., 212-535-7710; metmuseum.org.