My Vincent

MEYER SCHAPIRO GAVE A HINT AS TO WHAT IT WAS that so endears van Gogh to so many people. He said that he was drawn to art as a communication of the good. Van Gogh loved Giotto faces. He said they were always full of kindness. Goodness, kindness, facial expression, loneliness . . . these days young artists are too often told to shy away from such "literary" things. I like to think that painters like Degas, Gauguin, Seurat, van Gogh and Cézanne were on the verge of a kind of physiognomic renaissance, like the Greeks or Florentines, a new perusal of character in men and women. The last fin-de-siècle was a time of ravishing depiction and rich mimetic blood.

What is drawing? van Gogh asked in a letter. "It's the action for forcing one's way through an invisible iron wall which seems to be located somewhere between what one feels and what one can do. How does one get through this wall? . . . It has to be undermined and penetrated with a file, slowly and with patience . . ." I've never heard a better definition of drawing in all my years in the art game. To Theo, Vincent wrote: "What impassions me most -- much, much more than all the rest of my métier -- is the portrait."

Long after Vincent put an end to his suffering, another inmate of a French mental asylum, the very strange Antonin Artaud, conjured up these words in his mad essay on van Gogh, "The Man Suicided by Society": "I do not know of a single psychiatrist who would know how to scrutinize a man's face with such overpowering strength, dissecting its irrefutable psychology as if with a knife."

Oscar Wilde was a great contemporary of van Gogh who knew a thing or two about suffering at the hands of Perfidious Albion. Said Wilde about suffering, "It is what is hidden behind everything."