What the Composer Has Learned From Van Gogh

1.     Vincent Van Gogh didn’t begin his art career until he was twenty-seven years old! It’ never too late to start.

2.     “I find it ready-made in nature,” said Van Gogh about the composition of his paintings. Is there an analogy for music I can follow? A chord is a sound of nature, or a natural sound. Perhaps it is to not delve too deeply into the theory and simply use the chords as they sound.

3.     I say I love my work, yet the physical keeping of that work is in disarray. If I truly love it, I would care for it better, organize it, and keep it in order.

4.     Van Gogh was adept in various styles, not just “his” style. He allowed himself to be influenced by other styles and schools, e.g., Paris’s Impressionists (he totally changed his color pallet, allowing for so many new colors, and brightness and lightness), the Pointillists and other Minimalists.  Step back and take quick glance around the gallery walls and you will see how he abandoned his earlier, darker, backlit style for the bright, almost unbounded pallet of his Paris. Could this be in part because he did start his career later, that he was never locked into one style or school he was good at early, and therefore stuck with it because it was inculcated into his earliest “language” of art?

5.     Van Gogh only had a ten-year career. Ten Years! Yet everywhere you look in the gallery, there are many, many masterworks. I could labor my whole life and not successfully reproduce just one of these. There are also countless drawings, sketches, and even little illustrated additions in his letters to his brother showing how he envisioned the finished works to look and be displayed. Such an enormous amount of work he got done. Like Mozart, Da Vinci, and Michelangelo, Van Gogh’s output was stunningly large. He was so productive. And while it may possibly be that some of his work was not exceptional (in his eyes perhaps; we will find any Van Gogh exceptional in retrospect), he did so much of it that there were many more “greatest hits” as well.

6.     Connections. Boats are flowers, he dreamt of working side by side with friends in Arles, with whom he would swap paintings, portraits of one another (with Gauguin, in particular). Van Gogh sought to link his works to others, and link his images to yet other images you would see only if your mind made the connection.

7.     Deliberate, practiced study. Stepwise goals.

8.     Synthesis. Van Gogh put it all together: styles, schools, different brush strokes and techniques on a single canvas, colors, people, and places. There doesn’t seem to be anything in his life or his experience of life that he didn’t include in his art and vice versa. Note in particular some of the larger strokes of his 1889-1890 works, right at the end of his life: are some of these signs of impatience? Are the unevenesses a sign of his losing focus?

 

The Details

I spent an afternoon in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam’s musemsplein (with Michael Franks’ song, “In The Yellow House,” lilting softly in the background of my thoughts). When in Holland, one cannot escape the fact that over the centuries this country has inspired such wonderful schools of painting. The Dutch Maters, Vermeer in Delft, The Netherlands appreciates its artistic heritage. This includes the wonderful collection of Van Goghs at the Van Gogh museum on the musemsplein, just southeast of our hotel, and a short walk from the Concertgebouw.

There are two buildings with Van Gogh Museum emblazoned on them here. One is a modern curve of stainless steel that looks like an Eero Saarinen design, though I never verified that it was (Americans would recognize his work from the St. Louis Arch and the venerated TWA Terminal 5 at JFK). This building is under renovation, so for now, the entire collection is housed in the newer building closer to the street. Someone told me along the way that currently there are a number of Van Gogh’s works that are on loan from other museums across the world, thus making this a special time in which more of his work is on display in one place than ever before.

It was worth the look. It’s nice that the display is mostly chronological, and the commentary on the placards is enough to add some perspective without overwhelming the visitor with arcane detail.

I was really thrilled by it. No matter where you stood on the floor, the great works surround you. At times I would stop, pull out a pen and try to capture some of my thoughts of the whole experience.. I wonder if anyone thought that odd, this American scribbling notes onto the back of his admission ticket (my “eintrittskarte”). Probably not. I’m sure the display inspires many, from the next generation of Van Goghs to the arts wannabes like myself, who sit there in awe for spell.