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The Museum of Modern Art, New York/SCALA/Art Resource, NY

Everything Vincent van Gogh achieved was against the odds. He lacked aptitude. He couldn’t draw. His early paintings were like slurries of mud sprinkled with old potato peel. They were touching testaments to the pathos of earnestness unredeemed by talent.

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/interactive/2022/abelardo-morell-camera-obscura/" target=_blank>Van Gogh</a> wanted God to make use of him, but his soul felt turbulent and adrift. He was desperate to be of service. But he was confused about his calling, which might have been pastoral, might have been literary, might have been (don’t laugh) as a husband, a father.

In the end, there was only one thing — art. The point is, he made it so — by sheer striving. By the time van Gogh hit his stride, only 2½ years before he died, you couldn’t tell if he was sweating perspiration or paint.

If van Gogh’s work can make us want to fall to our own knees and weep, it’s not, I think, because we know how the tragic story ended. It’s because we, too, would like to be of use, to overcome our inadequacies and through some kind of virtue, be it kindness or hard work, radiate the same enduring love for life he did.

The Art Institute of Chicago/Charles Deering McCormick, Brooks McCormick and of Roger McCormick.

America’s two greatest museums — the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago — have mounted major van Gogh shows this spring. Both are rich and narrowly focused, and do much to air out the ambient flatulence of cheapo experiences such as the ubiquitous “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2021/05/11/van-gogh-immersive-exhibit-ticket-confusion/" target=_blank>Immersive Van Gogh</a>.” The <a href="https://www.artic.edu/exhibitions/9639/van-gogh-and-the-avant-garde-the-modern-landscape" target=_blank>Chicago show</a> zooms in on a three-month painting spree in Paris; the <a href="https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/van-gogh-cypresses" target=_blank>New York show</a> on van Gogh’s infatuation with a single motif — <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/interactive/2021/vincent-van-gogh-cypresses/" target=_blank>cypresses </a>— in Provence. Unintentionally, the exhibitions complement one another.

Van Gogh’s images move in the cinematic ‘Immersive Van Gogh.’ But will the show move New Yorkers?

But the Art Institute of Chicago show — “Van Gogh and the Avant-Garde: The Modern Landscape” — is not just about van Gogh. Rather, it tells the story of five artists struggling with the legacy of impressionism.

Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, Émile Bernard, Charles Angrand and van Gogh were all trying to find ways to address impressionism’s perceived weaknesses (that it was <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/interactive/2022/monet-rouen-cathedral-paintings/" target=_blank>too sketchy</a>, that it lacked robustness) while building on its strengths (its interest in modern, everyday subjects and above all, its liberation of color).

Their quest had enormous implications. The solutions they found would lead straight into fauvism, cubism, expressionism and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/interactive/2023/sonia-delaunay-terk-wellesley-college/" target=_blank>abstraction</a>. In short, to modern art.

In the 1880s, the five artists featured in the show all worked along the River Seine in the area around Asnières and Clichy, northwest of central Paris. Van Gogh was late to the party. Seurat had begun painting on La Grande Jatte and Saint-Ouen (elongated islands between Asnières and Clichy) at the beginning of the decade. Signac began painting in the area in 1882, Bernard in 1884 and the little-known Angrand in 1885.

Art Institute of Chicago

Van Gogh, who didn’t move to Paris until 1886, only painted in Asnières and Clichy in the spring of 1887. But the Dutchman was nothing if not prolific (there are almost 29 works by him in the show, 24 of them paintings), and these were crucial months.

Asnières was the second stop on the train line from the Gare Saint-Lazare, so it was a natural destination for weekend pleasure-seekers. Closer to the city, it was also grittier (more industrial and densely populated) than the more pastoral, villagey, downstream locations favored by Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and the other impressionists. Its cafes and restaurants were mobbed by Parisian day-trippers, many of whom came to watch or participate in the sailing and rowing regattas, and to swim, shoot or ride horses.

This was good modern subject matter. But how to paint it?

Seurat’s solution was to invent pointillism, the technique of constructing pictures from small dots of complementary colors. Pointillism relied on the latest scientific theories of color — especially those described by Michel Chevreul, a chemist and tapestry restorer. Chevreul had noticed that neighboring colors had a significant impact on one another. He registered, too, the phenomenon of retinal persistence — the way colored objects are often surrounded by a halo or afterimage in the original color’s complementary.

It’s fair to say that Seurat’s adaptations of color theory remained speculative and somewhat spurious. But he was leaning on science to give the perceived flimsiness of impressionism, its aesthetic of transience, more solid and lasting form. And he was a mesmerizing artist. (Stand in front of the Art Institute of Chicago’s great Seurat, “<a href="https://www.artic.edu/artworks/27992/a-sunday-on-la-grande-jatte-1884" target=_blank>A Sunday on La Grande Jatte</a>,” if you doubt it.)

Saint Louis Art Museum/Mrs. Mark C. Steinberg

In different ways, Signac, Bernard, Angrand and van Gogh all fell (at least briefly) under his spell and it’s this, as much as the focus on a small stretch of the Seine, that gives the show its special interest.

In Asnières, the five artists painted various leisure activities as well as the water itself, which broke up colored light in ways that <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/entertainment/claude-monet-la-grenouillere/" target=_blank>Monet </a>and Renoir had first been drawn to more than 10 years earlier.

In working-class Clichy, just across the river, they painted the suburb’s gasometers, steam trains, bridges and factories. (It’s interesting to learn from the catalogue that in Clichy at the time there was a candle factory where Chevreul had once worked, several glassworks producing glass prized for its brilliant color, and a printing factory where color printing was developed.)

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne/Felton Bequest

The Chicago show, which was originally conceived by Maite van Dijk and organized by Jacquelyn Coutré and Bregje Gerritse, will travel to the <a href="https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/nl" target=_blank>Van Gogh Museum</a> in Amsterdam in October. What makes it rewarding for van Gogh lovers is that it lets us stand alongside the striving Dutchman as he worked his way through all this.

“We painted on the banks of the river,” wrote Signac of his brief time with van Gogh, “and returned to Paris on foot. … Van Gogh wore a blue smock and had painted dots of color on the sleeves. He stuck right by me, shouting, gesticulating, and brandishing his large, size 30 canvas, so that he spread wet paint onto himself and the passersby.”

This is heady stuff (the pointillist dots on his sleeve!). But for van Gogh, Paris was just a staging post. To become “van Gogh,” he needed to get to Provence.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York/Rogers Fund

When, in New York, you arrive at his masterpiece, the Met’s indelible “Cypresses” — a shaggy, rippling walrus of a painting that makes <a href="https://www.moma.org/" target=_blank>MoMA’s</a> nearby “<a href="https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79802" target=_blank>The Starry Night</a>” resemble a cute but undernourished pup — you cannot miss the import of his breakthrough. It is like seeing a great Rembrandt self-portrait after a roomful of works by his contemporaries. “Congratulations, everyone, well-played,” you want to say. But you are in no doubt as to which artist has arrived at something inimitable and profound.

In Provence, van Gogh abandoned the practice of dividing his canvases up into discrete units of equal value — dots or short, straight stabbing lines surrounded by adjacent complementary colors. Instead, he embraced longer, curving brushstrokes of thicker paint pushed or dragged in different directions, creating turbulent rhythms that function like lines of energy. These lines find echoes all over the canvas — in the sky, the crescent moon, the contours of the purple hills, the yellow-green grass and, above all, the magnificent cypresses themselves.

Van Gogh is still interested in color theory at this point, but he is thinking about the interactions of primaries and complementaries over the entire composition, not just at the granular level. His new approach leads to larger areas of saturated color and therefore increased color intensity.

Van Gogh had to get away from Seurat’s and Signac’s dogma not just to find his own voice but also to liberate color from the clutches of pseudoscience. It’s telling that he fled Paris shortly after visiting Seurat’s studio. He hoped that he might establish a community of like-minded artists after his momentous move to Arles. That dream, as everyone knows, didn’t work out. But being in the fields of Provence, where the southern sun liberated and intensified nature’s colors, totally transformed van Gogh.

The National Gallery, London

In Provence, he developed a method that combined the flat colors of Bernard (who had pushed away from pointillism even before van Gogh) and Japanese prints with what became his trademark notation of short, swirling brushstrokes. These thickly painted notations have the surging, circular energy of crashing surf. They beautifully convey the teeming multiplicity of nature.

It’s amazing that van Gogh could apply his technique to so many different subjects without it ever feeling formulaic or false. The merit of the Met show, organized by Susan Alyson Stein, is to focus on just one of those subjects: the towering, glossy cypresses that stand like dark sentinels in the bright Provençal landscape.

Van Gogh first drew them shortly after arriving in Arles, in early 1888, astonished, as he wrote to his brother Theo, that “no one has yet done them as I see them.” He returned to them six months after his notorious breakdown while living in an asylum in nearby Saint-Rémy. It was during that summer that he painted both “The Starry Night” and the Met’s “Cypresses” as well as several views of wheat fields with cypresses standing like obelisks in the distance.

Having these legendary canvases hanging together is a special event. (It is a miracle, frankly, that the Museum of Modern Art agreed to lend “The Starry Night.”) But no less rewarding are van Gogh’s pen-and-ink drawings of cypress-strewn landscapes. And, of these, none is better than the Art Institute of Chicago’s “Cypresses.”

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum/Thannhauser Collection/Art Resource

Look out, too, for “The Road to Tarascon,” a ravishing drawing, belonging to the <a href="https://www.guggenheim.org/" target=_blank>Guggenheim Museum</a>, made by van Gogh in the high summer of 1888. With its speckled sky and foreground, the sheet of paper has more dots than you could comfortably count, suggesting that van Gogh never entirely abandoned pointillism. But the dots are combined with curved lines for tree trunks as well as straight-lined hatching for distant fields and for the rays of the sun, which hangs over a phalanx of distant cypresses inked in with maximally efficient notations.

Van Gogh painted a cypress for the last time in May 1890. The picture is almost unbearably poignant. Just saying its title aloud — “Country Road in Provence by Night” — is almost as good as being there. Two months later, this singular artist was dead. His coffin, noted an obituary, “disappeared under branches of cypress trees and bouquets of large sunflowers.”

Van Gogh and the Avant-Garde: The Modern Landscape Through Sept. 4 at the Art Institute of Chicago. <a href="http://artic.edu/" target=_blank>artic.edu</a>.

Van Gogh’s Cypresses Through Aug. 27 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. <a href="http://metmuseum.org/" target=_blank>metmuseum.org</a>.

Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, 2011. Finalist, Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, 2009

The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals and Breakthroughs in Modern Art

Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud: In conversation with Sebastian Smee

University of Sydney, BA, with first class honors, Fine Arts

Sebastian Smee is a Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic at The Washington Post and the author of “The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals and Breakthroughs in Modern Art." He has worked at the Boston Globe, and in London and Sydney for the Daily Telegraph (U.K.), the Guardian, the Spectator, and the Sydney Morning Herald.

Sebastian Smee

Van Gogh stars in tightly focused exhibitions in Chicago and New York

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