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Vincent and Me - Page 2

© John McManamy

They came out by the thousands in the bitter damp cold of a New York winter to witness the heart of this eccentric. You had to buy your tickets well in advance. You waited out on the steps, jockeying for a place in the crowd, stamping your feet to keep warm. Then they opened the doors and in you went. You literally ran through the first gallery so as to break free from the mobs, and there you stood in an empty gallery.

You looked at the walls and your jaw dropped.

You ran into another empty gallery, and another ...

And there it was: "Crows in the Wheatfields."

The pscyho-critics have had a field day with this one. He'd just been let out of the loony bin when he painted this one. There's no need to detail his strange behavior here - his going after fellow painter Gauguin with a razor, and how he ended up instead deliberately slicing off a piece of his own ear.

In May of 1889 he entered the asylum at Saint Remy de Provence. "As for me, my health is good," he wrote his brother Theo, "and as for my brain, that will be, let us hope, a matter of time and patience."

Then it was back to painting, 143 in a turbulent twelve-month stretch in which he would alternately descend into madness and attempted suicide then return to complete some of the most life-affirming works ever to grace this civilization, masterpieces such as "Cypresses" and "Starry Night," with light and form competing in glorious whirlpools of thick bold impasto.

Then there was "Crows in the Wheatfields." Even Van Gogh acknowledged the work was an expression of "sadness and extreme solitude."

And I had ten or fifteen seconds of the painting to myself before the vast herds came thundering through. Just me and his saddest work, all to myself, for ten or fifteen precious seconds.

There was that little bit of sky presing down on the fields, as if of a heavier substance than earth, and there were the fields trying to crowd the sky out of the canvas, as if vaster than the heavens. And there were the crows, hedging their bets, represented by stark black flicks.

There were no two ways about it. It wasn't just a landscape. It was a picture of Van Gogh's horribly bleak world closing in on him. Even as the wheat rose high and the sun shone hot and bright, one couldn't help but gaze into that canvas and feel night falling.

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