Robert Root

 

Some years ago, while I was researching the Rhine River, Sue and I toured the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. My familiarity with his paintings was enhanced by that visit and by a museum guide I purchased and read on the plane trip home from the Netherlands. The guide was still on a bookshelf in our study, somehow not yet stored in a box in our garage. But it wasn't my only Van Gogh book. I also owned a copy of Vincent, a graphic biography written and illustrated by the Dutch author Barbara Stok (Laura Watkinson translated it), a volume in the Art Masters Series, which also includes translated graphic biographies of Magritte, Munch, Gauguin, Picasso, and Dali.

 

I'd read Vincent years before but the recent "Beyond Van Gogh" exhibit in Milwaukee prompted me to read it through a few more times. Barbara Stok often draws on materials preserved in the Van Gogh Museum, especially letters from Vincent to his supportive brother, Theo. She provides a balanced portrait of the artist, including his conflicts with other people, his self-absorption and isolation, his tendency to alienate others, as well as his dedication to his artistry. Her illustrations have a cartoon-like quality when dealing with characters, and moments of Van Gogh's anxiety, anger, and anguish are presented with distorted images.

 

Except for those quotes from Vincent's writing, dialogue is the only available text in the book—there are no separate narrative passages. The artist's unbalanced interactions with his circumstances are often presented without dialogue. In the absence of dialogue, the reader must rely on images, often having to make sense of what Van Gogh is feeling or reacting to by studying the context of where he appears or of what he looks at or of what he refuses to acknowledge. In one sequence, we see him noticing a starry night, then walking with his easel and equipment into the countryside to set up a daylong session painting distant wheatfields. The act of painting takes up five wordless panels, until an appreciative bystander approaches and they converse amicably. In another sequence, where he and Gauguin have set up easels in the countryside, the silent six-panel sequence of Van Gogh painting a sower at work adds images of a young Vincent and Theo enjoying the landscape; it's a way to suggest what Vincent is imagining or remembering as he paints, the personal immersion he entertains in his art.

 

Stok's graphic biography manages to visually narrate the course of Vincent's artistic development and engagement and to intimate his isolation and remoteness from others even as he devotes himself to his work and relies on his brother. One sequence shows him having sex with a prostitute and chatting with her afterward, revealing how tangential and unrealistic his relations with others usually are. Repeatedly he returns to his artwork and Stok often replicates some of his best-known paintings: "The Yellow House," "The Bedroom," "The Almond Blossom," "Wheatfields under thunderclouds." She includes the dark moments—the severing of his ear, the residence in an asylum—but omits his death by suicide.

 

Instead, the book ends with a calm conversation between Vincent and Theo about taking a more positive view of existence followed by several dialogue-free facing pages. For the first two, each with four panels, Vincent walks off to prepare to paint. Then the reader is presented with a single image across two pages, Vincent on a dirt road that extends through a wheatfield, painting blue sky, crows on the ground behind him. In the subsequent two-page image he is still painting but our perspective is further away from him, he's deeper in the field, and some crows are taking flight. In the final two-page panorama, Stok reproduces his painting "Wheatfield with crows," the birds in flight, Vincent no longer visible.

 

The Van Gogh Museum Guide informs readers that Vincent felt himself a failure and died after shooting himself in the chest. His brother Theo died six months later. The guide contains a small photo of their tombstones which Stok reproduces in a drawing on the last page of her graphic biography. Her ending is more peaceful and positive than Van Gogh's biography reports. When I first read Vincent years ago, I didn't expect it to be as authoritative as a scholarly study, but I probably didn't appreciate how both evocative and informative it is. My "immersive experience" with Van Gogh prompted me to read the book again differently, to pay closer attention to all those text-free panels and illustrated sequences—to comprehend by what I was seeing, by what was portrayed on the page. Like the immersive exhibit, it gave me an alternative entry into Van Gogh's art. It also raised my level of appreciation for how astute and powerful graphic narrative can be.

 

 

I attended the "Beyond Van Gogh" exhibit at the Wisconsin Center in Milwaukee twice in one week, first in a family group that included Sue's sister Sarah, visiting from Michigan, then a few days later I returned with our son Tom, visiting from California, whom we hadn't seen in person in a year and a half. I thought that, as someone working with animation on both Cartoon Network and Hulu, he'd be interested in the "Immersive Experience" the exhibit promoted. Of course, what he'd bring to the exhibit would be different from what I brought to it.

 

"Beyond Van Gogh" immerses viewers in Vincent Van Gogh's artwork through audio-visual animation that surrounds them with colors, shapes, music, motion, and quotes from his writing. You enter through a room hung with rows of empty picture frames and dangling panels of explanation and quotation mounted on backgrounds from his paintings. Weaving your way among the rows, you enter a second room with black walls where wavering white dots slowly congeal into the shape of Vincent's face. In a much larger third room Van Gogh's paintings are projected onto every surface—the walls, several tall square columns, every inch of flooring.

 

It's hard to know where to fix your attention. With light and color pulsing around and below you, everything competes for your scrutiny. You may recognize individual paintings you've seen displayed in museums you've visited or encountered online or in books, but it's hard not to be disoriented by the size and scope of what encircles you. The paintings are not mounted in isolation on the walls but projected expansively onto every surface. Moreover, they are often in motion, morphing from one image to another, flowing off the walls and across the floor beneath your feet. You and all the dark figures around you are—Well, yes!—immersed in Van Gogh's artwork.

 

Individual images often come to life. Gazing at one familiar Van Gogh self-portrait towering over me on a nearby square column, his face spilling onto two sides, I saw his left eye blink—or was it a wink? Clouds changed shape in the "Wheatfield Under Thunderclouds" image. As the "Wheatfield with Crows" landscape unrolled across the wall and flowed onto the floor, the crows began flapping their wings and flying across blue sky. "Sunflowers" arose all around us. The "Almond Blossom" painting spread itself across one wall after another until it encircled the room and then its blossoms began sailing across every wall and every column and every patron and everywhere underfoot. At other art exhibits I've taken snapshots to aid my memory; here I started a long video that made me rotate around the room and linger on the closest column, blossoms abounding, until I became aware of the walls slowly changing their image, the blossoms no longer falling and another landscape emerging behind them.

 

Swirls of light on a dark blue background became "The Starry Night," overwhelmingly immersive. The soundtrack played an instrumental version of Don McLean's tune "Vincent," the one that repeats the phrase "Starry, starry night." The melody for Paul Simon's "America" played as well—both tunes would repeat in my head often over the coming days and make me struggle to recall their lyrics. "The Bedroom." "The Yellow House." "Vase of Gladioli." "Vase with Irises." "The Potato Eaters." Self-portrait after self-portrait lining the walls. An abundance of the artist's signatures inscribing themselves in multi-colored squares and rectangles. Countless images constantly replacing one another.

 

I felt absorbed into it—thoroughly immersed. Each time I visited, I left uncertain how to describe it. We all found it overwhelming, my son most impressed by its technology and the effects attempted. "Immersive experiences" have proliferated in recent years. "Beyond Van Gogh" is only one of several such Van Gogh exhibits, some considerably more extravagant and theatrical, and other artists, including Frida Kahlo and Salvador Dali, have also been subjected to the approach. Imagine being immersed in Kahlo's "The Wounded Deer" or Dali's "The Persistence of Memory."

 

Such exhibits inspire mixed reactions. Loath to have artworks transformed into animated entertainment, purists prefer gazing silently upon the originals. I like that too, though in a museum it often means maneuvering my way around other viewers hoping for a close-up look. One screen in the Van Gogh exhibit claimed that the "unlikely pairing of the digital and the classical allows one to dive into this world of paint, to experience it from the inside, to vibrate with it." It can be argued that immersive viewing is apt to send you back into the art itself, trying to get closer to his artistry, if only on a computer screen. Van Gogh surely absorbed himself deeply in his paintings; perhaps he'd appreciate experiencing such a thorough immersion in them this way.

 

Notes: A review by Ben Davis of two other Van Gogh Immersive Experiences and a review by Sarah Cascone of the Frida Kahlo exhibit "Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva" can both be found online in artnet news.

 

Feighan, Maureen. "New 'Beyond Van Gogh' immersive art exhibition fascinates," The Detroit News, June 25, 2021.

 

Schulman, Sandra. "Beyond Van Gogh: Starry Night, Sunflowers and Immersive Madness," Florida Daily Post, April 15, 2021.

 

My wife and I usually visit art museums wherever we live and wherever we travel. I can easily conjure up memories of halls and stairwells in museums in Chicago and Milwaukee and Detroit, the ones we visit most often, and imagine positioning myself in front of an artwork, shuffling among other viewers, squinting at tags identifying title, artist, composition elements, and date. Different sizes of squares or rectangles on the wall require shifts in distance for better viewing. Sometimes we purchase reproductions to hang in our household among photos and paintings by family and friends. Sometimes I'll step near one of them before I leave a room, almost close enough to step into the image or help it spill out into the space before me. We are silent and static as we face one another.

 

Our European travel always included museum visits: the Louvre and the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, the National Gallery in London, the Uffizi in Florence, the Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, everywhere amidst bustling tourists clattering from room to room, audio guides pressed to their ears listening to explanations of selected artworks. I appreciate having immediate access to the history and provenance of artists and artworks, but more often I simply gaze at the paintings, as I do photographs of my family on bookshelves and cabinet tops in our home, noting moments frozen in time. Any chance of interaction or interpretation depends on the viewer's memory or imagination. Conversation with a work of art depends not only on what the artist determined should be viewed but also on what the viewer brings to the painting.

 

Most of us are accustomed to more dynamic means of communication. As readers we expect to interpret texts that offer verbal cues, a process equivalent to viewing artworks, but more often we are audiences interpreting performances, what we hear on radios or audio sites, what we see on television or computer or theater screens, not only videos and films but also live interactions with family and friends and associates. Dog-walkers pass by our condo daily, communicating aloud with distant listeners they may see on their cellphones or only hear on headphones, barely aware of the animal guiding them along the sidewalk. We Facebook and Zoom and Google those we share personal and business gatherings with, sometimes a diverting panoply of faces, sometimes more intimately one person at a time,

 

During the recent pandemic year, we've often relied on remote digital interaction. Sometimes it's a plus, communicating with people from a distance, seeing faces of those whose voices we usually only heard on the phone or whom we seldom saw in person because of travel expenses or scheduling. Bookstores now post interviews and readings with distant writers who would never have appeared locally. Our laptops let us participate, even post "chats," as if we were an audience in a live television program. Our chapter of the Ice Age Trail Alliance conducted some monthly meetings that way, the safest way to keep in touch.

 

The art museums we're familiar with have been cautious about determining what would be the most prudent approach to allowing the public to visit in person. Many have found ways to display some of their art online, generating either internet tours of certain exhibits or posting special digital programming. In the past I've appreciated that kind of access to works of special interest to me. The Museo Del Prado has an extensive internet site for Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights Triptych, one of my favorite artworks; it lets online visitors view the triptych both as a whole and in multiple close-ups of its parts and offers abundant multimedia links with closed captions (in English). For anyone who is unlikely to ever make it physically to the Prado, it's a thorough and engaging use of digital technology, ultimately more informative than standing among a host of other visitors to look at the actual painting itself. (Example: My son's photo of the Mona Lisa in the Louvre beyond a row of hands holding up cameras.)

 

But having digital access is not the same as scanning the original artifact itself, developing an awareness of the artist's presence in the design and the execution, and gaining a realization of your own presence next to it. Some of us need to discern the brushwork up close in hopes of understanding what the artist saw emerging on the canvas, while others of us resist thinking about how the painting came about and consider only the totality of what's visible before them. Sometimes the medium is the message and other times it deflects the message. I often ask myself what I'm responding to and why I'm responding that way. The answers may depend on how I see the art.

 

 

Note: Bosch, Hieronymus. The Garden of Earthly Delights Triptych. Museo Nacional del Prado. Calle Ruiz de Alarcón 23. Madrid. 2801

 

 

Joan Didion's essay "Last Words," originally published in 1998, opens with the first paragraph of Ernest Hemingway's novel A Farewell to Arms, published in 1929. Didion claims to have reread it when she learned that Hemingway's final novel would be published the following year, though he had died in 1961 and the last novel published in his lifetime had been The Old Man and the Sea in 1952. He had drafted portions of other work—The Old Man and the Sea was essentially the fourth part of an unfinished four-part novel. After his death, across forty-five years, his family and his publisher released three novels and two memoirs culled from manuscripts he'd given up on, as well as collections of his short fiction, reporting, and correspondence. He had hoped—had requested—that all that material would be destroyed after his death.

 

"Last Words," which appeared in The New Yorker twenty-three years ago, is the second-to-last essay in Didion's most recent collection, Let Me Tell You What I Mean, made up of twelve essays published between 1968 and 2000 in The Saturday Evening Post, The New York Times, and, most recently, The New Yorker. Only one of the essays, "Why I Write," was familiar to me, and because I've read all her novels, memoirs, essay collections, and her play published since Slouching Towards Bethlehem in 1968, I was happy to get this broad ranging gathering of unfamiliar pieces.

 

The last of Hemingway's novels, True at First Light, is taken from his incomplete African novel, started before 1954 and abandoned in 1956 after 810 pages. Didion follows his mention of it in his Selected Letters, a posthumous collection, and notes when "a certain silence [falls] on the matter." She writes, "Eight hundred and ten pages or no, there comes a point at which every writer knows when a book is not working, and every writer also knows when the reserves of will and energy and memory and concentration required to make the thing work simply may not be available." Hemingway had abandoned an earlier four-part manuscript before starting the African novel, eventually published one part as The Old Man and the Sea, and another part was published after his death as Islands in the Stream. The African novel was edited and shortened by half by one of Hemingway's sons and published as True at Half Light.

 

Hemingway's widow, Mary Welsh Hemingway, who decided to ignore her husband's wishes and publish work of his that he did not believe was publishable, claimed, "Except for punctuation and the obviously overlooked 'ands' and 'buts' we would present his prose and poetry to readers as he wrote it, letting the gaps lie where they were." Didion reacts strongly to that editorial decision.

 

"Well, there you are. You care about the punctuation or you don't, and Hemingway did. You care about the 'ands" and the 'buts' or you don't, and Hemingway did. You think something is in shape to be published or you don't, and Hemingway didn't." She later claims that "the publication of unfinished work is a denial of the idea that the role of the writer in his or her work is to make it." She thinks the excerpts being published "can be read only as something not yet made, notes, scenes in the process of being set down, words set down but not yet written."

 

The essay begins with that opening paragraph from A Farewell to Arms and Didion confesses that, as a girl of twelve or thirteen, she imagined being able to "one day arrange 126 such words myself." She reports on what she sees: "Only one of the words has three syllables. Twenty-two have two. The other 103 have one. Twenty-four of the words are 'the,' fifteen are 'and.' There are four commas." Didion's five sentences have thirty-one words. Her next sentence, detailing "the liturgical cadence of the paragraph," is itself 115 words long. It is a sharply observed reading of Hemingway's paragraph and in its own style an homage to the elements of his writing that make it so vital, especially when the words are those he felt he really needed to publish.

 

It's taken me a few drafts to get my overview of Didion's essay and my comments reacting to it in shape to be posted here. I appreciate being reminded that the process takes time, repeated reading, and a variety of revisions. Most of my posts here have gone through that process; those that didn't get posted were those "not yet made," "not yet written." I have to remember that the writing will tell me when and if it's ready to go out into the world. It won't always be ready and I should let it go unpublished if it isn't.