May 14th, 2012 | 
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By JONATHAN LOPEZ
Philadelphia
In June 1882, Vincent van Gogh learned that the great German painter Albrecht Dürer had used a perspective screen—an empty picture frame strung with a series of crosshairs—as an aid to composing images from nature. Van Gogh soon acquired one, employing adjustable poles to stabilize it in the sand as he sketched along the beach at Scheveningen, outside The Hague. Guidelines corresponding to the perspective screen’s divisions can be seen in his drawings from later years, when he was living in France, suggesting that he still relied on the device to work out the spectacular foreshortening effects that characterized some of his best pictures of that period, such as “The Harvest” (1888), painted near Arles. Sun-drenched stalks of wheat dominate the foreground, while distant fields recede in a geometric quilt of greens and yellows to the high horizon, near the very top of the canvas. Writing to his brother Theo, Van Gogh compared this image to ones by the 17th-century Dutch painter Philips de Koninck, who often composed landscapes from an unconventional, downward-tilted viewpoint.
Van Gogh Up Close
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Through May 6,
then travels
to the National Gallery of Canada
“Van Gogh Up Close,” an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, focuses on the artist’s mature tendency to push landscape and still-life motifs dramatically forward in the picture plane, yielding images cropped and arranged in radical, often miraculously unexpected ways. Room after room of sumptuous paintings from Van Gogh’s French years, ablaze with the most brilliant colors of nature, offer endless visual fascination. But the show, which unfortunately does not include “The Harvest,” has little to say about the perspective screen or De Koninck; instead, it presents abundant material on 19th-century nature photography’s possible influence on Van Gogh—a peculiar issue to emphasize, given that the painter expressed outspoken disdain for photography. The result is the Paris Hilton of art exhibitions—extremely attractive but not especially noteworthy for its intellectual insights.
![[VANGOGH]](http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/PJ-BF294_VANGOG_OR_20120214165415.jpg)
Cincinnati Art Museum
‘Undergrowth with Two Figures’ (1890), by Vincent van Gogh.
The exhibition—organized by Philadelphia Museum curators Joseph J. Rishel and Jennifer A. Thompson, in collaboration with Anabelle Kienle, a curator at the National Gallery of Canada, and Cornelia Homburg, a Van Gogh scholar—opens with two small rooms of still lifes, most of them luscious pictures, although many have little to do with the theme of the show. “Sunflowers” (1888 or 1889), from Philadelphia’s own collection, is a virtuoso performance in color harmony, showing a ceramic vase of perky yellow blossoms against a swirling cerulean background, but it is entirely orthodox from a compositional standpoint, as the vase sits squarely in the middle distance at eye level. More aptly chosen is a second sunflower image of 1887 from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, depicting two slightly wilted blossoms lying on a rich ultramarine blue tablecloth. The artist’s point of view is elevated and extremely tight, so that the flowers appear much larger than life-size; the thick, springy yellow brushstrokes of the petals seem almost to leap off the canvas.
The still lifes are a warm-up for the exhibition’s main event: four large galleries of landscapes, the best of which give a splendid impression of Van Gogh’s mercurial, impassioned genius. It is here that one really sees the artist applying the lessons of Dürer’s screen, stretching and bending perspectives to isolate details like sheaves of wheat, underbrush on the forest floor or raindrops pelting a freshly tilled field. The exhibition includes pictures lent by museums from around the world—Britain, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Switzerland—as well as select private collections. But perhaps the greatest star of the show comes from the Cincinnati Art Museum, “Undergrowth with Two Figures” (1890), a stunning work that has been cleaned for the occasion and looks just as fresh as if it had been painted yesterday. Rhythmic starbursts of green, white and yellow brushstrokes race across the horizontal canvas, punctuated by the silver-gray verticals of evenly spaced tree trunks. The strolling man and woman mentioned in the title are easy to miss, but once seen they add an unmistakable note of foreboding to the composition.
Where the show falls down is in the largest of the landscape galleries, flanked on two sides by alcoves containing background material. One alcove displays a dozen 19th-century nature photographs marketed to artists as source images; there’s no evidence that Van Gogh used these, and the curators’ argument that he would still have been influenced by them is too speculative to merit the outsize presentation. The other alcove is filled with Japanese prints, most by Utagawa Hiroshige, an apt point of reference for Van Gogh, as he collected such items. Hiroshige’s high viewpoints, abrupt croppings and keen interest in the changing seasons influenced Van Gogh, as well as Claude Monet and other artists of the era. But it is unclear why so many prints are needed to demonstrate this fairly simple and well-known connection.
These alcoves would have been a good place to introduce additional issues: the perspective screen, which would be a nice item to display and fairly easy to reconstruct based on Van Gogh’s drawings of it from his letters; the precedents for Van Gogh’s compositional strategies in commercial illustrations, a question discussed in the show’s catalog but not represented in the exhibits; and the inspiration Van Gogh drew from earlier European art. That last subject receives brief attention in a narrow hallway at the end of the show, leading to the gift shop, but the few prints on view seem to have been chosen as much for their familiar names—Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Théodore Rousseau, Jacob van Ruisdael—as for apposite formal comparisons.
The curators don’t do a particularly good job teaching art history, but this is nonetheless a very handsome show, installed with great sensitivity to harmonious visual groupings. While it would be preferable to have brains and beauty in one package, the exhibition is worth seeing for the beauty alone. The pictures, after all, speak for themselves.
Mr. Lopez is editor-at-large of Art & Antiques
A version of this article appeared February 15, 2012, on page D5 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: A Matter Of Perspective.
![[THARP]](http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/PJ-BF325_THARP_G_20120214221107.jpg)