Van Gogh’s final flourish — an unforgettable exhibition in Paris

“Ah well, really we can only make our paintings speak,” Van Gogh wrote in a note found at his death on July 29 1890 in Auvers-sur-Oise, a village on the outskirts of Paris. He had moved there 10 weeks earlier from the asylum in St Remy, Provence, believing his mental disturbance came partly from living in the south and that the restorative, green north would help him.

Another attraction was that homeopath Paul Gachet, doctor to many sickly artists, lived there. Shortly after arriving, Van Gogh painted Gachet’s dense, overgrown garden, dominated by a slender twisted cypress, a favourite Provençal motif. Then he depicted the red-haired doctor, head resting on his hand in a melancholy pose, features furrowed, with what he called “the heartbroken expression of our time”. Hours later, still chez Gachet, he dashed off “Glass with Carnations”, a tilting still life of spiky leaves and sumptuous blue and white flowers, their transparent vase lurching on a cropped table, each element unstable.

Often painting two canvases a day, Van Gogh produced 70 works in these prolific months. Gathering the majority of them, Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise: The Final Months, the Musée d’Orsay’s iteration of a show launched at Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum in the spring, is unprecedented, unforgettable, supremely enjoyable.

Seeing them together, it is clear the final paintings “speak” a unified, utterly compelling language: more frenzied, condensed, direct, simplified and experimental than before. The mood is exalted; far from charting a depressive’s progression to suicide, the works express intense joy in nature, colour, paint.

Yet the idea that death is part of life is embedded in many of them. In “Wheatfield with a Reaper” the reaper cuts the grain, while swaying stacked sheaves, tied at the tufted top, resemble female figures — head, neck, dress. There is, Van Gogh wrote, “in this death nothing sad, it takes place in broad daylight with a sun that floods everything with a light of fine gold”.

From the first moment in Auvers, Van Gogh liked everything he saw. “It’s gravely beautiful, it’s the heart of the countryside, distinctive and picturesque,” he told his brother Theo. He was optimistic that paintings “present themselves to my sight which it will take time to shape, but that will come little by little”.

The opening impression is of surging, barely containable energy. “Blossoming Chestnut Trees”, made on his second day, is a rush of contrasting brushwork — zigzag sky, short dark strokes for the foliage, long white flares of blossom, loose blue slashes for shadows: a confident, innovative rendering of a tree bursting into leaf. In “Stairway at Auvers”, he takes command of the village as motif: its coiling paths form ribboned patterns, bright colour touches echo rhythmically — the yellows of the young girls’ hats, an arched doorway and the rounded steps; their white dresses, tinted green, and the facades of the houses. An Art Nouveau sinuosity, buoyant, restless, brings everything into cohesion.

A convulsive force sweeps up the squat homes in “Thatched Cottages in Cordeville” into a similarly swirling design: roofs undulate against spiralling trees and curlicues of clouds. In “The Church at Auvers-sur-Oise”, the building’s jagged outline trembles beneath a cobalt sky; in its distorted contours, the writhing violet church seems about to rise from the earth, while the sandy paths approaching it dissolve into rivulets of paint.

But the same church stands solid behind the curling bushes enclosing “Daubigny’s Garden” where, despite the diverse animated strokes, flurries, dots and tightly packed rods, the effect is serene: an enticing space with blooming flowers, little wooden gate, cat sneaking across the foreground. This was painted less than three weeks before Van Gogh died.

There are so many landscapes here because Van Gogh sought “to renew myself in nature”, asserting its life-affirming qualities even as his sadness became overwhelming. On June 20, midsummer, he switched to a new “double square” canvas, the panoramic 50cm x 100cm format emphasising nature’s all-encompassing aspect.

Van Gogh never saw them like this, but the Orsay’s persuasive display suggests his intention may have been to exhibit them together as a frieze

He started with “Landscape at Twilight”, pear trees black on a yellowing sky, scattered brushstrokes evoking quivering, fading light, and “Undergrowth with Two Figures”: geometric purplish poplar trunks, thickly outlined, emphatic columns above scintillating flower-speckled grass. A ghostly couple floats between them — the final appearance of a motif that, says Orsay curator Emmanuel Coquery, “pervades the artist’s oeuvre like a poignant regret”.

Of the 13 double squares, a dozen horizontal landscapes and one vertical portrait, of Gachet’s daughter at the piano, the Orsay assembles 12 in a dazzling once-in-a-lifetime grouping. Van Gogh never saw them like this, but the Orsay’s persuasive display suggests his intention may have been to exhibit them together as a frieze, a decorative ensemble treating similar subjects in nuanced ways. Five, painted from a high perspective on the plain above Auvers, unfold the sequence of the wheat harvest. This would have been spot-on radical. Monet was beginning his pioneering series paintings that very same summer — his “Haystacks”, which, Pissarro wrote, “breathe contentment”.

Van Gogh’s don’t. By now he was resigned that “the drama of a storm in nature, the drama of sorrow in life, is the best”. “Wheatfield with Crows”, with its strange perspective of multiple vanishing points created by the three paths through the fields, fragmenting space, and its extreme ultramarine/yellow saturated colour, is lit up by the darting circumflex dashes of the birds. “Wheatfield Under Thunderclouds”, more pared down, evokes powerful air currents as storms roll over flat plains.

“These are immense stretches of wheat under troubled skies and I have not shied away from trying to express sadness, extreme solitude,” Van Gogh explained, yet paradoxically ��these canvases will tell you what I can’t say in words, what I consider healthy and fortifying about the countryside”.

Such letters reassured his family and, throughout the exhibition, the double square pictures surprise and vary in emotional register. Painted within days in mid-July, “Sheaves of Wheat” enlarges the hay-figures of “Reaper” — dancing personages, nodding or bending as if posing for the painter, in a warm yellow tonality, casting lavender shadows — while in the wistful “Rain — Auvers-sur-Oise”, graphic lines representing summer showers, gossamer light, subtly infuse the landscape.

Each double square landscape breaks fresh ground formally, culminating in the final painting of all, the close up “Tree Roots”, made on the morning of the Sunday the artist shot himself. The paint is lumpy, knotted like a root, the bright blue trunks are defiantly expressive rather than representational in hue, and the horizonless composition of interlacing lines and fantastical arabesques verges on an abstraction. “My life . . . is attacked at the very root,” Van Gogh wrote as his mental state worsened; nevertheless, even in this last impasto tangle, sun penetrates the undergrowth.

To February 4, musee-dorsay.fr