Between the recent elections and this always-hectic time of year, doesn’t a leisurely walk through a lush and tranquil forest sound especially appealing?
If you can carve out time to head to the Cincinnati Art Museum, it will turn out to be a welcome respite from all the turmoil. The beautiful exhibition, “Van Gogh Into the Undergrowth,” will be presented only in the Queen City and brings famous artwork from around the world together for the first time. The theme is woodland landscape.
The focus is Vincent van Gogh, the famous Post-Impressionist painter known for his troubled life, his use of vivid colors and dramatic brushwork, for his portraits and self-portraits and his scenes of wheat fields and sunflowers. Van Gogh’s best-known painting, “The Starry Night,” hangs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He’s also the artist who, while suffering from depression, cut off his own ear.
Other featured artists
The Cincinnati exhibit, which will be on view through Jan 8, also features works by those who influenced Van Gogh including Théodore Rousseau, Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet and Paul Gauguin. Twenty artworks are borrowed from museum collections in Canada, The Netherlands, Switzerland, France, Japan and other countries. Also on display are works from the Cincinnati Art Museum’s collection of French paintings and works on paper.
Curatorial assistant Anne Buening worked extensively on the show with Julie Aronson, curator of American paintings, sculpture and drawings. The seeds were planted in 2013 by former curator Esther Bell who is now in charge of European paintings at The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. "Her idea was to focus on the sous-bois, a sub-genre of landscape painting," Buening explained. "The concept, which originated with Dutch artists in the 17th century, was later popularized by Barbizon School artists who began painting outside when oil paints became commecially available in tubes. Before that artists had to mix minerals and pigments with oil to create their own paints and that wasn't something that could be easily done outside."
What is sous-bois?
The French term sous-bois refers to a forest-floor or undergrowth, and to the 19th century painters who cast aside tradition and journeyed into the forests to paint close-up, rather than from a distance. In part, these artists were reacting to their society's growing emphasis on industrialization and urbanization. You don't see much of the sky in these paintings — there's a focus on tree trunks and many of the paintings are vertical rather than horizontal.
The Cincinnati exhibition is the first to take a closer look at Van Gogh’s depictions of the forest floor. The inspiration is a Van Gogh painting from the museum’s own collection — “Undergrowth with Two Figures.” That painting, which portrays a couple strolling through the woods, was one of the first “double squares” made by the artist — twice as long as it is high.
Cincinnati’s Van Gogh painting is well-known by scholars. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has asked for it three times and it will return to Amsterdam in 2018 for an exhibition on Van Gogh and Japan. “It was painted in June of 1890, a month before the artist shot himself in the chest at the age of 37,” Buening said. ” He died two days later. His painting career lasted only 10 years.”
Although Van Gogh traded paintings with other artists, he sold only one painting during his lifetime and became famous after his death. Buening said it’s a myth that Van Gogh was completely self-taught. “A lot of what he was doing was feeling his own way but he did also have some formal training,” she said. “He was a great experimenter. He used this impasto technique — where he just slathers the paint on so his brushstrokes are always fully loaded. He talks about squeezing paint out of a tube and directly onto the canvas.”
Creating the forest
Linda Mannarino of Oakwood is a Dayton Art Institute docent who visited the show. One of the aspects she liked most was the exhibit design. “I loved the way they created an intimate space — the rich color of the walls, the low-lighting,” she said. ” It made you feel that you were really in a forest.”
She also appreciated the Van Gogh quotes incorporated into the show, many taken from letters that Vincent wrote to his brother, Theo. “It made me realize what a sensitive person he was and that when he would go out into nature and paint, it was really a spiritual experience for him.” she says. In a letter written in 1874 Van Gogh wrote: “Always continue walking a lot and loving nature, for that’s the real way to learn to understand art better and better. Painters understand nature and love it, and teach us to see.”
Mannarino was also glad the curators included artists who had influenced Van Gogh. “That’s what artists do, they learn from other artists and that helps them develop their own style,” she said. “In this case you could see how Van Gogh’s style was based on the work of other artists.”
You’ll see references to a variety of art movements. You’ll learn that Van Gogh was inspired by Barbizon School forest scenes, the Impressionist’s focus on light, the Post-Impressionists’ explorations of color and line and the Neo-Impressionists scientific aproach to color. He was also influenced by Japanese prints and composition.
Buening said Van Gogh had a wonderful visual memory for art. “He would see something and write to his brother about it 10 years later,” she said.
But as the exhibit makes clear, the distinctiveness of Van Gogh’s own paintings rose from a desire to be avant-garde: “Never an imitator, he inventively transformed what interested him in the work of others to create his own style.”
Solving a mystery
While Cincinnati’s former painting conservator Per Knutas was cleaning “Undergrowth with Two Figures” in 2009, he found minuscule spots of pink in some of the white brushstrokes.
In a letter to his brother, Van Gogh had described the flowers in the painting as white, pink and yellow, so Knutas knew the color must have faded over the years. “Per worked with Gregory Dale Smith, conservation scientist at the Indianapolis Museum of Art and Jeff Fieberg, associate professor of chemistry at Centre College in Danville, Ky., at the IMA’s conservation lab to analyze 387 daubs of white paint on the canvas,” says Buening. “Using Raman spectroscopy to read the compounds of the paint, they were able to determine which strokes were originally pink.”
Buening says Van Gogh was fond of a striking red hue called Geranium Lake, which was known to fade with to light exposure. “Unfortunately for us, he used that color to create the pink flowers,” Buening says. “There is also evidence that the tree trunks had pink in them at one time. Because we will never know for sure the correct shade of pink Van Gogh originally mixed, the brushstrokes that were originally pink have been left white in the painting.” To give a sense of how “Undergrowth with Two Figures” may have looked, the museum reproduced a digital recreation.
An interactive part of the exhibit allows visitors — through Google technology — to explore “Undergrowth with Two Figures” on a touch screen, revealing the texture and brushstrokes of the painting in enlarged detail.
HOW TO GO:
What: "Van Gogh Into the Underground."
Where: Cincinnati Art Museum, 953 Eden Park Drive, Cincinnati.
When: Through Jan. 8. Hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday with extended hours on Thursdays until 8 p.m.
Tickets and pricing: $10 for general public, $5 for children (ages 6-17), free for children ages 5 and under and museum members. Free admission from 5-8 p.m. on Thursdays. Admission is also free if you have a membership to the Dayton Art Institute at the Reciprocal Museum level.
Public tours: Offered at 3 p.m. on Thursdays and Saturdays. Carolers will be singing at the museum from 5:30-7:30 p.m. on Dec. 8, 15 and 22.
Guide for teachers: There's an excellent pre-visit guide that provides background information, art history context, and selected vocabulary related to the exhibit. The on-site guide provides close-looking questions and connections to other pieces in the Cincinnati Art Museum collection. A post-visit guide facilitates interpretation exercises and STEAM curriculum connections. This information is worth checking out even if you aren't a teacher.
For more information or to order tickets online: cincinnatiartmuseum.org.
WORTH THE DRIVE
Arts writer Meredith Moss travels throughout our region to bring you news of significant art exhibits that are worth your time and money.
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