WILLIAMSTOWN —Halfway through “Van Gogh and Nature” at the Clark Art Institute, you feel a kind of vroom, a hair dryer blast, a sudden plunge into sensory bliss as your eyes alight on a painting called “Farmhouse in Provence.”
Everything changes after this point. It’s not that the show — which was organized by the Clark’s curator at large, Richard Kendall, with co-curators and van Gogh scholars Chris Stolwijk and Sjraar van Heugten — has been all somber browns and greens prior to this. We already know, not least from a stunning painting of peachy fritillaries against a blue wall in the previous room, that Vincent van Gogh was a young artist very much alive to color.
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The real difference is that he has finally arrived in the south of France.
A well-educated, highly literate Dutchman, van Gogh had traveled widely in his youth. But he had never been south of Paris.
Now, under a turquoise sky, vibrant with unformed wisps of pink cloud, he paints a white gravel path leading up to a stone gate, iced with improbable pink, and a long stone wall. The wall, which leads the eye to a yellow farmhouse with turquoise windows, is rendered with broken lilac dashes over light blue, and it hums with its complement, a mustard-colored field tinged with gold and a slightly dissonant green. (Van Gogh loved his bright, clean complementaries — yellow and purple, red and green, orange and blue — but he loved just as much to throw in a bit of acid, a clash, something to make your eyes flinch.)
The golden field, which takes up half the picture, is punctuated by a farm worker dressed in blue shirt and pink pants. Bushes of bright flowers, meanwhile, provide a pretext for van Gogh to try out another of his favorite pairings, red and green.
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Lord in heaven. The thing is dazzling. Who else saw it in the days after he painted it? What on earth did they make of it?
According to Kendall, this exhibition, which boasts loans from major museums on both sides of the Atlantic, is “the first project to address this theme [of van Gogh and nature] as a whole.” In one sense, this is like claiming that no show has ever hinged on the persistent allure for male artists of women’s naked bodies. OK, you think to yourself: It might never have been framed exactly that way. But really? Nature was not a “theme,” as such, for van Gogh — it was something very like the essence, the source, the whole point.
Still, I’m a firm believer in the benefits of belaboring the obvious. And “Van Gogh and Nature,” conceived by the man who gave us “Degas and the Dance,” another thumpingly obvious idea that Kendall’s scholarship transformed into a revelatory project, is a wonderful show: direct, compact, unpretentious, streaked with insight and pleasure.
It kicks off modestly with a few drawings and etchings from the Clark’s own collection by artists van Gogh admired, including Theodore Rousseau and Charles-Francois Daubigny. Next come some of the young artist’s early Dutch paintings and drawings, among them studies of birds’ nests, swamps, marshes, and sheaves of wheat.
Van Gogh knew the terrain of his childhood intimately, and indulged an abiding curiosity about its forms and particularities. There’s something of John Constable in him at this point: an emphasis on specifics over general effects (reflecting, perhaps, his increasing interest in science and its systems of classification) and a tendency not to omit things for the sake of aesthetic coherence, but rather to throw everything in: the bird in flight, the dead branch, its reflection in water, the falling-down fence, the foreground weeds, the dying flowers.
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The greatest of several marvelous early drawings here is “Winter Garden,” a study of two bare trees that each vibrate with their own zigzagging character. Even at this early stage, van Gogh’s draftsmanship was scintillating. He seemed to relish the challenge of making brisk hatching convey almost any detail, any effect.
Van Gogh moved to Paris in 1886. Under the spell of the influential art historian Charles Blanc’s color theories, he had begun experimenting with a more vivid palette before his departure. And in Paris, he spent time with artists such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Emile Bernard.
But it was the landscape painting of the Impressionist Claude Monet that affected him most profoundly. Apart from his dazzlingly high-keyed color, Monet’s fidelity to nature must have impressed van Gogh at a time when many avant-garde artists were moving away from Impressionism toward more scientific theories of art (Georges Seurat and the Pointillists) or else more poetic and mystical visions (Bernard, Paul Gauguin).
Van Gogh’s love of nature in all its particularities provided a buttress of sorts against these swirling fin de siècle currents, not that they didn’t affect him. It anchored him in the here and now. What mattered more than any theory was this clod of earth, those weeds, that rickety fence, the wobbly shadows cast by its posts.
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That said, it’s interesting to note that while “here-and-now” for van Gogh just then meant Montmartre, still a semi-rural hill on Paris’s outskirts, his views of Montmartre — and in particular the lovely “Montmartre: Windmills and Allotments” — look suspiciously Dutch.
Van Gogh was a seeker, a struggler, and so of course there’s a spiritual aspect to all his noticing and rapid reproducing. You feel in his best pictures an amalgam of general yearning and specific delight that links him — in my mind at least — with Gerard Manley Hopkins, the author of headlong, unsystematic paeans to nature like “Spring”:
“The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.”
Van Gogh’s ecstatic urgency is closely akin to that of the poet (“Have, get, before it cloy, / Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning”), who died a year before van Gogh. And indeed, the dialectic in his art is strangely similar: Nature, on the one hand, is felt as a source of sustenance, delight, and spiritual consolation. But on the other, something about it — its intensity? its overwhelming energy? its transience? — seems linked with terrible doubt and gathering crisis. (Or perhaps not? Perhaps the crisis was coming anyway?)
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In 1888, van Gogh moved south to Arles. There he hoped to discover a world that resembled the idea of Japan he had pieced together from the Japanese prints he so admired. He also wanted to establish a Utopian artists colony.
It was cold at first, but then came spring. “Neither in the Netherlands nor in Paris,” writes art historian and curator van Heugten in the catalog, “had van Gogh ever seen anything like the profusion of blossoming trees and orchards that he encountered in the countryside around Arles.”
Just imagine. Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo, back in Paris, about being “in a fury of work as the trees are in blossom.” He wanted, he said, “to do a Provence orchard of tremendous gaiety.”
“Orchard Bordered by Cypresses,” which hangs beside “Farmhouse in Provence,” is all about these blossoms. He sets them against an uncharacteristically smooth and inchoate deep-blue sky, with two sections of fence in bright red and chartreuse in the foreground, and a stand of tall cypresses behind.
By the end of the year, two months after Gauguin had joined him in Arles, van Gogh, fearing abandonment, quarreled with his rival, and in the midst of a mental breakdown, cut off his own ear. There’s no mention of this in the show; it’s hardly needed, I suppose. But what we do see is a magnificent painting, “Hospital at Saint-Remy,” which he painted during his convalescence the following year. As we look up at the huge trees that loom over the hospital, we notice for the first time the swirling lines of brightly colored broken dashes that flow together like tributaries of pulsating energy, overwhelming distinctions between leaves, branches, and sky.
This signature idiom takes over many of the succeeding pictures, which depict both the wild mountainous landscape around Saint Remy and the vineyards, wheat fields, and farmhouses at Auvers, back in the north of France, where van Gogh returned, in declining health, in 1890.
The masterpiece of this final section of the show — and perhaps of van Gogh’s entire career — is the Metropolitan Museum’s “Cypresses.” It has the same turquoise sky and pink-tinged clouds as “Farmhouse in Provence,” and the same swirling energies as the trees in “Hospital at Saint-Remy.” But it’s more distilled, more emphatic, than both.
The cypresses are dark and glossy, cropped at the top to emphasize their monumental presence, and churned up by multidirectional energies, like wet hair rubbed vigorously by a towel. It doesn’t seem to matter how many times you’ve seen it: It’s a painting to smell, to dive into, to adore.
It’s worth noting, by the way, that there’s something special — something at once stirring and quietly consoling — about seeing all these works at the Clark, where nature seems so beneficent, so close at hand.
My advice? See it, walk up the hill, see it again. Come back a few weeks later.
VAN GOGH AND NATURE
At: Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Sunday through Sept. 13. 413-458-2303, www.clarkart.edu
Sebastian Smee can be reached at ssmee@globe.com.