It is apparently a myth that Vincent van Gogh sold only one work in his lifetime, “The Red Vineyard” (1890), to the Belgian Impressionist painter Anna Boch, for which he was paid $2,000 in today”™s money. Van Gogh also sold pen drawings and bartered paintings for food and supplies, a common practice among young artists that probably still exists today.
What is undoubtedly true is that Van Gogh was in life nowhere near the success that he is in death. His nine paintings on the list of the most expensive canvases sold at auction would total $1.1 billion in sales in today”™s money. That”™s a lot of oil paint.
Still, there”™s something poignant about Vincent, as we inevitably slip into calling him, isn”™t there, straining for a human connection he rarely found. Now a new exhibit at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan considers just how deep that longing was. “Van Gogh”™s Cypresses” (Monday, May 22 through Aug. 27) features 24 paintings, 15 drawings and four illustrated letters that plumb the cypress in his work. The tree has long been associated with the funereal in Mediterranean culture, in large part because its roots are mainly vertical and thus don”™t impede on burial grounds. As usual, the ancient Greeks had a poetic explanation for the association. Cyparissus, who lends his name to the tree, was a mythic hunter who accidentally killed his companion stag and thus died of grief.
According to the art critic and biographer Deborah Solomon Van Gogh elevated the cypress to something beyond a funerary object. In such iconic works as “The Starry Night” (1889, oil on canvas) ”“ on loan from The Museum of Modern Art in midtown ”“ and The Met”™s own ”Wheat Field With Cypresses” (also an 1889 oil on canvas) a baby cypress leans against its “mother,” reminiscent of how in Van Gogh”™s paintings of shoes one cozies up to its partner.
What begins as a symbol of death then ends as a symbol of life and the desire for connection, companionship and love.
