Once, years ago, I was on my first trip to Europe when , without knowing why, I felt I wanted to go to Amsterdam. I was almost penniless, sleeping outdoors sometimes, but when i got to Amsterday I found a cheap room at the very top; of one of these narrow three story houses that line the streets and canals. The very next day I walked a long distance to the Van Gogh Museum. At that time it was in the park beyond the Reichsmuseum, a small sort of nondescript building.
Beyond the entrance a ramp led up and up, circling around the walls of the building, and as you walked up you walked through the stages of Vincent’s life, from the dark period known as the potato eaters period when he was perfecting his draughtmanship and the canvases were portraits and studies of peasants, workers, miners, depicted in dark tones, often with a greenish tint. Then on through more colorful works until at last many of then shimmered with light and color. Then, still further along pictures from his stay in the asylum in Aarl, but mixed in, pictures of the fields, of flowers and corn and peasants sleeping in hay ricks, of the building where he rented a room in Auvers-sur-Oise, pictures of his room. It seemed as if he couldn’t stop. Anything he saw, anything with form and shape and color drew him and he had to paint it. Blue skies as only the skies in the south of France can be blue, with great masses of white clouds moving across the canvas.
The ramp now flattened out and I found myself walk down a sort of hallway: on my right a bare wall and on my left some sort of almost cubicle walls, a little above eye height. I didn’t know where I was going. Directly ahead there was a huge window looking out on the trees in the park. It was a windy day and the trees were moving, swaying in the breeze. I remember wondering how Vincent would have painted them, as dark as they were. But I kept walking until, as I got to the window, the walkway turned sharp left and I found myself in a dead end, facing a wall. On the wall was the picture “Wheatfield with Crows” that Van Gogh painted in the final months of his life. It struck me like a physical blow. I felt, for a moment, the sense of lonliness and menace and hopelessness that Van Gogh talked about in his letters. Without a moment of warning
I burst into tears. I sobbed uncontrollably as I turned back and stumbled down the ramp and outside into the sunlight. I walked across the park until I found a sheltered place beneath the trees and the tears just flowed. Something changed in me that day, that moment. Something changed in that moment of sharing another human beings vision and feelings. Whoever I had been before, I was not that person anymore. I became more aware of feelings: of my feelings and those of others. But I was through with art for the day. I walked past the Reichsmuseum with its’ trove of dutch masters
. I found a sidewalk vendor and had a hotdog – in Amsterdam they were called “Polsers” – retrieved my pack and got on the train for Switzerland. Somehow I knew i needed the grandeur and patience and serenity of the mountains.The museum is different now. It is a grand building full of many many more of Van Gogh’s works, even his experiments of just drawing swatches if different colors side by side to see how they affected each other. I’ve been back to Amsterday and to the Van Gogh Museum twice since that first visit, and been to Van Gogh exhibits elsewhere, but though he is still my favorite artist, bar none, and I love his work, nothing has ever reproduced the impact, the cleansing, the transformation the who-knows-what of that final moment, years ago, in the old museum.
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