Lust for Line: Van Gogh Drawings

In April 1888, two months after he relocated from Paris to the town of Arles in Provence, Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) reported to his brother Theo about his latest drawings: "These drawings were made with a reed sharpened the way you would a goose quill; I intend to make a series of them, and I hope to do better ones than the first two. It is a method I already tried in Holland ..., but I hadn't such good reeds there as here."

Some 60 reed-pen drawings from Van Gogh's Arles period form the heart of an exhibition of the artist's graphic work that will be on view this fall at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City (October 18 through December 31). The first exhibition in the United States ever to focus on Van Gogh's drawings, the show comprises 113 works selected from public and private collections worldwide, including a large number of loans from Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum, the exhibition's co-organizer. The show thus affords a rare chance to examine Van Gogh's brilliant artistic evolution in terms of his drawings, which have remained generally overshadowed by his famously colorful oils.

A largely self-taught artist, Van Gogh believed that "drawing is the root of everything." His letters reveal his admiration for, and his sophisticated appreciation of, the masters of graphic art from Michelangelo and Rembrandt (his fellow countryman and particular hero) to such 19th-century illustrators as Honoré Daumier and Howard Pyle. Van Gogh experimented with a wide range of drawing media, and he seems to have been unusually sensitive to the handling qualities of different materials.

In March 1883, Vincent wrote to Theo about a type of chalk he was then using, which he referred to as "mountain chalk" (sometimes called "Italian chalk" in English): "Do you remember bringing me some pieces of mountain chalk last summer? I tried working with it then, but without success. So there were still a few pieces lying around that I recently took up again. Enclosed is a sketch made with it; as you see, it is a warm, peculiar black." He added that he found in Conté crayon "something lifeless," but he waxed poetic in his praise of this new discovery. "Mountain chalk understands what you want; I would almost say that it listens intelligently and obeys, but Conté is indifferent and does not cooperate. Mountain chalk has the soul of a true gypsy; if it is not asking you too much, please send me some of it."

In his self-invented program to teach himself the fundamentals of art, Van Gogh consulted how-to books, sought advice from professional artists he knew, and occasionally took classes in art schools. But mostly he drew. He devoted much time and energy early on to copying prints of master drawings in order to train his hand and eye. With characteristic fervor, he copied the 60 plates of contour figure drawings in Charles Bargue's Exercices au Fusain (Charcoal Exercises)—not once, but three times.

Many of his early drawings acknowledge, in his words, "the great importance of the outline." Occasionally, however, as in an 1881 pencil-and-pen drawing of a marsh, a very different way of working emerged. The surface of the paper is strewn with an array of dashes and squiggles—some made with a reed pen, possibly cut from a plant growing at the site—as if the artist were trying frantically to convey his sense of a dynamic universe. Landscape subjects would later become the vehicles for Van Gogh's greatest artistic statements; but the tendency lay dormant for seven years while he struggled patiently with the problems of contour and the figure.

This struggle had its roots in Van Gogh's artistic and humanitarian ideals. The figure was, after all, the pinnacle of Western art, and Van Gogh's heroes—Rembrandt, Delacroix, and Millet—were all masterful figure painters and communicators of profound insights into the human condition. For Van Gogh, the making of art could never be divorced from his hunger to touch the souls of others. With this purpose in mind, in the autumn of 1884 he began an ambitious series of drawings and paintings from life of the farming folk in the Dutch village of Nuenen, where he lived at the time with his parents.

The fruit of his labor was a rough-hewn masterpiece in oil, The Potato Eaters, and a number of superb drawings in black chalk—the high point of his early career as a draftsman. The large Head of a Woman (not shown) shows that Van Gogh's arduous training program had paid off in newfound control of his medium and an ability to express character through caricature. It would be a mistake to describe this snoutlike profile as "animallike," because no animal looks this ugly, and it's likely that Van Gogh exaggerated the features of his sitter. "[I]t is my great desire," he wrote about this time, "to learn how to make such inaccuracies, such discrepancies, refashionings, changes in reality that they might become, well, lies if you like, but truer than literal truth."

In another black-chalk drawing, Peasant Woman Gleaning, Van Gogh found in the figure's stooped silhouette an intriguing outline with which to enclose a powerful display of mark making. Multidirectional hatchings not only model the planes of the body and clothing but also insist on the fact of drawing as a process revealing the unique presence of the mark maker. This virtuoso performance, bursting with inner life, conveys strongly the impression that Van Gogh's genius for expressive line—long held in check by his devotion to the contour—would not be denied much longer.

"What is drawing?" he had asked rhetorically in an early letter. "How does one learn it? It is working through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do. How is one to get through that wall—since pounding at it is of no use? In my opinion one has to undermine that wall, filing through it steadily and patiently." Perhaps only Van Gogh, whose literary skill equaled his talent as a painter, could make learning to draw sound as subversive as a jailbreak.

In a last act of patient submission to conventional practices, Van Gogh enrolled at the art academy in Antwerp during the winter of 1885/1886. It did not go well. "How flat, how lifeless, and how insipid the results of that system are," he declared. Van Gogh's drawings were the butt of jokes by his fellow students, and he resigned himself to the lowest rank in the class, "because all the drawings of the others are exactly alike, and mine is absolutely different."

He moved to Paris, where Theo worked as an art dealer. A persistent myth about Vincent is that he was a naïve "peasant painter" when he arrived in Paris. In fact, he was already very knowledgeable about art, though he lacked firsthand information about the latest developments in the art world. Theo quickly remedied that by introducing him to the leaders of the French avant-garde: Pissarro, Degas, Seurat, Gauguin, Paul Signac, and Émile Bernard. Vincent spent the next two years absorbing the influences of Impressionism, Pointillism, Symbolism, and Japanese art—for which he retained undying enthusiasm.

Van Gogh drew relatively little in Paris. Engaged in mastering the new Impressionist system of divided color, he worked mostly in oils. View From Montmartre belongs to a group of works on paper he executed in hopes of marketing scenic views of Paris. This "drawing" is actually highly worked up, using a combination of graphite, gouache, colored chalk, pen-and-ink, and oil paint, and it originally had a painted blue frame.

Just how far removed Van Gogh's sensibility was from conventional taste can be seen in his choice of subject: an industrial wasteland, with a view of factory chimneys in the distance—not the sort of Parisian view a wealthy American tourist would likely take home. Yet the composition of View From Montmartre, with a big empty foreground, a fence running across the middle distance, and a minutely detailed vista beyond, is the prototype for some of Van Gogh's landscape-drawing masterpieces, created the following year.

Van Gogh probably drew View From Montmartre with the aid of a device he called a "perspective frame," an elaborate viewfinder with strings or wires crossing the center vertically, horizontally, and diagonally from corner to corner. The perspective frame had adjustable legs that made it freestanding, allowing the artist to look through it and carefully measure the positions of objects and angles of lines while he drew or painted. Van Gogh considered it indispensable for landscape work; he made several sketches of the perspective frame in letters to other artists, and he certainly took it with him when he moved to Arles in late February 1888.

Van Gogh went south in search of bright sunshine, warmth, and intense color, but when he arrived in Arles he found the town blanketed in snow. Eager to work outdoors, he had to content himself, at first, with small oil studies of still-life subjects painted in his hotel room. By mid-March he was able to venture outside, and very shortly painted the first of his Arles-period masterpieces, Drawbridge With Carriage (not shown). In the painting's foreground, women wash clothes on the marshy riverbank, where Van Gogh depicts tall, reedy grasses growing. Here, possibly, he discovered the plants he used to make his pens.

One of Van Gogh's favorite art manuals, Armand Cassagne's Guide pratique pour les différents genres de dessin [Practical guide for the different types of drawing] contained detailed instructions for cutting the reeds with a penknife. (Similar instructions are available today on the internet by searching for "reed pen.") Cassagne praised reed as the best pen to use for drawing, highlighting its facility to "glide" over the surface of the paper and its superiority over the "weak and puny" nibs of other pens. Moreover, Cassagne specified that the best natural reeds for drawing purposes grew "in the Midi, in the area of Cannes and Nice," that is, near Arles. These flexible, bamboolike reeds were "fine, elegant, and firm," and encouraged a bold, spontaneous manner of expression.

Van Gogh found the reed pen a natural fit for his "draftsman's fist," perhaps because drawing in ink on paper felt more like writing than painting, which often caused him great difficulties. "I wish that one could use paint as freely as pen and paper," he wrote. "Because I am afraid to waste paint, I sometimes spoil a painted study. With paper, if I am not writing a letter but making a drawing, it goes all right; so many sheets of Whatman [drawing paper], so many drawings."

He made astonishingly rapid progress in his work with the reed pen. Orchard With Arles in the Background, one of two drawings he sent to Theo in April, dates to late March (the fruit trees have not yet blossomed) and is thus one of the earliest drawings he made in Arles. Traces of telltale horizontal, vertical, and intersecting diagonal pencil lines on the sheet reveal his use of the perspective frame to scale the elements of the composition. Van Gogh drew most of the forms carefully in pencil before inking them with at least two, and possibly three, different pens: reed, quill, and perhaps an ordinary writing pen. He didn't slavishly follow his pencil underdrawing, however (some of the pen lines, such as the spindly tree branches, he drew freehand), nor did he ink all his pencil lines. The two media—graphite and ink—play mutually supporting roles, giving the drawing a subtle complexity of texture and shading.

Orchard With Arles in the Background demonstrates one of the primary working characteristics—and potential difficulties—of the reed pen. When the pen is loaded with ink, the first stroke tends to be heavy and dark; the following strokes become progressively lighter, until the pen very quickly runs out of ink. Hence, as Van Gogh (presumably right-handed) worked from left to right in the series of strokes that depict the grass, dark marks gradually shade to light marks, at which point he refilled his pen and made another dark-to-light series. The dark marks that punctuate the field at intervals create a lively, and not altogether planned, surface effect.

In the first week of May, Van Gogh created View of Arles With Irises in the Foreground as a study for an oil painting. Both the painting and the drawing are masterpieces. The drawing displays the quality of Van Gogh's mature graphic work: there is hardly a contour line to be found; he renders the various spatial planes and textures in the landscape by means of a system of lines of different lengths and light or dark dots. This stippling effect—evident in the middle distance of the field beneath the olive trees—Van Gogh undoubtedly borrowed from Pointillism, but as a draftsman he developed it in a new, personal way. His little lines and dots are an imaginative translation of reality rather than an attempt at literal description.

At the end of May, Van Gogh spent a week in the picturesque seaside village of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, painting and drawing the fishermen's cottages and their colorful boats. He drew Boats on the Beach, Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer on June 5, and used it as a study for a painting he made when he returned to Arles. Later he sent the drawing to Theo, and wrote proudly of it: "The Japanese draw quickly, very quickly, like a lightning flash, but tell me this—could I, in Paris, have done the drawing of the boats in an hour? Not even with the perspective frame; well, this was done without measuring, just by letting my pen go."

There followed a period of intense creativity that has become rightfully legendary in the history of modern art. Van Gogh's productivity while in Arles elicits awe: 35 paintings and 37 drawings during June, July, and August, 1888, despite hot weather, lack of funds, and neglect of his diet and general health. He remained nearly as prolific in the autumn until, at the end of December, overcome by physical and psychological exhaustion, Van Gogh quarreled violently with Gauguin (who had joined him in late October), cut off his own ear, and landed in the hospital.
Anticipating Gauguin's arrival—and the additional burden it would place on his brother, who was supporting him financially—in mid-July Van Gogh stopped painting for almost three weeks in order to cut down on expenses for paint and canvas. Instead he created three series of exquisite reed-pen drawings, copies of completed paintings rather than studies for new work, which he sent to Theo and the artists John Russell and Émile Bernard, to give them an idea of what he was doing. In these souvenirs or repetitions, Van Gogh reinterpreted the colors and textures of the paintings in terms of complex combinations of marks—lines, dots, dashes, curlicues—which he varied in the successive series to emphasize different effects.

For example, in the drawing after the painting Harvest in Provence, which Van Gogh sent to Bernard, he used a thick reed pen and short, choppy lines to simulate the decorative surface qualities of Japanese woodblock prints, which both artists admired. By contrast, in the version he sent to Russell the marks are delicately graded, transmitting a sense of atmosphere and dazzling summer light.

Unable to sell his drawings, Van Gogh created these mementos as gifts for his friends; in making them he succeeded in inventing a new language of graphic expression that made his work in black and white as emotionally compelling as his work in oils, and inspired a host of innovators in generations to come. Significantly, Russell presented one of the repetitions, a version of Haystacks, to the young Henri Matisse in 1897. The drawing's raw, rugged power became one of the primary sources for Matisse's Fauvism of 1905 through 1906, which critics decried as the work of "wild beasts."

Ironically, one of Van Gogh's unmarketable creations from this period—his reed-pen drawing Cottage Garden from early August 1888—sold at Christie's in New York City for $8.36 million, a record auction price for any single drawing. The auction, in November 1990, came just over 100 years after Van Gogh ended his life with a revolver in July 1890.

Rushing toward tragedy and artistic immortality, Van Gogh understood the risks he was running in painting and drawing at such a pitch of intensity. He knew that people would criticize his work's apparent crudeness, his disregard of conventional "finish," which resulted from his rapid pace of execution and the difficult conditions in which he often worked. In a letter from Arles in July 1888, Vincent told Theo to expect such criticism.

"I have to warn you that everyone will say I work too fast. Don't believe a word of it," he wrote confidently. "Is it not emotion, the true feeling for nature that guides us, and if now and then these emotions are so strong that you work without realizing that you are working, when now and then the strokes of the brush come in a sequence and relationship one to the other like words in a speech or in a letter, you must remember that it has not always been like that and that in future, too, there will be many trying days without inspiration. So we must strike while the iron is hot and put the iron aside when it has been forged."

During those magical months in Arles, using one of the simplest and most ancient of drawing tools, the reed pen, Van Gogh forged his lasting reputation as perhaps the most inspired and influential draftsman of modern times.


For more information on "Vincent van Gogh: The Drawings," at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City, call (212) 535-7710, or visit www.metmuseum.org.