Volume 54, Number 18 · November 22, 2007
The Purest of Styles
By John Updike
Vincent van Gogh—Painted with Words: The Letters to Émile Bernard
Catalog of the exhibition by Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten, and Nienke Bakker
an exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum, September 28, 2007– January 6, 2008.
Rizzoli/Morgan Library and Museum/Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum, 383 pp., $50.00
Renzo Piano's chaste blond addition to the Morgan Library holds for the remainder of the year, in the Morgan Stanley Gallery East, a small but intense exhibition centered on the twenty-two letters written in 1887– 1889 by Vincent van Gogh to Émile Bernard. Bernard, who was only nineteen at the outset of this epistolary outpouring from the thirty-four-year-old Van Gogh, is just a footnote in art history now, but as a painter and critic he enjoyed the acquaintance of a number of important Postimpressionists. The Morgan displays an elegant, thinly painted portrait of Bernard at a mere seventeen by Toulouse-Lautrec—the boy looks wispy, intelligent, polite—and Bernard claimed to have invented the 'cloissoniste' style used by Gauguin to good effect; he elicited, in another correspondence, Cézanne's famous wish to render nature 'by means of the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone.'
Review, 2318 words
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