Self-Portrait, 1889, by Vincent van Gogh
For those of us with a vested interest in contemporary art, it is an important question to ponder from time to time — one that the Norton Simon Museum’s temporary installation of an 1889 self-portrait on loan from the National Gallery of Art calls again to the fore. There is no more familiar face in all of modern art history: the piercing blue eyes; the gaunt, sallow features; the imagined spectacle of a severed ear (turned discretely away from the viewer in this, as in most, variations); all swimming in a sea of madly quivering brush strokes. If you’ve never seen Van Gogh’s visage in one of the dozens of self-portraits he painted in his lifetime, you’ve seen it on postcards, calendars, coffee cups or refrigerator magnets. The National Gallery portrait, painted three months after Van Gogh committed himself to a mental asylum in Saint-Remy, in the south of France, and less than a year before his death at age 37, is one of the best known, and its front-and-center presentation here is sure to draw the requisite crowd. It is, of course, a wonderful painting.
The chiseled, penetrating face of the artist, fringed by red and ocher wisps of hair, all but glows against a field of breathtaking blue, set down in fervent, agile brush strokes. It is, indeed, as if the blue got the upper hand, less a color than force, a kind of fever, that persisted beyond the completion of “Starry Night” several months earlier to colonize this canvas as well. The blue refuses to function as merely a backdrop and comes to physically envelop the subject, saturating his smock, bleeding into the palette he holds in his hand, and casting a blue-green tint across his skin. A vivid painting in almost any reproduction, it is, like all of Van Gogh’s work, particularly electrifying when seen in person, where the mad, groping humanness of his brush strokes can best be felt. ( By Holly Myers from www.latymes.com )