![]() In admitting to wishing to "do something with them… as I see them", Van Gogh confessed to a key aspect of his personal resilience: the struggle for professional success. He had been thinking about cypresses and their expressive potential ever since he had arrived in Provence in February 1888, yet the fruition in his art came about after his arrival at Saint-Rémy. "The cypresses still preoccupy me, I'd like to do something with them like the canvases of the sunflowers because it astonishes me that no one has yet done them as I see them," noted Van Gogh in a letter to his brother, Theo. Egyptian obelisks were symbols of Ra, the Sun God and, like cypresses stretched vertically into the empyrean, linking the cold ground to the fire of the heavens, expressing hope and immortality.īy painting cypresses like obelisks, Van Gogh's aim was to express the grandeur, timelessness, and monumentality of nature, something he could draw solace from at his moment of despair. As well as expressing endurance through history, cypresses and obelisks possessed a graceful simplification of form, and linked Earth to sky, a feature that Van Gogh used most dramatically in The Starry Night. He had discovered an equivalence in the form of the cypress and obelisks after reading about Egyptian architecture displayed at the Paris World's Fair of 1889. And the green has such a distinguished quality." This written description of cypresses was noted by Van Gogh at his asylum in Saint-Rémy, and you can see it expressed in visual form in all his canvases depicting the tree in 18, particularly The Starry Night. "It's beautiful as regards lines and proportions, like an Egyptian obelisk. Here's what four key artworks in the exhibition reveal about Van Gogh's symbol of resilience. ![]() It reveals the back story behind his long-standing interest in the motif." "It is an unprecedented and entirely new perspective. "This is the first exhibition to focus on Van Gogh's cypresses," its curator Susan Alyson Stein, tells BBC Culture. Van Gogh's Cypresses, a new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, puts the spotlight on the tree that became the artist's obsession. And he became increasingly fixated with one feature of the surrounding Provençal countryside: its muscular, ancient cypress trees. It was to engage with nature and embroil himself deeper with his art. His recuperation from a series of breakdowns was overseen by a team of doctors, but the artist had a self-prescribed remedy. In the summer of 1889, Vincent van Gogh arrived as a voluntary patient at the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, in Saint-Rémy. The tragedy of art's greatest supermodel ![]() Why did cypress trees become his symbol of fortitude? Sunflowers were his symbol of joy and devotion. Every element of the natural world tremored with significance in Vincent van Gogh's world.
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