Van Gogh at the MFA

Familiarity may not breed contempt, but it certainly dulls our capacity for surprise. I have seen “Starry Nights” a thousand times—in person, in print, on posters and screens.

At this point, I hardly see it at all. The swirl of dark blue is as familiar as my hand. So are the burning tapers of the cypress trees that thrust up from the bottom corner of the canvas. I long to see it again for the very first time, a picture that looks like it had been painted by a child who was also gifted with the eyes of a god.

Not so the paintings now in Boston in the Van Gogh exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts. I was there last week visiting friends on Cape Cod. The idea of the exhibit was new to me. At the end of his life, Van Gogh took refuge in a small rural town in the south of France. His destination was Arles, a picturesque spot where he rented an apartment and studio with an allowance from his brother. His psychological disturbances were already efflorescing and would lead eventually to his mutilation and suicide. He wrote that he sought sunshine and ease, a place that would somehow elevate his spirit.

In the end, Arles failed him, and he was institutionalized nearby. But in the short time he could function, he painted magnificently. His subjects were the various members of a family called Roulin, headed by the local postmaster, Joseph.

You may already know the signature portraits in this group, now mounted on their own dedicated walls in the exhibit. Like “Starry Night,” they feature multi-hued blues, but these are daylight portraits, with acutely observed faces. In both, Joseph Roulin looks fatherly, reassuring, with a bloom of jollity on his ruddy cheeks. Van Gogh recorded that he drank often with the postmaster, and the ruddiness is probably the flush of alcohol.

There is clear affection in both postmaster portraits, but there are also differences. In one, Van Gogh included a background of carnations, as if to suggest Roulin’s sweet beneficence. They offset the authority that is latent in the uniform. In the other, you eventually fixate on the subject’s hands, which are crabbed and spider-like, hovering near his lap. The rest of the figure is stable and at rest, but energy seems to collect in those hands, as if to suggest some unseen disturbance. Van Gogh always seems to be looking for unsettling forces.

But as good as these are, two other works were most memorable for me. The first is a picture of the infant Marcelle. She was painted in the months following her birth, and her features are scumbled, restless, and malleable. She is not an adorable seraph of child with a pink button nose and delicate eyelashes, but a dissolving slush of painted bands and daubs. Marcelle’s face is all potential, before it has arranged itself into fully discernable features. No painter I know better represents the untidiness of infancy, where tears and drool mingle with running mucus. Marcelle’s face below the eyes is a messy display of primordial clay, waiting to be shaped by the hand of experience. I love this painting because it idealizes nothing, because it resembles babies I have known myself, straining to resolve their hungers and discomforts.

The other canvas is still more touching. It is a scene painted quickly in the dance hall at Arles, a place which caused Van Gogh evident discomfort. Nothing here resembles the images of Degas with their conventional beauty and the structures of dance. The scene is s jumble of colliding bodies which seem to express no spirit or joy.

But buried in this pile is the outsized face of Madame Augustine Roulin. She seems to have been projected from another world, to offer Van Gogh the comfort of her presence. She is larger than all of the faces round her and painted as if in one of the focused portraits.

Van Gogh’s experience in Arles was all about connection, about constructing an experience of family and community. He invited other painters to share his studio, so that it could become an atelier of the soul. He found some of what he needed in the company of the Roulins. And when they were not available in three dimensions, he painted then into the canvas of his imagination. Augustine served the purpose in the confines of her parlor and also in the picture of the dance hall at Arles.