Van Gogh, Drawn Out

After a few years' stay in Paris, and then a trip to southern France, van Gogh had developed his own way with paint. By 1888, he'd taken the taste for a certain kind of lively, almost arbitrary mark that had evolved in his drawings and transferred it to oils. Instead of smoothly translating the world into a consistent system of colored dabs, as leading artists such as Monet and Seurat were doing, van Gogh famously set his brush free to make whatever kind or shape or size of stroke it wanted to.

Once van Gogh had really begun to break free in paint, it fed back into his drawings. Van Gogh's drawing style suddenly opens up to allow dots and blobs and rings and curlicues of ink, on top of the dashes he'd started out with.

It's not so much that he's working in a standard sketching mode, roughing out an image of the world in manic strokes of ink. In many of his pen drawings, the view has already been outlined in pencil lines that just peek out from underneath. Rather, van Gogh is using inky marks to fill in and complete and energize a picture whose structures he's already settled on -- the way a skilled painter might work up the final surface of a canvas.

Not knowing, or perhaps caring, that drawing and painting are supposed to follow different rules, van Gogh tried to make one match the other.

There was economy involved: Vincent's younger brother Theo, who worked in Paris to support the jobless artist, could sometimes barely scrape together enough money for fancy paints and canvases, so Vincent occasionally tried to make ink and paper take their place.

Working alone in far-off Arles, van Gogh also had to find a way to let his colleagues and his brother know about the progress he was making. By developing a way of drawing that could also stand for what he did in paint, van Gogh could use the mails to keep them up to date. A few of the ink drawings that van Gogh did as records of his innovative landscape paintings, after he had painted them, actually have the missing colors written in as words in their blank spaces. Many others show him inventing a novel range of wild marks that render coloristic energy as line. (Both systems work much better than when van Gogh tries to "color in" his drawings with even watercolor washes. Without the graphic verve of his brushstrokes -- which descends from the graphic power of his earliest drawings -- van Gogh's art falls asleep.)

In some ways, van Gogh's later landscape drawings are almost more far-fetched than his paintings of those years. They have a frantic energy that overrides traditional ideas of legible subject matter and coherent composition. The most extreme of them prefigure Jackson Pollock, or the bewildering complexities of landscape photos by Lee Friedlander.

Even in portraits, where you'd imagine subject matter having greater sway, van Gogh's drawings flirt with capriciousness. Van Gogh's famous painting called "The Zouave" is pretty great and wild, but his drawing based on it is truly an amazing thing. The painted sitter's tarry black jacket becomes a series of bold diagonals, the "green" of the wall behind him is a mess of thinner verticals, the thick impasto of the painted face becomes a fine polka-dot pattern -- like some kind of stubbly beard that happens to extend from neck to forehead -- and the red color of the hat is replaced by a wildly exaggerated version of the crosshatched weave of its fabric. Even the irises of the man's eyes, which on canvas are just a few dabs of colored paint, in the drawing become doughnuts of diverging rays spreading out from the black pupils. Details left out of the painting -- the weave of a fabric, the fine lines in an iris -- are put back into the drawing, in highly exaggerated form, to compensate for its missing colorfulness.

Van Gogh's self-taught line is more than up to the task of standing in for paint. Even when that paint is as great, and as sophisticated, as the mature van Gogh's.

Vincent van Gogh: The Drawings, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave., through Dec. 31. Call 212-535-7710 or visit http://www.metmuseum.org/ .