Everybody Loves van Gogh By Jo Ann Lewis Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, January 14, 1998; Page C01

"Interieur d'un Restaurant" by Vincent van Gogh. (Christie's New York/AFP)

This Dutchman with the reddish beard and ice-blue eyes, who painted for only 10 years, holds a place in popular culture unrivaled by any Western artist.

He moves ordinary people to poetry. Posters of his paintings fly out of museums. If you check the Internet, you'll find at least 57 van Gogh Web sites. His life produced a Top 40 rock song and an Oscar-winning movie. Hundreds of books have been written about him. A 1990 exhibition of his works in the Netherlands drew 1.4 million visitors, and many more were turned away. Van Gogh's portrait of his doctor fetched $82.5 million in 1990.

What is it about van Gogh?

The news of the van Gogh show coming to the National Gallery in October – a spectacular event, the museum's director is calling it – has generated unusual excitement not only among museum professionals but among people like Ruby Green of Spencerville, Md., who recently spent $3 at a yard sale for a flask with a portrait of van Gogh on it.

"They sure didn't know what they were selling!" she said. She hopes to resell it for considerably more during the coming van Gogh fever.

Charles Moffett, director of the Phillips Collection, which owns three van Gogh paintings, has thought a lot about van Gogh, the subject of his unfinished dissertation.

"I think it's a combination of the accessible subject matter and the rich color," Moffett says. "These are subjects that appeal to the modern eye and sensibility: They don't have to be decoded. A flowering orchard or men repairing a road in southern France have an appeal that doesn't need to be explained."

But they also have a profound spiritual resonance, notes Moffett. "Van Gogh spends a lot of time focusing on the cycle of birth, death and regeneration. The whole idea of the wheat field, a recurrent theme, reflects that: You see it at its ripest moment; you see the sower, and you see the reaper.

"We're dealing, in effect, with a pantheist," Moffett says. "His father was a Protestant minister; Vincent was trained as a lay minister. And in the course of his career, he translates a lot of those values from formal religion into his own personal brand of pantheism.

"That's made clear to the viewer through the expressive character of the brush strokes, in which he distills what he's looking at," Moffett says. "He distorts and simplifies and exaggerates what's important to him. He finds patterns and rhythms and repetitions which for him are indicative of a higher force at work. And, of course, he finds spiritual significance in those forces.

"There's a character to his brushwork that is unique," Moffett concludes. "If it weren't, we'd have a lot of van Gogh followers. But there wasn't one."

Many experts who were asked about the painter's essence began by recalling their first encounters with van Gogh, sometimes in an art class, often in Irving Stone's 1934 fictionalized biography "Lust for Life," or in the film that followed, starring Kirk Douglas.

National Gallery Director Earl "Rusty" Powell III still remembers the first van Gogh image he ever saw – a reproduction of "Starry Night," when he was still in high school in Providence, R.I. That painting inspired the early '70s song "Vincent," recorded by Don McLean, which begins: "Starry, starry night/ Paint your palette blue and gray/ Look out on a summer's day/ With eyes that know the darkness in my soul."

"I think that for everyone, van Gogh is one of the most interesting and compelling artists, " says Powell. "The painting is phenomenal and the life story is phenomenal – the agonies and tragedies of a flawed genius."

Says Moffett, "He's one of the most popular artists in the world, but his appeal is not limited to the U.S. and Europe. He's also the most famous Western artist in Japan, as indicated by the record prices set by Japanese buyers."

Moffett attributes this, in part, to van Gogh's interest in Japanese art, especially prints, of which he owned hundreds. "He was also interested in Japanese religions, and the Japanese aesthetic. He called Arles the Japan of the South of France."

Marguerite Beck-Rex, a painter, poet and editor who lives in Takoma Park, wrote 13 poems about van Gogh after seeing his work in the '80s. "I went to Arles to look at the van Gogh landscape," she said.

She even offered a few lines from her two-part poem "Blessed Is He Who Has Found His Work," which begins:

The yellow sun blesses earth's wheat-waves,

And a yellow reaper sails, riding wheat-tides,

Launched on the journey of harvest . . .

She says she believes she's caught "the vigor as well as the color" in van Gogh's paintings and hopes to post some of her poetry on a van Gogh Web site (http:\\van-gogh.org\ ) titled "Vincent van Gogh – A Handshake in Thought."

Among the other van Gogh Web sites are one for a comedy sketch team named Van Go-Go and another for a pop band called Blue Van Gogh, which purports to "lace swirling lyrical and melodic colors into unforgettable song treasures."

Is Beck-Rex excited about the upcoming show?

"Oh, my God," she exclaimed. "I'm going to take a week off and live in the museum."

At the nation's biggest museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, there were two van Gogh exhibitions in the '80s. And according to O'Keefe Associates, publicists for the chain of Metropolitan Museum shops, their van Gogh posters and note cards are among the shops' top sellers, running nose to nose with Monet.

But Philippe de Montebello, director of the museum (which will not get this van Gogh show) is one art professional uninterested in reasons for the artist's popularity.

"I'm not a sociologist," he said tartly, "so I can't say why he's so popular. There's no question that his appeal is enduring, but I don't look at the history of art in those terms."