Why does Vincent always seem like the center of the Impressionist / post-Impressionist moment in art?
            Question and answer are obviously subjectively determined. But I would suggest that anyone who holds the Impressionist / post-Impressionist moment in balance, and features it as an ultimate and substantive basis of the change into ‘the modern’ will find, if they investigate their own orientations, that Vincent is the pivot.
            Personally, my predilection is for Cézanne. The pure nature of his thought in terms of the brush and the motif, a thinking conducted entirely in terms of color as the simultaneous nature of mind and perception in the disposition of form, appeals to me as no other aesthetic personality can. The slow and certain growth of his personality in the art, the dynamic radicalism of his youth, visually and aesthetically, gradually tamed by a self-discipline with only an inner directive for control – no other artist can resonate for me with equal force.
            And yet, if I were to point to the center, it would still have to be Vincent. Precisely Cézanne’s demonstration of the purely intellectual potency of brush and color swings him out from the center of the moment. We cannot get to Monet from Cézanne. And we cannot get to Cézanne from Monet. But I have a copy of a drawing by van Gogh, rocks and path rising to the left overlooking his beloved level fields ranking upward in perspective toward a high horizon, and while it doesn’t point unequivocally to Cézanne, the link is tangible.
            Of course, we have the poignant interlude. Emile Bernard, presumably a fairly reasonable source, reports the mot by Cézanne to van Gogh at Pere Tanguy’s: ‘You, sir, truly paint like a madman.’
            Perhaps it was ‘Starry Night’. But I suspect, for Cézanne, that almost any Vincent would have done equally well. A painting of a garden and fields at the Met, with the vertical of a house corner on the right, if I remember correctly, and one or two of the larger flowers represented as pure abstractions, perhaps hexagons or octagons with the corners indented – nothing that could possibly be interpreted in any terms of verisimilitude of the eye, of ‘realism’, and yet somehow perfectly appropriate. So it would not surprise me if Cézanne’s comment, if true, did not contain a buried and sideways compliment, as well as a pure descant upon the suffering of all of these extremely serious artists at the hands of the public and contemporary critics.
            But this is the point. Some of Vincent’s earliest drawings already manifest the pure visual personality of the artist. What develops is not the confluence of personality and craft, but craft and personality together extending through the range of the visual. He begins and ends as an evangelist. But he begins with the book and ends with visual creation. He begins with a proletarian agenda, not of politics and social programs, but of compassion. But the pair of old boots requires no political subtext. They stand as art. By the time we arrive at the dead sunflower heads, it no longer matters. Art has become a religion because the world is the visual presence of God. He paints a portrait of a shrub. He paints the gnarled tree roots exposed by a stream cut. He paints an embankment of ivy and tree trunks, a craftsman’s nightmare – and he does it with the aplomb of one born to the task.
            Monet teaches us to see. Gauguin teaches us to dream. But Vincent insists that God is also in the eye.