Van Gogh, Whitman, and Darwin in New York I, t…

Van Gogh, Whitman,
and Darwin in New York

I, too, minister a deity
–Walt Whitman

New York City recently hosted a grand convergence—simultaneous exhibits on three 19th Century men who still have a profound effect on how we perceive nature, God, and ourselves. Still running at the American Museum of Natural History, we have “Darwin” through May 29. “Vincent Van Gogh: The Drawings” wrapped up on December 31 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and “‘I Am With You’: Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass” closed on January 8 at the main branch of the New York Public Library. In December, you could have seen all three.

Vincent Van Gogh, Walt Whitman, and Charles Darwin. Two artists and a scientist. A Dutchman, an American, and an Englishman. They were very different people in many ways. They never met. Van Gogh no doubt read Whitman, though, and he and Whitman probably read Darwin.

They were also similar in very important ways. All three were outsiders who, by following their own path, changed and improved their disciplines. They absorbed nature. Their achievements are such that anyone with an eighth grade education knows them, yet their works are a constant playground for discovery. They set the highest of standards. And all three, luckily, wrote incessantly about themselves and their work. I will go easy on the bios here, given most folks know them and know where to get them.

So, let’s play December and visit all three exhibits, starting on the upper East side…

“Drawing is the Root of Everything”
Vincent Van Gogh

The Van Gogh exhibit is a chronological survey that begins with his earliest student drawings and shifts quickly into his more distinctive work. It opens with “The Entrance to the Pawn Bank,” a city street scene done when he began his formal studies. This picture is an attempt on Vincent’s part to render a setting in “correct scale and proportion” using a perspective frame that organized his view while sketching into a boxed grid. It is fastidiously and efficiently executed. Student work: A.

He went on to follow the student manual, picking more and more desolate scenes to draw, always exercising the rules of perspective, doing very competent academic work. His touch is unremarkable. Somewhat light.

Soon things changed. Half way through the first room of displays, we come to the drawings he did when he lived with a prostitute, Sien Hoornik, and her five-year-old daughter. There is a drawing of the girl, a portrait that he obviously prized. He framed it in a wide black charcoal line going around the edge. We see angular tension in the figure. It is a drawing done from the eye with emotion, freed from the mechanical, cerebral interference of academic perspective. It conveys poverty and humanity. Van Gogh is finding himself—his most important discovery as an artist.

Before long, the dark, soulful portrait studies of the Dutch farm families start to pile up leading to his early masterpiece, The Potato Eaters. These are “clumsy,” lumpen figures in portraits that changed art. Steeped in Rembrandt, they introduce the psychological content that set the stage for Egon Schiele, Edvard Munch, and many others. Van Gogh is also the direct forebear to the Fauves, including Matisse, Braque, and arguably Picasso.

Van Gogh actively sought the company of the great artists that were convening in Paris where his supportive brother, Theo, was an art dealer. From what we know, Vincent got a lot of help from the likes of Pissarro, the generous dean of the impressionists. He befriended pointillists and experimented in their métier. We all know about the Gauguin experiment in Arles. Still Van Gogh followed his own course, mostly alone in nature, working incessantly.

He is best known for his paintings, but he often wrote in his letters of the primacy of drawing. Sometimes he mentioned its healing, restorative powers. The level of psychological tension in Van Gogh’s work is not surprising, given his own psychological problems, about which there is much speculation—there are people that have gone so far as to analyze how he rendered clouds in given periods in order to track his state of mind. He claimed, however, that drawing calmed him like nothing else. Anyone who draws can relate. It is a primal human instinct to stand before nature and reproduce our experience in drawing. When we do it, we are immersed into an enormous pool of timeless well-being that will make us miss our next appointment. I know of no greater spiritual immersion. It is truly prayer-like.

And it was obviously vital to Van Gogh’s craft. The exhibit, which includes some paintings, shows that a preparatory sketch exists for nearly all of Van Gogh’s major paintings. They are expertly and uniquely executed with fast flowing lines and nervous stippling, the latter a remnant of his pointillist experiments. None but the earliest are encumbered with an academic eye to perspective. The eye, in fact, seems to have circumvented the brain in guiding the hand across the paper.

And look at his paintings. The primary element is the drawing. He worked large canvases with small brushes, drawing as he painted. The drawing can outshines the color. But what shines most is his soul–his spirit, which, to paraphrase Whitman, was brother to God’s spirit.

There were many famous crises of faith in the 19th Century, and Van Gogh had his. He was not conventionally devout. His rebellion against his father, a Dutch Protestant minister who rejected his son’s Christian radicalism, was a rebellion against the Church. But Van Gogh internalized Christianity. His paintings have overt and personal Christian symbols, such as the sower and the sun in the painting at the top. He certainly saw God in nature and he practiced charity to a fault.*

Here is a stretch from a letter to Theo: “I think that everything that is really good and beautiful, the inner, moral, spiritual and sublime beauty in men and their works, comes from God, and everything that is bad and evil in the works of men and in men is not from God, and God does not approve of it. But I cannot help thinking that the best way of knowing God is to love many things. Love this friend, this person, this thing, whatever you like, and you will be on the right road to understanding Him better, that is what I keep telling myself. “ This was written in 1880, when he was just starting to draw and paint. His paintings indicate to me that this basic thought, which has nothing to do with an established Church, stayed with him.

I will not add to the speculation as to why Van Gogh killed himself, other than to note that this man, so obviously filled with love for mankind, working as a preacher, a teacher, and an artist, was impossible to deal with and an enormous handful to anyone that made the effort to be his friend. He was hard on himself and others. Van Gogh was overwhelmed by both society and nature. His work is his testimony, his confession. As an artist, he never sought to dissect and explain nature. He was compelled, instead, to report its effect on him, how it made him feel, where in it he found himself.

He left us the legacy of his solitary effort to reach the sublime with no certainty that the work would receive the appropriate regard, or that anyone would care about it at all.

We have Theo to thank.

“I resist anything better than my own diversity”
Walt Whitman

All right. Let’s swing around the park on the way to Darwin on the Upper West Side. But let’s swing wide south and stop first at the Library on 42nd Street for Whitman.

The Whitman exhibit is in a small room off of the lobby. It is a chapel of relics—manuscripts, photographs, and other documents related to the publication of Leaves of Grass. There are a few anecdotes about his stellar self-promotion, and a wonderful description of his visit to an insane asylum where he is described as making friends with doctors and patients in such a way that it is not clear whether he made any distinction between the two at all. This reminds me of Van Gogh in the poor Belgian coal mining towns, living with a prostitute in Holland, drinking with the Impressionists in Paris. It even reminds me of Darwin with Jenny the Orangutan in the London Zoo. Open-heartedness that paves the way for Ginsberg.

I haven’t much more to write about the exhibit. Whitman speaks for himself. Here is a poem from Children of Adam , Book II of Leaves of Grass.

One Hour to Madness and Joy

One hour to madness and joy! O furious! O confine me not!
(What is this that frees me so in storms?
What do my shouts amid lightnings and raging winds mean?)

O to drink the mystic deliria deeper than any other man!
O savage and tender achings! (I bequeath them to you my children,
I tell them to you, for reasons, O bridegroom and bride.)

O to be yielded to you whoever you are, and you to be yielded to me
in defiance of the world!
O to return to Paradise! O bashful and feminine!
O to draw you to me, to plant on you for the first time the lips of
a determin’d man.

O the puzzle, the thrice-tied knot, the deep and dark pool, all
untied and illumin’d!
O to speed where there is space enough and air enough at last!
To be absolv’d from previous ties and conventions, I from mine and
you from yours!
To find a new unthought-of nonchalance with the best of Nature!
To have the gag remov’d from one’s mouth!
To have the feeling to-day or any day I am sufficient as I am.

O something unprov’d! something in a trance!
To escape utterly from others’ anchors and holds!
To drive free! to love free! to dash reckless and dangerous!
To court destruction with taunts, with invitations!
To ascend, to leap to the heavens of the love indicated to me!
To rise thither with my inebriate soul!
To be lost if it must be so!
To feed the remainder of life with one hour of fullness and freedom!
With one brief hour of madness and joy.

To be lost if it must be so….

OK, let’s get a cab up to the Museum of Natural History and check out Darwin. And when we get there, don’t dare anyone mention Adam!

“Disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate”
Charles Darwin

Darwin might be the best known of the city’s three December guests of honor. The attack on his theory of natural selection has hardly let up since the publication of On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection (or The Preservatoin of the Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life) in 1859. It’s kept him in the news for over about 150 years. One of the really brilliant things at the Darwin exhibit, by the way, is that it simply ignores the current ruckus over intelligent design. It is a straightforward survey of his life and work that leaves appropriate room for questions.

And there are questions—let me do a flashback. It sets the stage for my take on Darwin at the Museum

In 2003,I attended a black tie dinner in New York. The guest speaker was Dr. Benjamin Carson, a surgeon renowned for his track record in operating on conjoined twins. Carson’s back-story is interesting. He is an African American who grew up in the inner city, succeeding against rather steep odds along the way.

He spoke, in part, about a crisis in science. A crisis of faith. He challenged the nonchalant agnosticism and atheism that holds sway in a climate where a scientist is as likely to express personal religious faith as a U.S. military officer would be to contradict Donald Rumsfeld. He talked about his own faith. And he talked about Darwin, expressing some astonishment that the man, whose theory is held by many, including many scientists, to be a kind of religious belief system, had a crisis of faith when his daughter died at the age of 10. I thought it was a tough-minded talk, and I liked that it challenged the audience. But not until I heard of award-winning scientists in attendance chastising their hosts for allowing this man to “speak to a serious audience of scientists” did I decide it was my second favorite black tie event of all time.

Flash forward.

It’s a wonderful exhibit. Like most things presented at the Museum of Natural History, it targets a young audience. There are a lot of middle school students and enthusiastic teachers. The atmosphere is vibrant—everyone is absorbed by the displays of animals, tools, and souvenirs from Darwin’s magnificent world travels. Probably the best exhibit I’ve seen at this museum.

The stage is set early on with a description of 19th Century ideas about man and nature. The century was one in which knowledge was organized, compartmentalized, classified, and systematized. This resulted in tremendous tools for understanding–the periodic table of the elements, Kirchel’s Motzart catalog. In this environment, the notion that life on earth evolved from a common ancestor was fairly widely held by naturalists who collected and classified specimens of plant and animal life. Jean Baptiste Lamarck was among those espousing a theory of evolution. So was Darwin’s grandfather. The exhibit makes clear that Darwin did not come up, as is widely believed, with the concept of evolution–some of the basic tenants of evolution harkens back to Plato. His accomplishment was the formulation of a plausible theory of how evolution works—the concept of natural selection by survival of the fittest.

The exhibit also explains that in Darwin’s time, man was not considered “part of nature,” that man was not considered an animal. Darwin, we are led to believe, cleared this up for us.

We are told that Darwin—a nephew of Josiah Wedgewood on his mother’s side–was an indifferent student who nonetheless collected natural specimens, beetles especially, with near obsession. He never tired of studying details. He hated the stifling discipline of his boarding school, and his father is said to have accused him of caring, “for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat catching.” He predicting that the boy would disgrace the family. Darwin’s boyhood was very much like the boyhoods of Van Gogh and Whitman. (Whitman, who was sent to a schoolhouse in Brooklyn in which all grades were taught by one teacher, used to skip out to go to lectures in Manhattan).

Darwin’s study of evolution was inspired largely by the Reverend Thomas Malthus, a social theorist of the utmost pessimism. Malthus detailed future food shortages and a world where only the strongest survive. Darwin’s theory of natural selection is deeply routed in Malthus, whose thinking generally latched onto the Victorian mind quite voraciously. In a way, survival of the fittest makes Darwin’s work rather straightforwardly Malthusian. Darwin called his theory an application of the doctrines of Malthus in an area without the complicating factor of human intelligence (from Wikipedia entry on Malthus-ed.). If I understand this, I disagree—like all scientific theory, natural selection is a triumph of invention, quite a cerebral affair.

Of course, Darwin did reams of original research, sailing around the world on the HMS Beagle. His book, The Voyage of The Beagle, can be opened at any page and enthrall with its 19th century-style anthropological accounts of “native peoples” and its wonderful depictions of nature. (The seed of an idea for February’s Fun With Literature just hit the garden—watch this space. ed). His collecting and note-taking achieved heroic proportions. This was act one his great work.

Act two took place after he debarked in London, the center of the 19th century universe. His London years were “feverishly creative,” according to signage at the museum. Darwin composed his theory, and sat on it, knowing only too well how it would offend society at large, specifically the Church. [Quite a divergence from Van Gogh and Whitman, who sat on very little and didn't mind stirring things up.] Not until it was apparent that Alfred Russell Wallace was about to publish a similar theory did Darwin move to publish On the Origin of Species.

Throughout the exhibit are displays such as a bat wing shown in comparison to a human hand. There are giant sloth models, and a model of an armadillo not much smaller that the cab that drove us to the museum. One of the quirkier displays is a drawing by his son, Francis, included in the exhibit as a peon to human imagination. It is done on the back of a discarded sheet of Darwin’s manuscript paper.

At one point we are told about how Darwin systematically worked out the answer to the question of whether to marry, listing pros and cons and coming down finally on the side of “a nice wife on a sofa.” (It must be said that Van Gogh and Whitman were a little more sensitive to any protofeminists that may have been around. And those guys fell in love without making lists–they wrote poems and proposed to strangers in supermarkets.)

Then we come to the stuff that Carson talked about. The death of Darwin’s daughter of tuberculosis at the age of 10 and Darwin’s loss of faith. It is described how Darwin’s wife could not reconcile her ability to visualize her daughter’s soul in heaven with her husband’s absolute black-out on an afterlife.

Of course, the fix was in long before his daughter was born. Darwin, like most scientists of his day, believed in a Designer up until he arrived at his breakthrough on natural selection. An essay in today’s New York Times Book Review by Judith Shulevitz** describes how this led him to a kind of Deiism, belief in a non-meddling “impersonal” God. After his daughter’s death, he became an agnostic–an agnostic whose spiritual jouney began with a fascination with nature informed by an enthusiasm for the pessimist Malthus.

I found myself wondering as I left the museum about the same thing that baffled Carson. How can Darwin, a man so immersed in nature, with such insight and hands-on experience with the mechanics of life, be left destitute—spiritually wiped out—by the death of his daughter? Massive grief and permanent sorrow, of course, but a rejection of the notion of higher spiritual order? He liked lists—didn’t statistics on child mortality in the 19th century cross his desk at any point prior to his daughter’s death? Yes, it is a personal matter, but we are all involved because Darwin’s thinking on spiritual matters has informed the thinking of scientists and the public at large. Perhaps Carson has some insight here. He noted that Darwin tried diligently to cure his daughter, taking her to spas, keeping detailed records on her condition. This is also mentioned at the museum. When Darwin is shown the inevitable limits to the rationalist’s control over nature, he has a spiritual hissy-fit. It’s hubris.

Ultimately, I can’t help seeing Darwin’s crisis of faith as born of a blind side to the part of nature that can’t be measured–the world that faces down the failed promise of better-living-through-chemistry. His intellectual journey strikes a hard blow to that subjugation to the unknown and the sublime that inspired Plato and Aquinas–to that surrendering awe before nature that is so central to Van Gogh and Whitman.

Ironically, as I’ve mentioned, Darwin is a kind of priest in science and in secular society. The best illustration of this is the tailgate fish wars. A few years after evangelical Christians put the little silver fish-shaped loops on their cars, the cheeky secularists put on similar fish that had evolved legs and letters, spelling Darwin. The counter attack, brilliantly ironic, is the Christian fish coming back bigger and swallowing the Darwin fish—survival of the fittest! Is Darwin hoist by his own petard? The silliness of all this reminds me that evolution by natural selection and religious faith are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, scientists with a healthy attitude toward Darwin treat his work as scientific theory. An elegant theory that has withstood all scientific challenges–but one that needs not compete with religious philosophy. Shulevitz reminds us of how Jay Gould puts it—science and religion are “non-overlapping magisteria.”

Finally, I’m left wondering about survival of the fittest in the broader social and political sense in which it is constatly applied. Isn’t it strange that in the cases of Darwin, Van Gogh, and Whitman, we have individuals that basically rejected the stricutres and mores of society at large, set off on their own to experience the world, and returned to successfully change the course of science, art, and society? It is telling, really, given the Malthusian/Darwinian worldview of western society, that the most innovative minds—indeed Darwin himself—existed on the perifery of mainstream society. Strength not in numbers, it seems, but in genius.

Let’s head back across the Hudson to New Jersey. Through Manhattan, Whitman’s landscape. The greatest city in the most powerful country in the world–the center of the 20th century universe with little credible challenge going into the 21st. It is still a great country, despite its current leadership. And it throws its weight around quite a bit. Survival at the top through brute strength? At this point, perhaps. But it wasn’t always that way. If, in fact, there was anything like survival of the physically fittest in the 18th century, London would still be the center of the universe.

I’ll end with the following words written to Thomas Jefferson by John Page in a letter dated July 20, 1776:

“We know the Race is not to the Swift nor the Battle to the Strong. Do you not think an Angel rides in the Whirlwind and directs this Storm?”***

Regards,
Vanx
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* I noticed a book on Amazon, Eternity’s Gate: The Spiritual Vision of Vincent Van Gogh, that deals with this issue. It is described as rather counter to the obviously flawed understanding that Van Gogh rejected God.

** Shulevitz writes an essay commenting on two new books, Evolution vs Creationism by Eugenie C Scott, and The Evolution-Creation Struggle, by Michael Ruse. Must be something in the air!

*** I saw Munich Saturday night. One of the characters recites a verse that Page used in his letter to Jefferson: “We know the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong. Time and change happen to them all.”
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Illustrations, top to bottom
Sower with Setting Sun, Vincent Van Gogh
Self Portrait, Van Gogh
Field in Provence, Van Gogh
The Zouave, Van Gogh
Cypresses, Van Gogh
Angel After Rembrandt Van Gogh
Early Autumn, George Inness
Eighth Avenue, NYC
Human evolution
Smoking Skull, Van Gogh
Route of The HMS Beagle
Bat skeleton
Flying Fox, Van Gogh
Giant armadillo
Swathmore club poster
Photo by Marguerite Mullin