Met Museum reveals Van Gogh’s fascination with cypresses

The Metropolitan Museum of New York is preparing to open an exhibition focused on the cypresses of Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh.

The exhibition reveals that the post-impressionist painter was fascinated with these trees during the last two years of his life, longer than previously thought.

‘Van Gogh’s Cypresses’ opens to the general public on Monday, May 22 and will run until August 27, 2023.

What works will be displayed at the exhibition?

The exhibition will reunite in the same room as two iconic paintings from 1889 that are usually visited in two different New York museums — ‘Starry Night’ and ‘Wheat Field with Cypress’.

The two paintings have not been in the same room for over 100 years, since 1901.

Several other works by the artist have been imported from around the world, with about a reported 20 to 40 paintings, watercolors, and drawings.

Susan Alyson Stein, the exhibition’s curator, noted to EFE that over 30 institutions and collectors have collaborated with the Met to make this a very specific exhibition.

The curator described the project as a “once in a generation” experience that will greatly impact the perceived history of one of the world’s most recognizable and studied artists.

Documenting Van Gogh’s history

“[The exhibition] tells for the first time the background,” Stein said, elaborating that the public’s “conventional” theories falsely place Van Gogh’s discovery of the cypresses much later, after he was admitted to psychiatric care in June 1889.

‘Van Gogh’s Cypresses’ clearly documents that these trees were already inspiring the painter months earlier — as early as March 1888.

Van Gogh’s journey into the cypress tree was divided into three stages, beginning with a piece titled ‘The Roots of His Invention’, which was dated between February 1888 and May 1889.

The significance of the cypress trees

“To an extent that has gone unrecognized, Van Gogh brought his trademark ambition, determination, and a rare degree of consideration—and reconsideration—to giving signature form to the storied cypresses in works as striking for their originality as for their continuity of vision,” the curator explained.

“In quick, confident succession, he fixed his sites on picturing the cypresses under star-strewn night skies and above windswept fields of golden wheat, later returning to his exuberant study from nature for a studio rendition.”

“Van Gogh’s inimitable cypresses have unfailingly captured our attention and awe,” Stein continued. “He didn’t bother to mention the obvious—that he’d of course seen the region’s celebrated evergreens, or [that] he was familiar enough with their age-old associations with death and immortality to invoke his tried and true metaphor for eternity and the eternal cycles of life.”

“He simply pronounced, in ways both telling and prescient, his intention to bring his vision to bear on the cypresses,” she added.