If you have ever admired any of these works-either on the walls of a museum or in reproduction-it's enough to jolt your sense of reality. Once you know the history of the color in these paintings, you'll never look at them the same way again.
The stunning "Irises" (1890), from the Met's permanent collection, which art lovers today know as a symphony of blues and greens on white, was once dominated by purples and greens on pink. Two canvases called "Roses," painted the same week, known today for their abundant, creamy white flowers spilling out of rustic crockery, originally featured coral pink cabbage roses, the signature flowers of Provence. Such has been the work of sunlight and electric light on Geranium Lake, a volatile red pigment that Van Gogh loved and used in many of his late works.
Changing the colors back to the hues Van Gogh first painted in May of 1890 isn't possible, of course. But at the Met you can see a slide show with a digital reconstruction of what they might have looked like. Susan Alyson Stein, a curator of nineteenth-century European paintings, and Charlotte Hale, a conservator at the museum, researched and organized the exhibition, including the slide show that outlines some of the issues Van Gogh's choice of pigments entailed. The reconstructed images of what the paintings probably looked like in 1890 are much warmer and more vibrant than what is left today.
More attuned to the emotional power of color than any painter before or since, Van Gogh spent his short time in the south of France painting a great number of masterpieces and, in the process, revolutionizing painting. He didn't create this revolution entirely on his own, of course. There never would have been a Van Gogh, as we think of him today, without Degas, Signac, Seurat, Monet, Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec-all of whose work he encountered and was changed by during the two years he lived in Paris.
The Impressionists and other avant-garde artists in the French capital were already deep into color theory when Van Gogh arrived from Antwerp to stay with his brother Theo in 1886. They had read and discussed the writings of critic Charles Blanc and chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul and had already integrated many of their ideas into their work. In Paris, Van Gogh rapidly absorbed it all. Although he was already familiar with color theory from his days in Belgium and the Netherlands, in Paris he feasted his eyes on the canvases of the French artists. By the time he left for Arles in February of 1888, a new approach to color had transformed his vision and the way he used paint.
The Impressionists and many of the artists of Paris explored the beauty and sensuality of color, but Van Gogh alone seemed to use it for direct emotional expression. Looking at his late works, you feel the colors must have flowed from the artist's body straight onto the canvas. In "The Night Café" (1888), the blood red walls, green ceiling and citrus yellow gaslights seem to pulsate like a brain on absinthe. His bristling wheat fields and haystacks from this period suggest thatches of human hair.
In his letters to his brother, Van Gogh seemed to take enormous pleasure in simply naming the colors. "The sky is aquamarine, the water is royal blue, the ground is mauve. The town is blue and purple," he wrote, describing his sketch for "Starry Night Over the Rhone." As if drunk on even the idea of the colors, he continued, "The gas is yellow and the reflections are russet gold descending down to green-bronze. On the aquamarine field of the sky, the Great Bear is a sparking green and pink, whose discrete paleness contrasts with the brutal gold of the gas."
Gazing at the finished painting today, we can see he had it all mapped out from the beginning, down to the green and pink, which do seem to sparkle, even now. One senses that, for this artist, even the names of the colors held an almost magical power.
After a year in Arles, during which Van Gogh painted some of his greatest works and fought tragically with his beloved friend Paul Gauguin, he signed himself into an asylum in nearby Saint-Rémy. There, he hoped to recover from his deliriums and establish a disciplined and monastic life that would allow him to keep painting.
In artistic terms, the plan was a success. While in Saint-Rémy, Van Gogh completed close to 150 paintings and an equal number of drawings. These paintings included some of his greatest landscapes, such as "Starry Night" and his brilliant series of the nearby olive groves in many moods and lights, as well as "Portrait of Trabuc," and a couple of wonderful self-portraits.
But Van Gogh's mental stability remained fragile, and in February of 1890 he had a serious relapse. That spring he decided to leave the asylum and move north to Auvers to be closer to Theo and Paris. In May, as he packed his belongings, Van Gogh painted the series of four still lifes with flowers, now on exhibition at the Met. They would be his last series in the South of France.
"I'm working here with calm, unremitting ardor to give a last stroke of the brush," he wrote to Theo on May 11. Van Gogh described "two canvases of large bouquets of violet Irises, one lot against a pink background in which the effect is harmonious and soft through the combination of greens, pinks, violets."
Was Van Gogh hoping these harmonies would work as a sort of charm to keep his mental demons at bay? We can only guess. But, given his deep sensitivity to color, it seems possible. "If I didn't have my work, I'd have sunk far deeper long since," he says in the same letter. Like so many artists before and after, Van Gogh saw his artistic work as his salvation.
The following month the four flower paintings followed Van Gogh north. Packed up by an orderly at the asylum and shipped to Auvers, where the painter would spend the last months of his life, they have not hung together since.
By assembling the four paintings-one from the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam, one from the National Gallery in Washington and two from the Met's permanent collection-and hanging them side-by-side in simple, matching frames in a relatively small room in the Lehman wing, Stein encourages us to look at them quietly and carefully. This, of course, is what Van Gogh intended as he worked in his small cell at the asylum.
It is only by pushing aside the noise and distractions of modern life and letting our eyes commune with the actual paint on canvas that we can fully experience these remarkable expressions of an entirely unique man and see the world-though briefly-through his eyes.
On May 13, as he made the last preparations for his journey, Van Gogh wrote Theo a final letter from Saint-Rémy. "This morning, as I'd been to have my trunk stamped, I saw the countryside again-very fresh after the rain and covered in flowers-how many more things I would have done." Van Gogh's words, like his legacy, are laden in equal measure with an extraordinary love of the world and an overpowering regret.
"Van Gogh: Irises and Roses" runs through August 16, 2015, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 212-535-7710. Metmuseum.org