15 Minutes with Vincent Van Gogh

I had a little time to kill in New York. I spent it looking at one painting

It was raining in New York, and I had half an hour to kill at the Guggenheim Museum.

I could have worked my way up the famous snail shell ramp of the Frank Lloyd Wright building and seen a lot of art. But on the first floor, among selections from the permanent collection, I saw a Van Gogh. Since my high school days I’ve loved and even feared Van Gogh. The urgency. The colors. The asylums. The ear. There’s one self-portrait that I just can’t stand to look at too long.

There was nobody around at 11:30 in the morning. I had the picture to myself. Maybe because I was so aware of the limited time I had available, I decided to spend 15 minutes with just the Van Gogh.

I’d never done this or even thought of doing this before. In museums I’m usually looking to cover ground, not burrow into it. Did I have the visual and cognitive endurance to pull this off?

I purposely didn’t read the placard with the title and description. This was going to be just me and whatever was on the canvas, for a quarter-hour. I started out about 10 feet away, leaning against a railing. My hip hurt.

The picture is about the size of the TV you had in 1994, with a similarly dark frame. It depicts some mountains, with a line of trees in the middle ground. At the lower right, starting in the foreground, a road sweeps around a bend. The peaks in the distance are forest green and cobalt, the sky an unremarkable blue. It’s a simple composition, but it kept my eyes moving back and forth across the mountain peaks, from front to back.

Some school kids shuffled past, partially blocking my view. Then came a young couple. He put his arm around her and they lingered for 30 seconds or so and moved on.

Just to the right of the middle of the painting, it now looked to me like there were two blue eyes of a face shrouded in black. It seemed to be wearing a hat like Napoleon wore. Trying to make sense of it, I looked to the left. I saw a rooster’s head, facing the other direction, its green coxcomb fluttering in the wind.

I knew Van Gogh wasn’t the sort of painter to put a rooster and a human face sharing a head at the top of a mountain. But my brain was attempting to identify shapes I knew, like it was browsing through a catalog of images to find a match. I realize this is not the way one is supposed to view Great Art. I felt juvenile, like a kid who looks up at the clouds and sees a doggie.

Now on the right hand side of the panel a light blue man appeared, unbidden, slightly below the midline. He was old, his hair was trimmed into a monk’s tonsure. It looked like he was reading. Just above him was a dark, hectic space. Did I see another face, a demonic one?

More people clustered around the picture, looked at it, and moved along.

The mountainsides, blue and tan and gray, had a sort of motility. They seemed to be crawling up themselves.

A few people clustered around and a guard came up, and asked them: “What do you see there?” He was pointing at the eyes I had seen. “A cave,” one guy said. “A skull,” a kid said, and his friends laughed.

The guard took a black and white photo of the same mountains out of his pocket. “That’s what Van Gogh saw,” he said. “See those two holes? You can see right through the rock to the sky.” He held the photo so it was right next to the same place in the picture. The kids were briefly rapt. So was I. Indeed, you can see right through the mountain in those two arched, blue voids. It wasn’t a face. It was geology.

The crowd moved on. I stepped closer, as close as I dared. From here I could see how forceful, nearly fierce the brush strokes were. Some were straight slashes. Most were sinuous but strong, tracing the shapes of the rocks and outcrops. Most of the mountains were outlined in black.

And the colors: What at 10 feet away looked like brown and blue and gray exploded into individual strokes of ochre, cobalt, sienna, and aquamarine. The colors were layered, greens on blues and grays and tans and blacks. The dark, hectic place was a vivid royal blue.

That simple sky was active too, harsh stabbing strokes of light blue at the horizon, ominously dark at the top. The strokes looked like shingles on a roof. The sky wasn’t finished; there were unpainted areas near the top, where I could see through to the bare canvas. In the sky, just to the right and above the eyes, there were rounded strokes of a bright green mixed with the blue, as if Van Gogh was briefly using a brush he’d used to paint the trees to color a bit of the sky.

I moved back, maybe six feet away. I noticed the two rows of trees, one of them marching up the slope that seemed to be climbing up itself. For the first time I saw there was a house behind the trees. And in front of the house were tiny, delicate flowers, including the sunflowers Van Gogh painted so often. They were painted with tiny, calm, detailed strokes and daubs, as if they were added the next day, when the madness had passed.

I lingered, my eyes continuing to rove and pause. I felt the beauty and the torment. I felt shaken, and sad.

I’d set the timer on my phone so I knew when to leave the museum. It chimed. It was time for my lunch reservation.

Van Gogh painted Montagnes à Saint-Rémy in July 1889, from the grounds of the asylum he entered after he’d cut off his left ear seven months earlier. In December 1889 he ate paint in an attempt to poison himself. In July 1890, one year after he painted this picture, he shot himself in the abdomen and died.

Eat This Tip

This was a beautiful, memorable experience. Next time you’re at a museum alone, or with someone who will abide your eccentricity, spend 15 minutes with one picture. Set a timer. Stick with it.