The Organ at the Morgan: "Sex Lives of the Painters" by Van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh, letter to Émile Bernard, Arles, ca. June 20, 1988 (Letter 7)
Thaw Collection, Morgan Library & Museum

In the revelatory exhibition now at the Morgan Library & Museum, Painted with Words: Vincent van Gogh's Letters to Émile Bernard, to Jan. 6, the collection of van Gogh's letters to the minor artist but major confidant (a gift from mega-donors Eugene and Clare Thaw) are exhibited for the first time.

And what a catch this cache is!

The introductory wall text explains why these missives from this artist, who was able to limn his artistic sensibility in words with as much skill as he applied paint to canvas, are so endlessly fascinating:

The frank and honest tone of these letters make them exceptional among the extant correspondence by van Gogh. Writing to a fellow artist, van Gogh could express himself more freely about life and detail his struggles more carefuly than he could in letters to his family.

And how!

Here are some excerpts from Letter 14, written from Arles on Aug. 5, 1888, in which he tells us more about certain artists than we may want to know (and perhaps more than even van Gogh himself really knew). Reading these, in the original and in translation, also helped me improve my high school (and college) French:

Why do you say that Degas has trouble getting a hard-on ("de Gas bande mal")? Degas lives like a little lawyer, and he doesn't like women, knowing that if he liked them and fucked them a lot ("les baisait beaucoup") he would become cerebrally ill and hopeless at painting....He watches human animals stronger than himself getting a hard-on and fucking, and he paints them well, precisely because he doesn't make such a great claim about getting a hard-on.

Cézanne is very much a respectably ("bourgeoisement") married man as the old Dutchmen were. If he has a good hard-on in his work, it is because he's not overly dissipated through riotous living.

So THAT was his secret! Who knew? And I had always thought that "baiser" meant "to kiss." Did that woman who reportedly "kissed" the Twombly in Avignon actually do something else?

You will not find any of van Gogh's adults-only ruminations in the exhibition's label for Letter 14, which sticks to comments about Bernard's art and van Gogh's celebrated sitter, Joseph Roulin. But you can pick up the unexpurgated translations of all the letters in booklets at the entrance. I strongly suggest you do.

The exhibition catalogue, which reproduces and translates all the letters, also provides some helpful annotations explaining where van Gogh got his notions about the sex lives of his contemporaries and predecessors: Rubens, after all, had married a woman 37 years his junior and they had five children in seven years. Enough said.

The Morgan's website has a nifty feature showing some of the letters and their translations. But, wouldn't you know it, Letter 14 is not among them.