Van Gogh’s olive groves tingle on your retina like crackling chewing gum on your tongue ★★★★☆

To Vincent, trees were like people. He often wrote about them with an anthropomorphic view. ‘An old whopper’ of an oak was ‘attacked’, a cypress was a ‘funeral cypress’. Because Van Gogh refrained from such visual characterizations with the olive trees, I’ll just give one: olive trees – at least, Vincent’s olive trees – are cheerleaders. They hold their pompoms in the air encouragingly. It makes the paintings in Van Gogh and the olive groves exuberant, regardless of its sad history. It is a cheerful exhibition, against the rocks.

It is also an exhibition, as you would expect from the Van Gogh Museum by now: well thought-out, well thought-out, solid, good. All relevant works are there, The olive trees MoMA excluded, plus a few bonus paintings, this time in an attractive, undulating setting (an allusion to the rocky landscape of Provence?) accompanied by a soundtrack with the chirping of crickets, although the latter can also help my tinnitus have been. Two publications have been published to accompany the exhibition: one for the layman and one for Vincent studies. In the second book, the paintings are studied as objects at a crime scene. The blue shadows in the paintings appear to have been purple in the past. Good, you’re back.

In terms of story, we continue where the critically acclaimed Van Gogh and Gauguin-exhibition (2002) ended: in June 1889. Vincent is 36. He no longer lives in the Yellow House in Arles, where the brotherhood with Gauguin ran rampant, but in nearby Saint-Rémy, where he was voluntarily admitted in the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole institution. The diagnosis is ‘acute insanity with visual and auditory hallucinations’, which sounds like rudimentary psychiatric jargon for psychoses. In clear moments he is allowed outside, where he works on paintings of the nearby olive grove. He will eventually fabricate fifteen such canvases, a series comparable in visual impact to his series of cornfields and orchards in spring.

One of the attractive things about such variations on a theme is that they show the inconstancy of things. ‘The olive tree is as changeable as our willow or pollard willow in the North’, Vincent wrote to Theo, and indeed: the trees always look different, depending on the time of day or the time of year that Van Gogh saw them. Sometimes they are golden yellow, and the ground around them reddish brown from the setting sun. Another time the ground looks grey, and the tree trunks already dissolve in the twilight. Then again the leaves are metallic green, even though the painter looks at the sun. Once a couple of olive pickers put a ladder under a tree.

Vincent painted all this in the way we know from the Arles era: a streaky, almost hatching handwriting, which sometimes swirls, like a drifting river, and in which the complementary colors are placed directly next to and mixed up (blue on orange, et cetera), so that they collide firmly – that was the legacy of the balls of color wool he had been playing with since Paris. The effect is blistering: the paintings tingle on your retina like crackling chewing gum on your tongue.

In the last painting in the series, made in November 1889 olive pickers, the colors are softer, more harmonious. It is a calm painting, muted and serene like a memory worn out by time. ‘Strange that I [er] completely calm [aan] had worked,” Van Gogh later wrote about this work (and the two variations he made of it), “and that I suddenly became confused again, for no reason at all.” It is hard to imagine a stronger argument for the idea that Vincent made his innovative art despite rather than thanks to his mental illness.