The Impact of a Visionary Artist

I want to touch people with my art. I want them to say, "He feels deeply, he feels tenderly." -Vincent van Gogh

A friend of a friend tells a story. And it’s one that speaks volumes about the power of art to touch us deeply, unexpectedly, even inexplicably.

The setting is the highly regarded Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pa. Six or seven years ago, Phyllis, the retired teacher whose story it is, went on what she assumed would be a pleasant but routine cultural outing.

That’s pretty much what it was, she wrote in her journal shortly afterwards.

Until she turned a corner and one painting stopped her in her tracks.

She wrote that an unexpected wave of emotion overcame her immediately. She found herself bursting into tears, even before she was near enough to see the roughly 28x36-inch oil painting clearly.

Even now, she can’t say why reacted that way, or where that extreme emotion came from. She’s reluctant to embrace the easy, mystical explanations that might have come to mind when she moved closer to the painting and realized what she was seeing:

Wheat Fields at Auvers Under Clouded Sky was painted in July 1890, making it one of the last works created by Vincent Van Gogh. He committed suicide that same month.

Of course, one way to understand all this is that Phyllis had somehow tuned in directly to Van Gogh’s emotional state when he painted the picture. But there’s another way of thinking about it.

The popular image of Van Gogh is that he was a “mad genius,” and that both his life and his art were consumed by his madness. The reality is he was a disciplined artist with a mastery of color, composition and paint.

Looked at the second way, the emotional intensity of his work was anything but a byproduct of a troubled mind. It was the intended impact of a skilled artist whose vision was matched in every regard by his command of his craft.

In its own way, I think, that explanation of the power of the painting is every bit as “magical” as the first. What do you think?When was the last time you saw or heard a work of creative genius not with your eyes or ears, but in your marrow?

What are we fighting for?

Like pretty much every other arts administrator, I always know the end of the year is going to bring anything but a “holiday” from the year-round demands of hitting budget goals and paying the bills.

That’s true even in a “good” economy, because every good arts organization I know of is always doing more than is possible with less than is needed.

So, December always means a last-minute push to bring in a little more revenue to keep the wolf away from the door just a little longer.

In years like this one, however . . .

Well, most of us have never seen a year like this one!

That’s why I found myself thinking about the Great Depression as I wrote a year-end fundraising appeal.

I don’t mean to say I think that our current economic situation rivals the Depression, as bad as it is. But I do think we can learn some important lessons about the value of the arts from that time. Famously, the federal government created four arts projects, under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration. These projects put artists, writers, musicians and actors to work, but they also did a whole lot more.

For one thing, much of what we now know about the Depression is what we have seen through the eyes of artists like Dorothea Lange, Saul Bellow, Jackson Pollack and hundreds of others who worked under the WPA programs.

But those programs also recognized that the arts are an essential aspect of both our individual lives and our society as a whole. As such, they require our support not only in good times, but especially in bad times—when it’s all too easy to conclude that we can’t afford the arts.

What the WPA demonstrated is we can’t afford to do without the arts.

That’s what I was thinking as I wrote that fundraising letter. If we don’t take care to preserve our art and culture when times are tough, what will we have left when the economy recovers?

I ended the letter with a story about Winston Churchill. The story goes that he was asked at the height of WW II whether he would consider slashing Britain’s arts budget to pay for other programs.

His response? “My God, no! What have we been fighting for?”