Van Gogh's Brown Period

Boston.com (opinion piece) Van Gogh's Brown Period

Vincent Van Gogh's paintings of sunflowers, made in the late 1880s, are widely known for their vibrant yellow color. Van Gogh used a new kind of paint, "chrome yellow," to achieve that now-iconic vibrancy - and curators around the world have watched in mystified dismay as the yellow color has faded to brown over the course of the last century. Now, the Journal of Analytical Chemistry reports that chemists have figured out why: in the presence of sunlight, the chromium in the yellow paint reacts with the white pigment Van Gogh used to lighten it, turning the yellow brown. To stop the reaction, the paintings may have to be treated like medieval tapestries, and stored in cooler, darker galleries.

Van Gogh's sunflower paintings are about the life cycle: they show, gathered in the same vase, both bright yellow sunflowers in the prime of life, and drooping, withered ones in its twilight. That's why some of the sunflowers are brown already - and why the vividness of the yellow is especially important. And the paintings are about memory, too: Van Gogh painted them in France, partly to remind himself of home, and made the first painting to decorate the guest room where his friend Paul Gaugain would come to stay in Arles. So the paintings already testify to the passage of time and to the inevitability of aging, even as they try to capture the beauty that's also inherent in those transformations.

It's definitely sad that the paintings are fading, but you can't deny that it's weirdly appropriate, too: The sun is fading the painted sunflowers, just as it faded the real ones. Japanese artists, of course, have a term for what's happening to Van Gogh's sunflowers - wabi-sabi, or the humble kind of beauty that happens through, and even expresses, the natural flow of time. After all, Van Gogh's sunflowers aren't getting older in an arbitrary or unnatural way - they're not covered with grime or getting chipped and scratched. Instead, they're growing older in a way that intensifies and even embodies what they're all about. In a way, the paintings are becoming more themselves. They might be diminished in one dimension, but they're only getting richer in another.