The Real Van Gogh

"You know the painter at Ravoux's, the one we call Le Rouquin [The Redhead]? He has shot himself with a pistol in the park behind the chateau." So, recalls 89-year-old Henry Maurage, the news that Vincent Van Gogh was dead swept through the obscure town of Auvers-sur-Oise one Sunday in July 1890. Since then the small town where Van Gogh ended his tortured life and the tiny room where he lived have become historical shrines.

Pilgrims making the journey last week found the presence of Van Gogh evoked by a larger-than-life (10 1/2 ft., 880 Ibs.) bronze statue that is in many ways as strange as the man it commemorates. Staring toward the rolling wheatfield that was the subject of Vincent's last canvas is a figure with peasant hat and deep-set eyes, the severed left ear barely suggested, paintbox and easel slung on his back. The work of Russian-born Sculptor Ossip Zadkine, it stands a few paces from the small walled cemetery where Van Gogh lies buried beside his brother Theo.

Sculptor Zadkine confesses that as his admiration and respect for Van Gogh increased, so did the task of portraying him with fidelity. "You cannot go into abstraction when you do a personage; a person is always a document." Zadkine believes. Zadkine finally narrowed his search for the real Van Gogh down to two self-portraits, one in which Van Gogh resembled his mother, the other his father, and modeled them in clay. "When I had these two portraits I proceeded to create this being. He was an active man. Every morning he would go out, make three paintings, afterwards working on them a little at home. Except for his paintbox and easel, he looked like a peasant of the south of France, in corduroy coat and trousers. But enlarged in the statue, this corduroy looks like the bark of a tree. It looks like the texture he used in his Arles paintings, the great big scratches in his corn and wheatfields. Everything about him is so strikingly interesting. I did it with enormous enthusiasm."

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