Vincent Van Gogh and the Search for the Sacred A MONA Moment By Ron Roth Director Museum of Nebraska Art

Few artists' lives are more encrusted in myth and misinformation than that of Vincent Van Gogh. The commercial engine which drives the hyper-inflated prices his works command gains great promotional cachet by the exaggerated legends of his mental illness and lack of art sales during his lifetime. But the defining theme of his life which may most benefit our understanding of this art is not his mental instability, but his life as a devoutly religious, spiritual driven human being, who, according to art historian Deborah Silverman, had an ongoing preoccupation in seeking "a theology of art as a privileged vehicle of divinity."

His life as an artist was preceded by several religious vocations, as a Methodist Lay Teacher in England, a divinity school student in Holland, and an itinerant preacher evangelizing among destitute Belgian miners.

In choosing to devote himself to art, Van Gogh extended the nature of his religious evangelism, to his new calling. It is in the sanctity of the lives of the laborers, the redemptive, sacred qualities of the process of labor to which he concentrated his early work in the countryside of the Brabant region of the Netherlands. Here, in an artistic counterpoint, he actualized the process of labor he saw in the subsistence farming of the potato farmers and the local, hand-loom weavers in his own cycle of work. Thus, he worked slowly, steadily, and methodically as he learned his craft at a pace he way in sympathy with the weavers and the farmers. It was a physical exertion and steadiness of purpose which was the sanctified, and merited grace and, like the Barbizon artists before him, his works from this period show farmers bending, planting cultivating and digging their crops then partaking of the fruits of their labor.

In his early painting, the potato eaters, he suggests the redemptive, sacred quality of the cycle of peasant farming in the formal elements of the painting. He mixes and uses a color he likens to that of a dusty potato-a course, thick crusty treatment of the painting surface suggest the dusty texture of the fields. The faces of the peasant at table are coarse and unattractive, but they are actively engaged in sharing with each other in a communal harmony, the fruits of their labor. There is a palpable sense of calm, of reverence that infuses the darkly lit scene.

The coarse features of their faces are illuminated by a small oil lamp hanging above the table. The image offers comfort and perhaps will suggest to the most empathetic viewer something calm and eternal.

We listen to Van Gogh comment on this scene of the sacred he sought in his images of people. "In a picture I want to say something comforting as music is comforting. I want to paint men and women with that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolize, and which all seek to convey by the actual radiance and vibration of our.