Just before Christmas 1881, Vincent van Gogh took some of his studies to The Hague to show Anton Mauve, then a well-known painter (and his cousin by marriage). It was his first professional art criticism. As he later wrote to his brother, Theo, “When Mauve saw my studies, he said at once, ‘You are sitting too close to your model.’”

No reference to this episode is made in the catalogue or labels for Van Gogh Up Close, but it seems to me quite revealing and pertinent to the theme of the exhibition. Less than a year into his artistic career, van Gogh had already demonstrated to the trained eye a marked idiosyncrasy that persisted throughout his life. Whether figure, landscape, or still life, he was always too close to his model. He was always intensely absorbed in what was before him; for the viewer it is always Van Gogh Up Close.

This statement is true even of those works in which he creates a powerful effect of recession—and van Gogh was a master constructor of linear perspective. But whether the lines denote buildings or hedgerows, streets or fields, the viewer’s eye is invariably returned to the surface. How is this done? Partly through the avoidance of atmospheric perspective: objects allegedly in the middle and far distance are rendered with as much firmness and physical integrity as objects in the foreground. More significant is van Gogh’s consistent touch: flowers in the foreground; a house or row of trees in the middle distance; and especially the void of the sky and its clouds are rendered with the artist’s characteristic rough, thick, pasty brushstrokes. The surface in its uniform rawness requires attention—just as the recession pulls one into the depth of the picture. It is van Gogh’s achievement that he can create an equilibrium between these conflicting forces.

He does not always succeed. Along with such tautly constructed masterpieces, on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, such as View of Arles with Irises in the Foreground (1888) and Wheat Fields after the Rain (The Plain of Auvers) (1890), there were paintings in which the objects of the landscape seem to slip and slide across a liquid surface, e.g., Trees on a Slope (1887) and Wheat Field with Auvers in the Background (1890). These images seemed tenuous, wispy, more ephemeral, more subject to wind and rain. Less saturated hues, tending toward the pastel, enhanced their insubstantiality.

These paintings constitute a lesser-known aspect of van Gogh’s art. He himself seemed to consider them of less significance since he rarely discussed them in his letters. Viewed in the Philadelphia exhibition, they evoked a sense of discovery. Much credit should go to Cornelia Homburg and her team of curators for unearthing and bringing to public attention many of van Gogh’s less familiar paintings.

With the exception of a few still lifes and two landscapes (cat. nos. 149 and 150) the exhibition was limited to landscapes painted in the last two-and-a-half years of van Gogh’s life after he left Paris for Arles in February 1888. Most of the still-life paintings were done before that, in Paris, in 1886–87. Their inclusion raised some questions.

In Philadelphia, the visitor was first confronted by the home institution’s Sunflowers (1888 or 1889). This was visually impressive, but what role the painting played in the overall scheme was not made clear; it is neither mentioned nor illustrated in the catalogue. Yet of all the paintings on display, it was undoubtedly the one most recognizable to visitors—and scholars. Nearby, on a side wall, were two other, quite different, sunflower paintings, done in Paris in 1887. They were smaller, and each depicted two decapitated disks lying on their sides, filling up the compressed space. Were they the “up close” versions to be contrasted with the more formal arrangement just a few feet away?

There followed a small gallery with four conventional still lifes—flowers in a bowl or vase—that van Gogh painted in Paris in 1886–87. Then one entered the larger galleries of the exhibition proper. Here, paintings were organized thematically by whichever aspect of nature the curators thought they emphasized. The theme of each gallery was inscribed on one of its walls above the paintings.

The first, “Blades of Grass,” contained images in which van Gogh had zoomed in on a patch of grass or turf or a bunch of flowers. The patch filled up the canvas; there was no horizon, no release from the closely focused corner of nature. One was invited, if not compelled, to move near to these small paintings and study them intently. It was in these close-ups that the exhibition most fully realized the promise of its title.

Then came two galleries designated “High Horizons,” which included fifteen landscapes, most of them unfamiliar. In contrast to the previous gallery, these larger paintings, all horizontally oriented, depicted a broad, sweeping view of nature, macrocosmic to complement the just-seen microcosmic. Their horizons ranged from barely noticeable slivers of sky (cat. nos. 106, 169) to about one-third of the canvas (cat. nos. 191, 166). The curators seemed to believe that the high horizons flattened the paintings and brought the landscape “up close.” But I did not read the images that way. Most of them, especially the late works from Auvers, seemed immensely expansive. It was easy to imagine taking a long walk in the fields and plains they depicted even though the brushstrokes made one simultaneously aware of the plane of the canvas. Where the “blades of grass” paintings did not show or refer to a human presence, these landscapes were full of such indications: houses, cultivated fields, wheat tied in sheaves. It was a domesticated nature that they portrayed.

Nature in its wilder state reappeared in the next gallery, “Tree Trunks and Undergrowth.” Here van Gogh turned to a genre, sous-bois, initiated by the Barbizon painters. On one wall were three similar images: a pocket of a dense woods where thick vegetation gathered around the trunks of trees that were cut off by the top of the canvas (cat. nos. 50, 70, 58). All three paintings were predominantly green and covered with many daubs of pigment. They were small works, the largest 49 by 64 centimeters, but through their unity of color, surface, and subject they held the wall and provided one of the more satisfying visual experiences of the exhibition.

Opposite them was chaos. Undergrowth with Two Figures (1890), twice as wide as it is high, was flanked by two vertically oriented paintings whose presence was problematic. One, Edge of a Wheat Field with Poppies, was done outside Paris in the summer of 1887. The other, Park of the Asylum at San Rémy (1889), was also a scene of nature altered by humans. Neither qualified as a sous-bois. Moreover, van Gogh’s touch was different in all three paintings. Undergrowth with Two Figures shared the spots of impasto of the three works opposite. The wheat field painting contained irregularly shaped strokes, most of them moving diagonally from upper left to lower right. The Park of the Asylum was composed primarily of hatchings, an area of green horizontal strokes placed next to an area of yellow vertical strokes, for example. This painting was further set apart from its neighbors, jarringly, by its wide and smooth black frame.

Finally, one arrived at the “Radical Still-Life” gallery. Here, in my view, the exhibition’s scheme of categorization, already strained in the previous gallery, more fully broke down. Three fruit pieces, all from the Paris period, were on one wall. They utilized a conventional centralized composition and a horizontal format. Objects were gathered together on a surface that looked to be a tablecloth. Two of them (nos. 139, 142) were brightly colored—indeed their forms were primarily modeled by color. The third (no. 3) created its forms through modeling in light and dark. But that difference did not seem to be the distinction by which the curators were defining “radical.”

Nor did it seem to derive from a contrast with the four paintings on the opposite wall (nos. 19, 156, 158, 160). Were these paintings even still lifes? They all depicted flora still in the ground and growing: Arum lilies, wheat stalks, poppies, a flowering acacia—hardly nature morte. The sense of growth was enhanced by the verticality of the four canvases. In them, blossoms and leaves, stems and stalks twisted and intersected, creating a lively pattern suggestive of life and movement. With their forms filling up the canvas and extending beyond the frame, these paintings had more in common with the “blades of grass” paintings than they did with still life, “radical” or otherwise.

By concentrating almost exclusively on paintings from the artist’s last years, Van Gogh Up Close showed what he had become. Becoming van Gogh, the exhibition in Denver, showed how he got there. Whereas the Philadelphia exhibition presented the artist as fully formed, the van Gogh of Denver was an experimentalist. The title and its use of the gerund form—so popular in current scholarly discourse: “inventing,” “fashioning,” “constructing”—implies change, development, process. So instead of a static arrangement by theme, Becoming van Gogh offered a dynamic chronology from one of his very earliest drawings, Barn with Moss-Grown Roof (1881), to one of his very latest paintings, Wheatfield with Cornflowers (1890). There were many depictions of the human figure, including portraits, absent in Philadelphia. Drawings, the main vehicle of his experimentation, were of course numerous, and pains were taken to let the viewer know what media were employed and (in the catalogue’s timeline) when they were first used. So intent were the curators at making the viewer aware of van Gogh’s working methods that they even exhibited a wooden perspective frame just like the one he described and illustrated in his letters.

There were also works by other artists who had influenced van Gogh: Jean-François Millet, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Georges Seurat, et al. They presented a problem illustrated by the following overheard conversation: “Watch out,” one visitor warned her friend, “Not all of these are by van Gogh.” Of course if one wants to demonstrate that van Gogh flirted with Neo-Impressionism, it would be crucial to hang paintings by Seurat and Paul Signac near his versions of their style. The organizers of the Denver exhibition, with their agenda of elucidating van Gogh’s “becoming,” could not avail themselves of the solution employed in Philadelphia to deal with collateral material. At the latter, long alcoves built into two facing walls of the largest gallery (the second “High Horizons” one) held Japanese prints that van Gogh admired as well as contemporary photographs of landscape images similar to his. In their subsidiary spaces, these images fulfilled a didactic role without the occasional visual confusion of the Denver installation.

Conversely, by choosing chronology as the determining principle, Timothy Standring and his Denver colleagues avoided the problem of trying to squeeze real objects—van Gogh’s paintings—into a didactic framework in which they did not always fit. Once one grasped why paintings by Sir Hubert von Herkomer (his illustrations of Victorian social conditions inspired van Gogh) and Toulouse-Lautrec (van Gogh followed his method of applying thin paint in longitudinal strokes for a time in 1886) were included, the installation unfolded through a series of spaces with a certain degree of pomp and majesty. Its climax was the great landscapes of 1887–90, the focus of Van Gogh Up Close. Indeed, four of the landscapes in Denver had already been shown in Philadelphia (Wheatfield with Sheaves (1888), Grass and Butterflies (1887), Edge of a Wheat Field with Poppies, and Undergrowth with Two Figures). Plucked out of the thematic categories to which they had been consigned in Philadelphia, they now stood witness to a mature artist at the height of his powers. He had become van Gogh, ready for his close-up.