Van Gogh @ Philadelphia Museum of Art

I could plan an entire weekend in the City of Brotherly Love around this exhibit:

VAN GOGH UP CLOSE - PHILADEPHIA MUSEUM OF ART

Focusing on his post-Holland, and final, years in France, it aims to "engage the viewer with the strength of his emotions."

And they were STRONG.

John Peter Russell - Vincent van Gogh (1886)

I recall taking an art history class as an elective in college and the professor (who bore more than a passing resemblance to Bebe Neuwirth, that brilliant actress who played Frasier's brainy, raven-haired wife, Lillith Sternin, on "Cheers") insisting on calling Van Gogh simply "Vincent" because of the highly personal nature of his work.

"Really I have to call him Vincent in presenting these slides to you because that is what he was painting - what Vincent saw, what Vincent felt, what Vincent perceived," she said, her voice quivering with unexpected emotion, leading some of us to believe she would suddenly rip off her glasses and undo her bun, her hair tumbling in inky, wild waves about her face and shoulders like Edvard Munch's erotically defiant yet remote "Madonna" or that brazen librarian-like Asian vixen lady in the video for Thomas Dolby's smash 1982 hit single "She Blinded Me With Science."

Seeing a real live Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) painting right in front of you is like gazing head on at someone you  have just fallen in love with - you simply cannot look away (but at some point you just might have to because it is almost too much to bear...) as Vincent's brushstrokes, colors and compositions sear themselves into your mind, never to be quite forgotten like the complex contours of a long-lost lover you will always pine for even if only in some frozen-out recess of your slowly fading personal memory bank.

Vincent van Gogh - Self-Portrait (1889)

I've seen Van Gogh paintings at, among other places, the National Gallery of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Van Gogh Museum.

When I was an undergraduate student of political science - with a missionary-like view to eventually becoming some kind of do-gooder-nature-savior environmental journalist - up at McGill University in Montreal the walls of most of the apartments I occupied during that four-year period suspended artificially between adolesence and adulthood were plastered in various forms with Van Gogh prints torn out of a calendar and Van Gogh posters purchased at various museums. (Georgia O'Keefe and a few European Expressionists also made an appearance here and there, as well as countless "arty" postcards that seemed "cool" to just tape in various creatively conceived formations along bedroom walls or doors ... )

Van Gogh helped keep me awake at night as I typed up undergrad papers until 4 am in flannel pajamas on my brand-new Macintosch Classic with a spoon lodged bolt upright inside an open jar of Nutella perched upon the slab-like, birch-veneer IKEA desk that took up at least a third of my bedroom.

(This was before we even knew what the Internet was, or had vaguely heard it was some project of the U.S. military, and when email was only some kind of minimalistic intra-university thing used sparingly, for instance, to tell a classmate that you had, indeed, just talked to that silent hot Indian dude in the mysterious Nehru jacket you'd both been pining for all semester in that African politics class ... ah, the unbearable lightness of being young - 'tis all too fleeting one only realizes with adequate hindsight!)

Vincent van Gogh - Irises (1889) (c) All Photos: Wikimedia Commons

These papers involved muted musings heavily supported by secondary literature on the the political situation du jour in various parts of the world - possibly influenced by the strains of REM, U2, Nirvana, Depeche Mode, New Order, the Smiths, the Pixies or Sting playing faintly in the background - and were delivered, sometimes via taxi (no one owned a car), in the nick of time to the Social Science building on campus the next morning (... were you still wearing the Nutella-stained flannel pajama pants under your coat? no matter - so were several other students ... ).

Van Gogh's brushstrokes energized me because they made me feel alive. It's like they set off tiny sparks like pop rockets going off all over my brain, like pulsating electrictiy shifting it back into a higher gear.

I remember seeking out one particular Van Gogh painting ("The Night Cafe") that was depicted in my lavishly illustrated encyclopedic art history book.

It was like a pilgrimage.

Vincent van Gogh - Starry Night Over the Rhone (Arles, 1888)

I knew from my college artbook that it was located at the Yale University Art Gallery, where my older boyfriend at the time was enrolled in an MBA program. Given that he had a car and had actually worked full time (!) before, he tended to drive up to visit me in Montreal more often than I visited him in New Haven.

But finally I was going to go visit him again at Yale. I was eager to see him - and excited to seek out said Van Gogh painting while he engaged in some kind of dreadful-sounding "group exercise" with some of his super-driven Yale classmates (who later worked at places in Manhattan that sounded terribly dull to me, like Goldman Sachs, where a single annual salary + bonus was easily five times more than what I later would make starting out as a local newspaper reporter in Maryland ... but what was money? ... yep, I was an idealistic middle class white kid from Chevy Chase, Maryland).

So while my boyfriend was busy with his truly intense studies at Yale, I meandered over to the university's art gallery by myself. After foraging through some interesting, but not exactly heart-stopping, ancient Central American figurines and other similar objects, I finally entered the room where the Van Gogh was hanging ...

... and I instantly lost all sense of time and place as I was engulfed by its melancholy yet oddly radiant nocturnal gloom, by its garish, almost sickly greens, yellows and reds and by the disconcerting, zombie-like gaze of the man at the pool table.

I sighed. Now this, I thought to myself, is a true work of art that will have the same impact on someone a century from today.

That is the power of Vincent's work.

Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) - The Night Café (Arles, 1888)

(And we have his doting brother Theo to thank for it - Vincent was totally broke when he lived in southern France and Theo, a Paris-based art dealer who alas never managed to sell a single painting by Vincent, sent him some high quality paints from time to time. Thanks Theo!)