'Immersive Van Gogh,' Part 2

[This is the second and concluding part of my report on Immersive Van Gogh as it was seen here in New York City.  I went down to Pier 36 on the Lower East Side on Friday afternoon, 31 December, and spent about two hours with my usual theater companion, Diana, taking in the “experience.” 

[Readers should catch up with Part 1, posted on 10 January, for the background to the exhibition and others like it and for a brief (which isn’t to say “short”) biography of Vincent van Gogh.  Here, I give you a description of IVG, my evaluation of the experience, and a summary of the published reviews.]

Van Gogh’s popularity and reputation ignited after his death and grew with each passing decade.  Exhibits of his work are today among the biggest draws in any museum.  That’s, of course, why such shows as Immersive Van Gogh are profitable and so well attended. 

(It doesn’t hurt, either, that virtual reality shows in large venues with plenty of open space are also tailor-made for such COVID times as these.  There are even projected circles on the floor of IVG to designate appropriate social-distancing spacing for viewers.)

That’s why I found myself with Diana at Pier 36 on South Street by the East River to experience IVG at noon on Friday, 31 December 2021.  Diana was almost literally chomping at the bit to see something. After I told her my trepidations about returning to the theater, we decided on an art show—less likely, I figured, to close down due to a COVID outbreak among the ranks.

Diana’d been to a couple of exhibits in recent weeks, but I hadn’t seen anything since the 12 March 2020 shutdown, so even when I reported the absence of actual paintings and the negative responses of some of the reviewers I read, not to mention the high ticket price, she still wanted to go.  So, we did!

Diana, who lives up in Morningside Heights, picked me up in the Flatiron District at 11 and we swung over to the FDR for the drive south.  That all went fine until we got all the way downtown when we missed the Clinton Street exit.  It took us a good 20-minutes-to-half-an-hour to find our way back up to Pier 36 driving on the surface streets of Old New York.  (We passed the 1719 Fraunces Tavern on our meander!)

Nonetheless, we still made it to Pier 36 with 15 minutes to spare before the hour on our timed-entry tickets ($54.99, plus tax and service charge).  Parking the car and negotiating the COVID protocols took another eight or nine minutes—all of which happened outside the event building, so we were lucky Friday’s temperature was about 52°.  Inside was the ticket scan and the bag search.

(I don’t know if the range of ticket prices I’ve been citing is just for New York City or if all the IVG entrance fees are the same across the country whether you live in L.A. or Boston, or see the show in Phoenix or Seattle.  I presume the parking fee is set by the venue, not the show producers; it’s higher than commercial garages in the same area, but you’re paying for the convenience of on-site parking and contributing to the overhead for operating the facility.)

After the entrance preliminaries, Diana and I were ushered through an entry gallery that showed slides of some of the details of the artist’s biography—we arrived when it was running through the women who were influential in the his life, many of whom he painted: his mother, Anna Carbentus van Gogh (1819-1907), who encouraged him to draw; Wilhelmina van Gogh, his youngest sister, known as Wil, who helped support him; Clasina Maria “Sien” Hoornik, a prostitute who served as the artist’s model and lover, among them.

There was a small bar in this anteroom and bunches of large, artificial sunflowers the exhibition was handing out as keepsakes.  The bar, which sold wine, beer, and snacks, also reportedly provided absinthe, van Gogh’s preferred tipple and was once believed to cause hallucinations and erratic behavior (up to and including madness.)

One of the ushers offered to bring Diana, who walks with a cane now, a chair—seating was reportedly scarce, which turned out to be true—and then escorted us into the main gallery-cum-projection room.

We passed through one of several small side galleries on the way to the large main room.  Here there were people standing around the space or seated on the floor as the artwork was projected onto the walls.  The room also offered abstract mirrored sculptures with irregular surfaces (Peter Marks in the Washington Post called them “mirrored ‘icebergs’”) that served as seats—though one really leaned or perched on an accommodating flat spot rather than actually sitting. 

If I had to guess, I’d say the sculptures were inspired by van Gogh’s depictions of stars in his nighttime scenes.  I surmised that their primary purpose was to break up the space and to refract and distort the images of the projected artworks to generate another perspective.

Diana and I proceeded through this small outer room into the large main gallery, chose a spot sort of in the center—it was not crowded and our usher placed Diana’s chair next to a vacant one already there.  Many viewers were lounging on the floor in couples or small family groups; there were quite a few small children wandering all around the room.

In the main room, unlike the side galleries, the floor was also a surface for the projections.  (I couldn’t tell how this was accomplished since spectators moving around the space didn’t disrupt the projection except with an ordinary shadow.  It was as if the image was projected from beneath the floor, but the floor wasn’t translucent like some kind of disco floor.)

For a different perspective, there was a tall platform, like a stand-alone bridge, in the middle of the main room.  One could climb up—there were only stairs to access it—and watch the show from about eight or 10 feet up.  For me, the extra height didn’t make much difference in what I was seeing.  The platform was constructed of the same mirrored material as the seating sculptures in the small side room.

The show was about 30 or 40 minutes long, and Diana and I sat through it 2½-3 times before we moved on.  There didn’t seem to be a thematic sequence to the images—though I suppose Massimiliano Siccardi, the designer, could have had something in mind that I just didn’t spot. 

There’s no narration (as there is, apparently, at Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience), but the images are accompanied by an eclectic soundtrack that includes French chanteuse Edit Piaf singing her 1960 pop hit “Non, je ne regrette rien” (No, I regret nothing) and, in IVG’s climax, Modest Mussorgsky’s crescendoing ”Pictures at an Exhibition” (in the 1922 Maurice Ravel orchestration).

The paintings—parts of them, really; I didn’t notice many visuals in which an entire canvas was projected (chiefly the portraits and self-portraits)—flow from one into another without breaks.  (There is a break with the projection’s credits, including the musical pieces used in the soundtrack, at the end.)  Elements of some 40 paintings are used in the video and, as creative director Korins put it, “broken down piece by piece, element by element.”

Practically none of the paintings are shown still; the projections are all animated in one way or another.  Some simply move as if they were alive, some are manipulated like hallucinogenic visions, with objects in the paintings fluctuating like an amoeba.  Some images pass by faster than others and at least one, The Bedroom (1888), was projected in parts, with the individual pieces of furniture floating randomly in a sea of corn yellow until they’re assembled into a reproduction of the painting.

I can’t say that I saw any rationale for the juxtaposition of the music with the pictures—as much as I love those two particular selections.  (I have an audio cassette of the von Karajan/Berlin Philharmonic recording of the Mussorgsky, the same one used in IVG, which I listened to on my car’s tape deck—which gives you an idea how long ago that was.  I was a fan of Piaf as a teen living in Europe and I have several of her albums—vinyl LP’s, which also gives away their provenance.  “Non, je ne regrette rien” is familiar these days from an Allstate TV commercial from last year.)

Several writers noted that van Gogh has been posthumously diagnosed with chromesthesia, or sound-to-color synesthesia, in which sounds generate colors and other visual sensations in the hearer.  Assuming Siccardi heard this condition, perhaps he was using the reverse phenomenon, color-to-sound synesthesia, and sees the projected images as evoking the music.

From my reading, I had the impression that the various rooms—there are three in all—in IVG showed different works of art, constituting different shows.  It turns out that was wrong: all three rooms showed the same videos synched to the same music at the same time. 

Diana surprised me somewhat because she was very enthusiastic about the experience.  She said so several times while we were there and has repeated her delight when we’ve talked in the days since.  What startled me was that, after paying over $60 to get in plus the parking fee, I figured she’d be disappointed that there wasn’t any actual van Gogh art on display.

You see, Diana’s an art-museumgoer, like me; she was a member of both the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.  I wouldn’t have thought that a van Gogh show without real van Goghs would satisfy her.

But Diana’s also a serious amateur painter.  She’s studied at the Art Students League of New York and has even exhibited a few times.  What she told me she truly valued in IVG was the magnification of van Gogh’s paintings so she could clearly see not just his brushwork, which is another of the artist’s trademarks, but, as she explained to me, which colors he applied to the canvas in which order. 

This really fascinated Diana and she said so to me multiple times both at the show and later over the next couple of days.  She specifically stressed her hope that viewers with no innate interest in art would see this—though my sense is that people who aren’t interested in art wouldn’t be paying attention at that level of detail; they’d be looking for entertainment. 

Jim Beckerman of NorthJersey.com insisted, in fact, that IVG “is all-out entertainment, with no apologies.”   In the Washington Post, Peter Marks, who’s the theater reviewer there, labeled “this unabashedly commercial venture, equal parts art installation, self-guided theater and tourist attraction.”

Indeed, there’s very little educational significance in the exhibition, either regarding Van Gogh’s biography or his artistic development.  As Corey Ross, one of the show’s producers, said in an interview (as paraphrased by the Washington Post): “‘Immersive Van Gogh’ is not seeking to compete with a museum.  It’s entertainment, not edification.”  The curatorial support you’d expect from a museum is absent.

While her little discoveries were enough to make Diana happy to have seen IVG, I had a different response to the experience.  Quite the opposite of Diana’s, in fact.

I said earlier that the three Times reviews had all been negative to one degree or another, and I commented that all three writers were art critics—and one of them had had an especially powerful response to van Gogh’s art.  I suspect that most people with some kind of interest in art will find these so-called immersive experiences disappointing at best, while entertainment-seekers will enjoy them for what they are: a video show.

Readers of Rick On Theater will be aware that when it comes to visual art, I’m a true culture-vulture.  My mother and father started taking my little brother and me to art museums in Washington, D.C., when we were small, and that continued through my adulthood.  In the late 1950s and early 1960s, my parents part-owned a small modern art gallery in Washington.  My father involved himself in two museums after he retired, the then-private Museum of African Art and the National Portrait Gallery.

(I’ve posted on some of these experiences.  See “The National Museum of African Art,” posted on 19 January 2015, and “Gres Gallery,” 7, 10, and 13 July 2018.  Additional pertinent remarks are also in “A Passion For Art: My Parents’ Art Collecting,” 21 November 2017.)

As it happens, van Gogh is my all-time favorite artist and Impressionism and Post-Impressionism are my favorite art styles.  That puts me in a similar position to Maya Phillips, New York Times critic at large, who experienced an intense “emotional high” when she viewed the van Gogh collection at Paris’s Musée d’Orsay in 2017.

Phillips described a response at seeing the artist’s paintings in Paris far more “fierce” than any I’ve had, but she reported the immersive show “left me feeling largely indifferent,” an impression with which I can fully identify.

Among my reservations, I cite IVG’s own promos for the show, that the visitor “steps inside” the artwork.  Not exactly.  You’re surrounded by it, in that it’s in front of you, behind you, to the left and right of you, and, in one gallery, beneath you—but you aren’t inside it.  You’re still looking at it from outside, and the images around you are the same as the one before you. 

It's also still 2D, not 3D—not even the pseudo 3D of the stereoscopic View-Master.  In an interview, IVG creative director David Korins, asserted: “Massimiliano Siccardi, the filmmaker who made the film at the centerpiece of the experience, created a whole new interpretation of Van Gogh’s work. . . .  [H]e . . . almost deconstructed it, then cut it together.”

“What you’re seeing at a museum is the art in a finite, framed setting as a two dimensional experience,” Korins concluded.  Well, maybe—but that two-dimensional framed view is what the artist (remember him?) created!  It’s what van Gogh wanted us to experience.  (Van Gogh’s work is all in the public domain, so commercial users can do what they want with it—after paying a licensing fee to the work’s owner, usually a museum.)

If van Gogh had wanted to make three-dimensional art, he’d have been Red Grooms. 

Furthermore, van Gogh’s paintings, like those of many of his contemporaries, isn’t really just two-dimensional.  He was well known for his use of impasto, so his pigment was raised off the canvas to varying degrees.  This gives his oils a texture that reflects some of his passion in creating the art.  This effect is lost on the photos of his works on which the video is based.

In addition, I invoke a principal articulated by Abstract Expressionist Hans Hofmann (1880-1966) in his theory of “plasticity” (see my essay “‘The Sculptural Drama’: Tennessee Williams’s Plastic Theater,” 9 May 2012).  In my interpretation of Hofmann’s notion, I wrote:

Hofmann defines plasticity as the communication of a three-dimensional experience in the two-dimensional medium of a painting.  His contention is that plasticity derives from the tension between the forces and counter-forces—which he calls “push-pull”—created by the separate elements of the painting.  (The juxtaposition of empty space and filled space, for instance, creates this kind of tension.)  The tension creates the sensation in the viewer that the painting breathes, even seems to move.  

Van Gogh perceived his own version of “push-pull” in the juxtaposition of contrasting colors, such as blue and orange.  This creates the kind of tension, van Gogh felt, that filled space and empty space did for Hofmann.  So, in another sense, van Gogh’s paintings were a 3D experience.

Of course, a viewer would actually have to look at the picture to sense this “plasticity,” not just let it pass before her or his eyes at vertiginous speed.

There were many press articles of one perspective or another in the newspapers from all the cities where Immersive Van Gogh was displayed, including reviews.  (It seems that many editors didn’t know what category into which to put IVG.  Many of the reviewers were art critics, but others were so-called cultural reporters and at least one was the theater reviewer.)

Somewhat surprisingly, the coverage in New York City, arguably the art capital of the U.S., was fairly skimpy.  The New York Times sent three reporters to cover the pair of van Gogh immersives that were playing here, but no other New York daily reviewed VGI (though a couple of others did report on some aspect of the shows).  A couple of out-of-town papers sent someone into the city to review the show.

Even though all the immersive shows were essentially the same irrespective of the city in which they were showing, IVG, at least, adjusted each production for the city and event space in which it played.  So even though the basic video in all exhibitions was the Massimiliano Siccardi creation, I’m going to limit my survey to reviews that specifically covered the New York version.

I’ve already mentioned the Washington Post review, so I’ll start there. 

“The intention here is not so much to try to understand Van Gogh or his work,” wrote Peter Marks.  “The immersive aspect is pleasantly theatrical—Van Gogh in the round—but it’s no more substantive than any special effect.”

Marks gave a capsulized description of his experience:

Watching the paintings metamorphose, with familiar colors and images taking shape on the walls and floors, and Handel and Ravel and Edith Piaf’s “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” piped in over the speaker system, I got the appeal.  A certain hallucinogenic quality takes hold, especially if you can block out the spectators all around you with their arms raised, recording the film on their phones. . . .  The impression is not unlike that of an amusement park, or sitting through those scenes in Harry Potter movies, in which human figures in paintings are made to seem alive, changing their facial expressions or walking in and out of their frames.  Like many such effects, the thrills are highly perishable.

In the Pelham Examiner, the digital paper in Pelham, New York, a small town in Westchester County about 10 miles northeast of midtown Manhattan, staff reporter Gillian Ho’s first bit of advice was that “the tickets . . . were pricey” and that “if you’re looking for something inexpensive to do in NYC, this place isn’t for you.” 

Ho found, however, “[t]he whole show . . . really beautiful and exciting to experience.”  Van Gogh’s artworks “were showcased really beautifully.”  She felt, “The show really allowed us to feel the artwork and music.” 

Ho reported that for her, “the showstopper was the music in the exhibit” because it “fit all parts of the experience and was helpful in immersion, which is a pretty tough feat.” 

She admitted that she did “like the exhibit after going, but it was underwhelming considering the amount of praise it got online.  I was expecting much more from the exhibit and hoped it would be better or have something more than just the art show, despite the show being really appealing.” 

“Overall,” Ho concluded, “the experience was really nice, but I think it’s not worth going to considering the price-tag of admission. . . .  [I]n general,” she added, “this isn’t worth visiting.”

One little side note on this Pelham Examiner notice: reviewer Ho is an eighth-grader at an independent prep school in the Bronx.  The Pelham Examiner is a student-run, student-owned independent online daily newspaper serving the town.

In Spotlight News, which provides local news to communities in the Capital District (i.e., Albany area) of New York State, Olivia Poust declared of IVG that “it was one of the best art installations I’ve experienced.” 

“As someone with pre-existing knowledge surrounding the artist,” wrote Poust, “the Pier 36 exhibit was perfect for me, although I wouldn’t have opposed a letter or two.”  She added that “if you are looking for a beautiful visual display and don’t care much for the history, Pier 36 is stunningly crafted.”

Poust admitted that she “took in the room more than the paintings” when she first entered the main gallery.  “I did find that although the set work was beautiful, it could be a bit distracting when trying to focus on the paintings themselves.”  The reviewer felt, “The soundtrack accompanying the paintings fit perfectly.”

The Spotlight News reviewer visited MoMA the previous day where she saw The Starry Night and Portrait of the Postman Joseph Roulin.  She reported:

“Starry Night” was swarmed by visitors trying to get a picture alongside it and no one other than myself stopped to look at Joseph Roulin’s face.  But in the immersive exhibit, people had stars in their eyes—quite literally—and it was like they were seeing these paintings for the first time.  They were being seen how they were painted, as living and breathing representations of a not-so-colorful world.  When the blues and yellows swept across the wall, it was as if my eyes were following a paint brush.  I will always appreciate seeing an original painting, and I’ll get choked up over it as well, but there’s something to be said for walking amongst art, for existing in tandem with something so timeless and infinite.

As her final word on IVG, Poust recommended that “it’s not something to miss.”  She added, “It’s also a great way to get kids to engage with art, and they’ll definitely enjoy it more than a walk through the Met.”

And now, the Times, which, as I noted above, triple-teamed the exhibits.

First, on 8 March last year, Christina Morales, a reporter covering news on food and culture, filed her report.  “The projections move,” she recounted, “the images shift from dark to light, the colors explode.  The scale, the images and the effect of being inside van Gogh’s work have led some visitors to cry.”

Morales continued: “Groups and families often sit in circles on the ground, six feet apart, to drink in his almond blossoms or ‘The Starry Night Over the Rhône’ (1888).”  These video exhibits replace “the often rigid museum etiquette, with its near silence and strictures intended to protect the artwork, with a looser atmosphere filled by music, lounging and chitchat,” she added.

On 11 June, Jason Farago, a Times critic at large, explained, “Babies don’t develop stereoscopic vision for the first few months of their life; they have a hard time perceiving depth and dimensions, and therefore gravitate to swirling shapes and bright colors.”

Then the zinger: “They and others with similar taste”—by which he must mean “infantile”—"will find great pleasure in our culture’s latest virally transmitted spectacles, which distill fin-de-siècle French painting into an amusement as captivating as a nursery mobile.”  (I get the notion he’s not seeing this . . . ummm, experience in a positive light.)

“Vincent van Gogh, his corpse moldering in Auvers-sur-Oise and his paintings out of copyright,” lamented the Timesman, “has these past few years been dragooned into a new sort of immersive exhibition that reproduces his churning paintings of Provence as wall-filling animated projections.”

Dubbing IVG and its sister shows “postimpressionist fairground attractions,” Farago reported that “‘Immersive Van Gogh’ . . . favors lavish, synesthetic visuals.”  It “features irises, sunflowers and almond blossoms, cloned and flipped at mural scale, their short brush strokes whirling like cold fronts on Sam Champion’s [the weekday-morning and -noon weather anchor at WABC-TV, Channel 7 in New York City] five-day AccuWeather forecast.”

“If you are committed to trying one out,” advised Farago, “go to the east side [IVG], which has graphics of meaningfully greater sophistication.”  He suggested that “some might also enjoy a psychedelic supplement, and in fact the east side venue plans to install an absinthe bar later on.”  Be forewarned, he seemed to add: “Sensuous selfie backdrops come well before intellectual engagement here, so you might as well make the most of it.”

Of the two digital exhibits that were in New York, IVG’s animation “is cleaner and sexier, though not more sophisticated than the flat-screen visuals in airport terminals or sports stadiums.”  The review-writer continued: “In both cases, the digital reproductions . . . strongly recall the escapist fantasies of anime, and the childish moral sentiments that go with them.”  Farago asserted that “this van Gogh is less an artist than a craftsman of other worlds.”

Farago’s last remark was another lament—but this one is for those other art shows, the non-digitized experiences.  He commented:

There’s a speechless and irreducible quality to great art, a value that goes beyond communication or advocacy.  And if audiences find that quality more immediately here than they do in our traditional institutions, maybe we should be asking why.

Have our museums and galleries played down too much the emotional impact of the art they show?  In the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s gallery 822, you can stand as long as you like in front of van Gogh’s “Wheat Field with Cypresses,” the agitated clouds rolling like waves, its climbing greenery edged with trembling blacks.  I want everyone to discover, right there in the thick grooves of the oil paint, the wonder and vitality of art that needs no animation.  There has got to be a way to lead people back to that discovery, even if some of us take a selfie afterward.

I have to say here that I get Farago.  Art, even in the depersonalized environment of a museum, makes me respond emotionally.  I’ve never actually cried from looking at a van Gogh—though I’ve come close.  But Joan Miró makes me smile, Red Grooms makes me giggle, and Jackson Pollock, especially his drip paintings, makes me drool (though, if I’m honest, that’s over the fantasy of owning one).

I’m not a Christian, but Salvador Dalí’s The Sacrament of the Last Supper fills me with a sense of spirituality that I don’t get from Leonardo da Vinci’s treatment of the same subject.  If you know me, you know that that’s an almost impossible achievement.

Returning to the task at hand . . . .  The Times critic at large Maya Phillips, who actually did cry over a van Gogh painting, she confessed, said, as I reported earlier, that the digital reproductions “left me feeling largely indifferent; in fact, the strongest reaction I had was an alarming sense of intrusion and a disingenuous connection with the artist and his work.”

“Immersive art installations . . .,” Phillips observed, “trigger my sense of play and activate both the critic and artist in me.”  But she admonished us: “There’s a large difference between art conceived to be immersive, though, and art strong-armed into an immersive medium.”

After having been excited by the homage by the designer David Korins to van Gogh’s Starry Night on the entrance ceiling, she was immediately disappointed by the “main show” “that left me numb.” 

“[W]hat got to me,” she explained, “was the brevity of the paintings in the video sequence—how quickly they appeared and disappeared.  And it was the animations—his mighty cypresses manifesting like apparitions from the mist so that the magic of the work is rendered literally.”

“There’s no room for subtlety or implication here,” she complained.  “The beauty of being swallowed by projections of van Gogh’s multicolored fields was subdued by the sloppiness of the translation.”  The reviewer realized, “The goal was to use the art as a backdrop for a kind of theatrical experience.”

It was precisely this experience that made me uneasy.  How do you make theater out of art that is so explicitly contained and individual to van Gogh’s perspective?  Despite all the color and character in his work, it would be inaccurate to restyle his paintings as scenery on the quasi-stages that these exhibitions create for audiences to explore not as admirers but active participants.

Phillips felt “it was dishonest” to alter the dimensions of the works because “there’s a reason for the size of the original work; what the painter wanted to obscure, what parts of the world we’re allowed to see and what we’re left to imagine.”

“A painting hanging on a museum wall is a declarative statement, the artist saying, ‘Here’s a piece of a world of color, style and form that I’ve given you.’” 

Recalling her experience in Paris in 2017, when seeing the van Goghs made her cry, made Phillips understand that “we can’t pretend to know van Gogh, just like we can’t pretend his work can be projected on walls as though it’s the same experience.  All we have are the paintings in the frames, but those nights, those cypresses, those sunflowers—they’re more than enough on their own.”

I concur.

'Immersive Van Gogh,' Part 1

 

[It’s been a long time since I posted a report on anything live and in person.  Over the New Year’s weekend, my frequent theater companion, Diana, and I went down to the Lower East Side to see one of the two immersive van Gogh art exhibitions that were visiting New York City at the time, and I wrote a report on the experience, a new one for me.

[I felt I had to include at least a summary of the artist’s biography, and because his life was so crowded with incident, I was unable to keep it really brief.  As a result, I’ve split the “Immersive Van Gogh” report into two parts.  Below is the first installment; Part 2 will be posted on Thursday, 13 January.]

Frequent readers of Rick On Theater will have noticed that I’ve posted few performance reports since the pandemic shutdown started.  I managed to write up some online performances and one television presentation of a stage play on PBS, but the only live, in-person productions on which I reported since the theaters shut down were ones I saw before 12 March 2020.

The corollary to this situation is that I hadn’t seen my theater partner, Diana, for all that time, either.  We’d been in touch some by text and e-mail, but we hadn’t met for anything.  Then, in late November this year, Diana wrote and suggested we get together for coffee or something. 

It took us a while to follow up, but Diana had a good excuse to press the issue: she invited me to dinner on my recent birthday last December.  We talked about returning to the theater, but I told Diana that I wasn’t really comfortable going back to the theater yet because so many shows are cancelling performances even at the last moment. 

Some plays are even closing permanently, like the Rockettes, which had just opened its holiday spectacular to great fanfare, only to cancel the rest of the season.  The Met’s Nutcracker has just done the same thing.

That’s making me less and less comfortable with booking a show only to have it cancelled out from under us.  And even if it’s not, though both Diana and I are vaccinated, sitting for two hours in a theater wearing a mask is not part of a theater experience I’d enjoy. 

But I added that if there were some good art shows on, I’d be very happy to go.  Diana had mentioned a van Gogh show on a pier which she thought was closing on 2 January.  I said I’d look it up and see where it was exactly and what the remaining dates had to offer.

The show Diana was talking about turned out to be Immersive Van Gogh, one of several “immersive” van Gogh “experiences” making the rounds around the globe just now; there’s even a competing show on Manhattan’s Lower West Side called Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience.

The surprise was that these aren’t really art shows—there are no actual paintings on view.  It’s all CGI reproductions of van Gogh paintings, manipulated and animated digitally and projected onto the walls and floors of room-like galleries and you “enter” the paintings.  After reading some online articles about these shows, I remembered having seen something about the phenomenon some time back. 

One problem arose immediately: there were three reviews in the New York Times, all by art critics, and their responses ranged from merely dismissive to derisive.  One of the three quipped: “Like Vincent, I too suffer for my art, and so I attended both of them.”  Doesn’t bode well, does it?

Immersive Van Gogh, which opened in New York City on 10 July 2021 and closed on 2 January 2022, was conceived and produced by Lighthouse Immersive, founded in Toronto in 2019 as an “experiential entertainment multiplex,” in its own words.  It has locations in Toronto, Chicago, San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, and Dallas and has produced other immersive shows such as Illusionarium, which is on magic, and Immersive Klimt, a treatment of the art of Austrian Symbolist painter Gustav Klimt (1862-1918).

Lighthouse Immersive finds local partners to coproduce IVG in each city.  In New York, it’s Maestro Immersive Art, a subsidiary of Maestro Artist Management.

The Artistic Director of IVG is Massimiliano Siccardi, an internationally-known digital artist who created the videos, aided by Broadway set designer David Korins (2009 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Set Design Of A Play for Why Torture is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them and the 2019 Drama Desk Hudson Scenic Award For Set Design For A Musical for Beetlejuice; Tony nominations in 2016 for Hamilton, 2017 for War Paint, and 2019 for Beetlejuice). 

The Van Gogh immersive experiences are for-profit, virtual reality exhibits of the artist’s paintings.  Usually presented in large exhibition spaces (like the Pier 36 sports and entertainment facility used for IVG), images or videos of van Gogh’s works are projected onto walls, ceilings, and floors, often accompanied by animations, narrations, music, or fragrances.  Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience (but not IVG) provided virtual-reality headsets.

Depending on the perspective and expectations of the visitor, criticism varies greatly; art devotees, especially if they anticipated seeing actual art, are often disappointed—especially when the cost of the tickets is added in.  Entry prices range from $25 to $75 for adults (adult IVG tickets went from $40 to $110, depending on when you went and what perks you wanted; on-site parking was a flat $42 fee for two hours).

Entertainment-seekers, especially families with children (there were lots of very wee ones at IVG) find the experience fun, even exhilarating, and very diverting.  For them, the video experience was more engaging than staring at an inanimate painting on a museum wall. 

Again, this was especially so of parents with little children, who were more entertained here than in an art museum; some were mesmerized by the moving and changing images—the older kids largely—and others found the big, open room with the odd lighting effects just a great playroom, which wouldn’t have been tolerated, I don’t imagine, in a museum setting.  (I’ll tell you how Diana responded in a bit—it was a surprise to me.)  

Another source of complaint was the similarity of the exhibits’ names.  I saw Immersive Van Gogh; the other New York City show is called Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience.  In other cities around the world, there have been shows entitled Imagine Van Gogh: The Immersive Exhibition, Van Gogh Alive, and Beyond Van Gogh.  There are reports of would-be visitors buying tickets to the wrong show or arriving at the venue of the wrong exhibit.

The immersive art experiences first became known more than a decade ago in Europe.  Van Gogh is by far the grandaddy of the genre, but there have also been virtual shows of work by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), the Spanish abstract painter, sculptor, printmaker and ceramicist; French Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), Russian Abstract painter and art theorist Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944); and Claude Monet (1840-1926), the French Impressionist painter. 

(Many writers have attributed the mass popularity of IVG and, by extension, the other immersive van Gogh experiences, to the Netflix streaming series Emily in Paris.  In episode 5 of the first season, “Faux Amis,” which was released on 2 October 2020, the title character, played by Lily Collins, went to an immersive van Gogh exhibit called Van Gogh, Starry Night and the notion went viral.  I can’t attest to this personally because I bever watched the show.)

Vincent van Gogh (1853-90) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who lived and worked most of his short life in France.  Though he produced about 2,100 works of art, which included around 860 oil paintings, he sold only one in his lifetime—and that was to his art-dealer brother Theo (1857-91).  Of his total output, van Gogh created some 300 paintings and drawings while he was in Arles from 1888 to 1889.  (He produced another 222 from May 1889, when he was hospitalized, to his death in July 1890.)

Despite his lack of success as an artist while he was alive, after death, he became one of the world’s best-known, most-beloved, and biggest-selling (and at some of the highest prices on record) painters ever.  Many of his works, such as 1889’s The Starry Night, many of his self-portraits (1885-89), his sunflowers (mostly 1887-89), and several of his portraits (e.g.: Portrait of Père Tanguy [1887-88], Portrait of the Postman Joseph Roulin [1888], La Berceuse (Augustine Roulin) [1889]), among others, have become iconic, recognizable almost instantly even by people with little interest in art.

The Starry Night, in fact, is one of the few pieces of art that inspired a pop song, Don McLean’s “Vincent” (popularly known as “Starry, Starry Night”), written and released in 1971.  A tribute to the artist inspired by a biography of van Gogh the composer read, it went to number 1 on the U.K. pop charts and number 12 in the U.S.

Van Gogh led a troubled life, beginning in childhood when he was intensely introverted and shy.  In one of his letters, originally published in English in 1958, the artist described his childhood as “austere and cold, and sterile.”

Vincent was the oldest of six children of Theodorus van Gogh (1822-85), a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, but he was close to only his younger brother Theo and his youngest sister Wilhelmina (1862-1941), known as Wil.  

The name Vincent was a common in the van Gogh family, but the last possessor of the name was an older child who’d died at birth about a year before the future painter was born.  Vincent’s parents let him know that he was a replacement for the dead son.

Vincent was obsessively religious as a youngster and after failing to find success as an art dealer, he endeavored to become a pastor.  He failed in three attempts and his religious zeal became excessive.  His father thought he should be committed to an asylum.

During a stint in London as an art dealer when he was 20, he fell in love with his landlady’s daughter, but she rejected him.  Later, when he was 28, he fell in love again, with a niece of his mother, Cornelia “Kee” Vos-Stricker (1846-1918).  He declared his love for her and proposed marriage, but Kee rejected him vehemently.

Later that year, van Gogh wrote a strongly-worded letter to Kee’s father.  Van Gogh quickly went to Amsterdam, where the Vos-Strickers lived, but Kee wouldn’t see him.  The young man stuck his hand in the flame of a lamp and demanded that the parents let him see Kee for as long as he could keep it there.  Vos-Stricker apparently blew out the lamp and was adamant that the rejection would stand and that van Gogh and his daughter would never marry.

He’d always had an interest in art, and his mother had encouraged him to draw.  His early drawings were expressive and full of feeling, but nowhere near the force and color of his later work.  In 1880, van Gogh had returned to live in a Belgian coal village where he’d done some missionary work earlier and lodged with a miner.  He found himself interested in people and the daily scenes of his neighbors going about their lives.

At Theo’s suggestion that Vincent follow his artistic instincts seriously, he went to Brussels to study at the royal Belgian art academy.  The nascent artist came home for a visit in 1881 and he continued to draw, using his neighbors as subjects. 

In 1881, van Gogh went to The Haque to meet his second cousin, Anton Mauve (1838-88), a successful artist.  Mauve asked van Gogh to come back in a few months; in the meantime, he recommended that his cousin try working in charcoal and pastels.  When the would-be artist returned home, he took his cousin’s advice.

Van Gogh went back to The Hague and Mauve took him as a student.  He introduced his cousin to watercolor and a few months later, taught him to paint in oils and lent him money to start a studio.  But van Gogh and his cousin fell out and by 1882, Mauve stopped answering his cousin’s letters.

Van Gogh, however, found he liked working in oils and began to practice the impasto technique, applying the paint thickly onto the canvas, that would become one of his trademarks.  He had little money, and Theo and their sister Wil, supported him, giving him money to buy paints and supplies.

Impecunious as he was, van Gogh could only afford to use street people as his models, and one of these was a prostitute named Sien Hoornik (1850–1904) with whom he also had an affair.  In June 1882, he contracted gonorrhea and was hospitalized.  When he had met the woman, she was pregnant and in July, she gave birth to a son.

Van Gogh’s father learned of the relationship and pressed his son to leave Sien.  He first resisted his father’s urgings, but in early 1883, he left the woman, who ultimately drowned herself in 1904 at the age of 54.  Sien is the subject of a series of drawings and paintings van Gogh made between 1881 and 1883.

When loneliness impelled him to move back in with his parents in December 1883, van Gogh concentrated again on his art work, completing several canvases and sketches of local peasants and artisans at their work and in their homes. 

His companion on his painting and drawing forays in the summer was the daughter of a neighbor who was 10 years older than he.  She fell in love with the tyro painter, and he felt the same, but neither family supported a marriage.  The woman took strychnine, but survived because van Gogh rushed her to a nearby hospital. 

In March 1885, Minister Theodorus van Gogh, the young painter’s father, suffered a heart attack and died.

In the two years he stayed with his parents, van Gogh completed nearly 200 painting.  His palette was dark and somber, quite the opposite of the colors he used after he arrived in southern France.  Theo in Paris asked if his brother had any paintings ready to be shown, and in May 1885, van Gogh sent him The Potato Eaters and several of the character sketches of the local peasantry on which he’d been working.

When the works didn’t sell, Theo explained that his paintings were too dark and not in the fashion of the brightly colored Impressionism that was then in style.  In August, one of van Gogh’s works was exhibited to the public for the first time, displayed in the window of an art dealership in The Hague.

In September 1885, a young peasant girl who’d sat for the artist became pregnant and van Gogh was accused of having forced himself on her.  The local pastor prohibited the villagers from modeling for him.

In November, the young painter moved to Antwerp where he lived the life of a penniless artist, eating little and smoking and drinking excessively.  He spent most of the money Theo sent him on art supplies, and by early 1886, he was in poor health, but he was conscientiously studying color theory and expanding his palette to include some of the bright blues, reds, and greens that would become his signatures in later work.

(It may surprise no one that van Gogh’s habitual drink was absinthe, popular especially among 19th-century artists and bohemians.  This highly alcoholic [90-148 proof], liquorish-flavored drink was believed to cause hallucinations and altered perception; it was banned in most countries by the early 1900s.

(The psychoactive effects were found to be a myth and the liquor was revived worldwide in the 1990s.  The dangers attributed to absinthe were found mostly to be caused by its high alcohol content and the facts that many absinthe drinkers were alcoholics or users of other drugs and psychoactive substances. 

(Van Gogh, for instance was not only a heavy drinker, but also smoked heavily and drank coffee immoderately while at the same time eating little and infrequently.)

At the same time, van Gogh discovered Japanese woodblock prints and became intrigued with them.  He began applying some of their style in his paintings. 

He was drinking more heavily now and was hospitalized in February and March 1886.  He was possibly also treated for syphilis at this time.

Van Gogh had never cared for academic art training, but in January 1886, he’d entered the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp.  He quickly came into conflict with a series of the teachers under whom he was studying resulting from his quick temper, his intolerance for regimentation, and his idiosyncratic painting style.  He abruptly left the academy in February and went to Paris in March to live with his brother, Theo.

Van Gogh’s sister-in-law Johanna (1862-1925), the wife of his brother Theo, reported: “[T]he greatest objection against him was, ‘He is not submissive’ . . . .”  Van Gogh himself put his rationale this way:

. . . I don’t care a damn whether my language is in conformity with that of the grammarians.

. . . .

Suppose a man has something to say, and that he speaks a language which his audience knows instinctively—then every now and then there will be the phenomenon that the speaker of truth has little oratorical elegance, and that what he says is not to the liking of the majority of his audience—nay, that he will be called a man ‘of slow speech and of a slow tongue,’ and be despised as such.

He may consider himself fortunate if there is one, or at the most a very few, who are edified by his words, because what these listeners were looking for was—not oratorical tirades—but most decidedly the true, the useful, the necessary content of his words, which enlightened them and broadened their minds, made them freer and more intelligent.

And now as regards painters—is it the purpose, the non plus ultra, of art to produce those peculiar spots of color—that capriciousness of drawing—that are called the distinction of technique?  Most certainly not.  Take a [Camille] Corot [1796-1875], a [Charles-François] Daubigny [1817-78], a [Jules] Dupré [1812-89], a [Jean-François] Millet [1814-75] or an [Jozef] Israëls [1824-1911]—fellows who are undoubtedly the great leaders—well, their work is outside the paint; it is as different from that of the elegant fellows as an oratorical tirade . . . is different from a prayer—or a good poem.

He found himself in the midst of one of the most exciting periods in art history, the emergence of Impressionism and several “radical” techniques allied with the movement, like Pointillism.  Though Theo’s dealership carried Impressionist art, Vincent was slow to take up the style.

Nonetheless, van Gogh frequented the places where the great modernists gathered, painted, and displayed their work; he painted with them in the same ateliers.  Now-famous artists like Australian John Peter Russell (1858-1930) and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901), a French count, painted the redheaded Dutchman’s portrait.  Under the influence of the Paris art scene, van Gogh further broadened—and brightened—his color palette.

By the end of 1886, Theo van Gogh found living with his brother intolerable and their relationship became contentious.  (We’ve seen this happen with Vincent’s cousin Anton Mauve and it will occur again in Arles with fellow artist Paul Gauguin.)  “It is a pity that he is his own enemy,” Theo van Gogh wrote, “for he makes life hard not only for others but also for himself.”

Vincent left his brother’s home and moved out to a Paris suburb, even though the two had reconciled.  By November 1887, van Gogh adopted more of the techniques of Impressionism.  He exhibited with Toulouse-Lautrec and Émile Bernard (1868-1941), a French Post-Impressionist.  He and Theo also became friendly with Gauguin (1848-1903), newly returned to Paris from Copenhagen.

During his two years in Paris, van Gogh painted some 200 canvases, but his poor health and diet, his drinking and smoking, and his habit of working constantly left him exhausted.  In February 1888, van Gogh made his famous trip to Arles in the southern French region of Provence. 

It would be the artist’s most creative and productive period.  In the 15 months he lived in Arles, van Gogh created 200 paintings and over 100 drawings and watercolors.  Of these, many were his most famous and recognizable works.  But Arles would also prove to be van Gogh’s most devastating experience as well.

He took rooms in the now-famous Yellow House (demolished during World War II) which he also used as a studio.  Van Gogh sent many works back to Paris to exhibit (and hopefully sell) and to exchange with other artists such as Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Bernard, Charles Laval (1862-94), and others.  He painted anything and everything he saw around him—street scenes, landscapes, seascapes and boats, flowers, trees, fields, people working, people in the cafés, his bedroom, still lifes, portraits, self-portraits, night scenes—all in the bright, vibrant colors of sun-bathed Provence. 

Van Gogh had always been fascinated with depicting light—not the effects of light, like Rembrandt (1606-69), the Dutch baroque master, and American Realist Edward Hopper (1882-1967), but the light itself.  One of the aspects of Arles and Provence that had attracted him was the bright sun, which contrasted so drastically with the dark and somber tones of his native Holland. 

He painted scenes that drew the viewer’s attention to glowing candles and lamps (especially in otherwise darkened rooms), twinkling stars in a night sky, lighted windows in a nighttime street scene, lamp-lit interiors of restaurants and cafés, and the sun-drenched Provençal landscape.  He was especially challenged to paint the sun itself.

In an 1892 entry in her diary, Theo’s widow, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, wrote that esteemed Dutch painter Jozef Israëls remarked of her late brother-in-law’s works on exhibit in The Hague:  “Some of them he thought very fine, but he said there were impassible bounds between things that can be painted and things that cannot, and Vincent had often wanted to paint things that were impossible, for instance the sun.”

At his brother urging, van Gogh, after many invitations, succeeded in prompting Gauguin to join him in Arles in October 1888.  To prepare for the stay of the artist he thought of as his mentor, van Gogh fixed up the room in the Yellow House with a newly-acquired second bed and painted a series of sunflower canvases to decorate the house.

For van Gogh, the anticipated arrival was, however, more than just a visit from a fellow artist, even one he admired greatly.

Since his earliest drawings, one of van Gogh’s most repeated themes was working people at their labor or in their homes—“le paysan chez soi, peasants in their surroundings [literally, the peasant at home].”  One reason, I suspect, is that he saw artists as laborers, too.

Van Gogh proposed a community of artists who would support one another and take control of their art, in terms of both content and sales, away from the dealers and the managers, like a workers’ cooperative.  He spoke of a “collaboration” among artists so that they would support each other both emotionally and financially and also share their professional knowledge and discoveries.  In van Gogh’s mind, the older and more established Gauguin was destined to be the leader of the artists’ commune.

It didn’t work out that way.

First, Theo van Gogh was Gauguin’s art dealer, and while he had urged his brother to invite Gauguin to Arles, to Gauguin, Theo had promised a 150-franc monthly stipend if he went.  For Gauguin, the visit to van Gogh was just a way to acquire a stake to get him back to the French colonial island of Martinique in the Caribbean where he’d spent six inspiring months in 1887.

Second, Gauguin took an instant dislike to Arles—and he let van Gogh know his feelings and his plan to go back to the Caribbean.  This destroyed van Gogh’s vision of establishing an artists’ collective in Arles with Gauguin at its head.

Third, the two men’s personalities were diametrically opposed.  Gauguin was slow and methodical in his work, he was neat and orderly in both his habits and the maintenance of his painting materials.  Van Gogh was sloppy, disorganized, and crazed in his painting, slapping paint almost haphazardly any way his eye and his feelings prompted him.  His paint box was a mess.

Van Gogh’s behavior became increasingly erratic and Gauguin began to fear for his own safety.  In late December, he told van Gogh that he was returning to Paris and van Gogh snapped.  He chased Gauguin through the streets of Arles waving a straight razor as the Frenchman raced to a hotel to take refuge from his housemate. 

Gauguin was afraid to leave the hotel that night, for fear that van Gogh was outside waiting for him.  He couldn’t have known that the Dutchman had gone back to the Yellow House where he cut off part of his left ear, wrapped it in paper, brought it to a local brothel, and presented it to one of the prostitutes.

Though Gauguin and van Gogh continued to correspond until the latter’s suicide, the two artists never saw each other again.

The day after he severed his ear, Christmas Eve, the police came to the Yellow House, alerted by the maison de tolérance (a French euphemism for a licensed brothel), and found the artist unconscious from loss of blood.  They rushed him to the hospital where he was treated by Dr. Félix Rey (1867-1932), a young trainee doctor whose portrait van Gogh painted in January 1889. 

Theo van Gogh was contacted that night and raced to Arles immediately, arriving on Christmas Day.  The day before, Theo had proposed marriage to Johanna Bonger, who would have an outsized responsibility for the posthumous fame of her brother-in-law.

Theo van Gogh comforted his brother, who was fairly lucid, and then returned to Paris.  The painter recovered despite a pessimistic prognosis, and returned to the Yellow House in early January 1889.  He began to suffer from hallucinations and paranoia—he may have had auditory hallucinations the night he cut off his ear—and returned frequently to the hospital.  It was at this time, apparently, that he acquired the pejorative nickname of “le fou roux,” the crazy redhead.

In May, he checked himself into the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, 17 miles northeast of Arles.  He was hospitalized from May 1889 to May 1890, during which time he continued to paint.  He created about 150 works including scenes in and around the asylum from the garden to the corridor outside his room, portraits of people at Saint-Paul, irises, still lifes, and the iconic Starry Night.

In early 1890, van Gogh began to experience epilepsy-like seizures.  The attacks got worse and he didn’t feel that staying at Saint-Paul was doing him any good.  In May 1890, he made arrangements to move to Auvers-sur-Oise, 20 miles northwest of Paris (and 485 miles north of Arles), near Theo and his bride, Johanna. 

(Theo and Johanna van Gogh married on 17 April 1889, around a month before Vincent committed himself to the asylum in Saint-Rémy.  They had a son on 31 January 1890 and named him Vincent Willem [d. 1978] after his uncle.  Theo and his family visited his brother in Auvers on 8 June, a little more than a month before Vincent died. Vincent Willem van Gogh founded Amsterdam’s Vincent van Gogh Museum, which opened on 3 June 1973.)

In Auvers-sur-Oise, van Gogh was under the care of homeopath Paul Gachet (1828-1909), who was an amateur painter himself.  The Dutch artist lived in Auvers for just two months, but he completed some 80 paintings in that time. 

Among his subjects were some wheat fields near the auberge (inn) in which he lived.  He said they expressed his sense of being sad and lonely.  Wheatfield with Crows was painted in July 1890; van Gogh shot himself in the chest on 27 July and died of the wound early in the morning of 29 July.  He was 37.

Theo van Gogh, who’d been ill, died on 25 January 1891, just shy of six months after his brother; he was 33.  He was buried in Utrecht, Holland, and Vincent had been buried in Auvers-sur-Oise, but in 1914, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, Theo’s widow, had her late husband’s remains reburied next to his brother.  Both graves are covered with a bed of ivy from an original cutting from Dr. Gachet’s garden.

[Part 2 of “Immersive Van Gogh” will cover the exhibition, including a description, my evaluation, and a survey of published reviews.  Please come back to Rick On Theater on Thursday for the conclusion of the report.]

Travel Journal: People's Republic of China, 1980 – Part 5

 

[This is the conclusion of the transcription of my travel journal of my trip to the People’s Republic of China in December 1980 and January 1981.  Aside from concluding my visit to Peking (now called Beijing) and the group’s return to Canton (Guangzhou) and Hong Kong, at the end I wrote out some impressions and observations of both the country and the tour. 

[Things are completely different in 2021-22 than they were in 1980-81, perhaps especially with respect to China and its relationship with the United States.  I’ve bever been very good at prognostication, so my opinions 41 years ago are probably miles off the beam.  Readers can judge that for themselves, however. 

[I thank all the ROTters who’ve read along with this posting.  I hope my account had been at least somewhat as interesting to you as the living experience of the journey was for me.  If it was and you haven’t already done so, I suggest you also read my “Travel Journal: Israel & Egypt, 1982,” posted in 12 parts from 11 July to 20 August 2021. 

[I’ll shortly be transcribing the third and last of my long-ago travel journals, covering a high school trip to Poland and the Soviet Union in 1965; I will publish that as soon as I can, hopefully later this year.  (By the way, that’s no typo: 1965 is correct.  If you do the math, you’ll see that that was 57 years ago.  I was all of 18 years old when I went on that journey.  Talk about things having changed!)]

Peking [Beijing] – Thursday, 1 January 1981 (New Year’s Day)

We started out very early (5:45 a.m.) to get ready to ride the train to the Great Wall (2 hours).  I put on seven layers of clothing, including my fur “vest” from Nanking [see entry for 29 December 1980, Part 4], and brought along two more. 

[I still have that vest, but it’s stashed in a storage trunk that lives in the basement of my building.  It came in handy in February-April 1981, though, when I did an Off-Off-Broadway production of Macbeth.  It was designed for a rough, primitive look (Macbeth was king of Scotland in the 11th century), so I wore the vest cinched with a wide leather belt with a free-form brass sun-burst buckle that looked “primeval” and “druidic.”]

The train ride was very pleasant; not only was the scenery increasingly rugged and beautiful as we approached the mountains on which the Wall was built [Jundu Mountains], but Elise Miller’s birthday had been yesterday and we had a big cake on the train. 

[Obviously Miller, one of my traveling companions, didn’t run into the same roadblock I did with respect to getting a cake (see entry of 25 December, Part 3).  Maybe the explanation was simply that Beijing isn’t Suzhou.

[On the train ride north, I remember feeling that this scenery was what I saw in so many of the old Chinese scroll paintings—gnarled trees rising up from steep mountain cliffs, sometimes shrouded in fog.  We were riding through a living scroll painting!]

As we neared the Badaling stop (the fortress protecting a pass along the Wall), we caught glimpses of the Wall topping the mountain ridges.  Quite a spectacular sight, even from the moving train.

[Badaling railway station, opened in 1979, is a stop on the Jingbao Railway in Beijing; it’s about 50 miles northwest of the center of the city.  (It should not be confused with the high-speed rail line’s Badaling Great Wall railway station which opened in December 2019.)  Badaling is about 3,300 feet above sea level and is the most visited section of the Great Wall.]

From the train, there is a brief bus ride to the wall itself, but there are fewer buses than train passengers, so some must wait for the buses to return for a second run.  Between the bitter cold and the peddlers selling fake antiques, the short wait was less than pleasant.  It was very short, however, and the Wall is certainly an impressive structure. 

(Unfortunately for me, I had a touch of the runs [probably a 24-hour flu or something; I was fine the next day] and had to trot [sorry about the scatological pun; it wasn’t intentional] back down to the bus area against the bitter wind to use the Chinese public crapper – quite an unpleasant experience!)

[That requires a little explanation—grotty though it be.  Has any of you ever used or even seen a Chinese public bog?  It’s literally a hole in the ground.  There’s a cement floor with a hole in the center; the user straddles the hole and squats, does his/her business, cleans up as well as possible, redresses as well as he/she can—and hopes not to have to return. 

[All the extra clothes I had on made this a hassle as well as a disgusting experience—there are no hooks or pegs for hanging coats and the floor is decidedly not dry and clean!  (The same hole is used for #1, too.)  One has to keep any hanging garments from getting between one’s butt and the hole . . . for obvious reasons.  Get the picture?]

Though it was very cold (ca. 5°F) and windy, being dressed for it made the visit no real hardship [except for . . . you know].  The climb up the Wall was a struggle, and I decided not to make the whole climb.  Then the wait, first for the shuttle bus and then the train in a crowded waiting room with insufficient seats.  That put the only blight on an otherwise pleasant morning.  The train ride back and the box lunch were also pleasant (a far cry from our last box lunch [see entry of 22 December, Part 2])!

We got off and met our buses for our visit to the Ming Tombs.  The tomb itself was less impressive (except as an architectural accomplishment) than the grounds and the approach (particularly the animal statues).

[After the death and burial in Nanjing of the first Ming emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang, the Hongwu Emperor, in 1398 (see 30 December, Part 4), the third Ming Emperor, Zhu Di (1360-1424; reigned: 1402-24), moved the capital to Beijing.  He and 12 of his successors are buried at the Thirteen Ming Tombs in Beijing, located about 30 miles north-northwest of the city’s center.

[The grounds for the 13 tombs cover approximately 15½ square miles (that’s the size of the City of Alexandria, Virginia).  The monumental animal statues, along with statues of officials, line the Sacred Way that leads from the entrance to the grounds to the 13 tombs; these figures, which include sculptures of mythical beasts as well as living ones such as elephants and camels, guard the resting places of the emperors.

After an early (and not particularly good) dinner at a Henan (not Hunan) restaurant, we took in a dance drama. 

[There are several places in China called Henan and I don’t recall if the one connected to this restaurant was identified.  It’s something of a guess, but logic suggests it’s the Province of Henan in the center of the country, 430 miles south of Beijing (measuring to the provincial capital, Zhengzhou).  Henan cuisine is a mix of influences from all its surrounding regions, but despite the array of flavors available, Henan cooking is known for not taking them to extreme levels; Henan food is renowned for the moderate and balanced mix of flavors in its dishes.

[Dance drama, or wuju, is a 20th-century development in China.  Its origins date only back to the 1950s when Soviet dance troupes introduced ballet to the PRC.  Chinese dance drama is a hybrid of Western theatrical elements and traditional Chinese forms: orchestras mix Western and Chinese instruments (with the Western instruments dominating), musical styles combine Western and Chinese forms, and the choreography is an amalgam of ballet and Chinese folk dances.]

The show is a modern piece, based on a legend or folk tale, utilizing Western instruments and Western-style music and choreographed in semi-balletic and semi-stylized movement and pantomime. 

There was no dialogue or singing; the story was all told in dance and movement.  [Two other 20th-century performance forms that derive from Western influence are huaju, or spoken drama (of which Lao She’s Teahouse is a prime example; see entry of 30 December, Part 4) and geju, or sung drama.] 

The costumes were quite brilliant and colorful and the sets were very effective, using mostly painted drops and flats, but very little constructed pieces.  The work as a whole was charming and thoroughly enjoyable, but not exciting in its originality.

[Despite what I characterized as a lack of originality in the dance drama, I gather that it’s a popular form of entertainment in China, after Beijing opera.  With China having so many languages (linguists identify eight dialects, but each of them has many subdialects) and most of them being unintelligible to speakers of the others, maybe an all-dance-and-movement theater form is welcome to lots of Chinese entertainment-seekers.  Just a thought.]

Peking [Beijing]/Canton [Guangzhou] – Friday, 2 January

This morning was taken up with a trip to the Temple of Heaven, a magnificent 15th-century pagoda with several outbuildings located on a hill overlooking Peking, and the Summer Palace, where the Empress Dowager [Chongqing (1692-1777)] held court in a very imperial – and imperious – style.  An impressive layout along a beautiful lake, now completely frozen – to the delight of skaters and ice-walkers – the Palace was entirely built for the Empress’s use to the virtual exclusion of anyone else (except her thousands of servants and eunuchs).

[The Temple of Heaven (or Tiantan Park; the Chinese name means “altar of heaven”), built between 1406 and 1420, during the Ming Dynasty (the same period as the Forbidden City; see 31 December, Part 4), is a complex of 92 religious buildings set in gardens and surrounded by a pine forest.  The emperors of the Ming and Qing Dynasties, considered “sons of Heaven,” offered sacrifices to heaven and prayed for good harvests. 

[The layout of the complex, which covers just over a square mile, and its architecture both symbolize the relationship between earth and heaven.  The design of the main buildings is a combination of circles and squares, which symbolizes the belief that Heaven is round and Earth square.

[The Summer Palace was first built in 1750 (it was destroyed 110 years later in the Second Opium War, 1856-60, and then rebuilt in 1886) is not just a palace per se; it’s an ensemble of lakes, gardens, pavilions, halls, palaces, temples, and bridges 6¼ miles northwest of Beijing.

[The site was originally an imperial garden beginning in the Jin Dynasty (1115-1234) in 1153 and grew over the centuries as succeeding emperors added buildings.  Around 1749, the Qianlong Emperor (1711-99; reigned: 1735-96) ordered a palace to be built near one of the lakes to celebrate the 60th birthday of his mother, Empress Dowager Chongqing.  

[After the reconstruction following the Second Opium War, Emperor Guangxu (1871-1908; reigned: 1875-1908) rebuilt the palace for use by his aunt, Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908; concubine of the Xianfeng Emperor [1831-61; reigned: 1850-61] and de facto ruler of China from 1861 to 1908), and renamed it the Summer Palace.  It became the property of the former imperial family after 1912, but in 1924, when Puyi, the last Qing emperor, was evicted from the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace became a public park. 

[One of the most startling Summer Palace structures associated with Empress Dowager Cixi is the so-called Marble Boat.  Also named Qingyanfang, the Boat of Purity and Ease, it’s a lakeside pavilion, first erected in 1755.  The original pavilion was made from a base of large stone blocks which supported a wooden superstructure done in a traditional Chinese design.

[In 1860, when the Palace was razed, the pavilion was destroyed.  It was restored in 1893 on order of the Empress Dowager, when a new two-story superstructure was designed which incorporated elements of European architecture.  Like its predecessor, the new superstructure is made out of wood but it was painted to imitate marble—giving the pavilion its name.

[On each deck, there’s a large mirror that reflects the waters of the lake to give the impression of floating in the water.  Imitation paddlewheels on each side of the pavilion make it look like a sidewheel steamer.  The Marble Boat was used by the Empress Dowager to view the scenery and for entertaining guests.

[After 1949, the park became a facility of the CCP (among other uses, Jiang Qing, the wife of Mao Zedong, lived there) until 1953, when it was restored and renovated as a public park again.]

We had lunch in a restaurant on the Palace grounds.

This afternoon, we flew back to Canton for the start of our homeward journey.  The trip to China is virtually over. 

The flight to Canton was easy and peasant.  I was able to rid myself of my long underwear for the first time since leaving Canton [23 December] and relaxed most of the flight.  When we arrived and got to our hotel (Bai Yun, the one we stayed in before), we had the same jumble to assign rooms. 

Dinner was to be in 45 minutes, and I wanted to take a last look in the nearby Friendship Store for the ceramic lion I missed at Foshan when we were here last, so as we got our rooms, I ran over without going to my room. 

I didn’t find the lion (just as well – at $55 [¥82.50], I really don’t need it!) and came back, freshened up and went up to a decent, but not outstanding dinner. 

At least the weather is warm again (though after tomorrow in Hong Kong, we will have to face winter in New York anyway). 

Tomorrow starts early again, but we are supposed to catch an express, non-stop train to Hong Kong, so we are due in at ca. 11 a.m.  That’ll give me another real half-day in Hong Kong to look around.  I don’t think I’ll shop anymore.

It’s hard to sum up an opinion of the trip now that it’s really over.  Of course, it was interesting and informative, and the Chinese we met, both official and non-, were gracious, charming, and helpful, but I don’t really feel I saw China. 

Part if that is due, I’m sure, to the fast pace of the trip – six cities in 13 days didn’t leave enough time see any one, especially Peking – but some of it had to do with what we did see – too many craft factories and stores. 

Of course, we had those damned shoppers with us who took time in every shop, store, and souvenir stand we passed, and even made us stop at several Friendship Stores I could have done without.  In several cases, they delayed us en route while they shopped and we waited on the bus for them.  I was often embarrassed at how much – and what – they bought – kitsch and junk of every description.

Another part of my confusion is that I really didn’t know what to expect.  Old China is so remote and unreal, and new China so stark and unformed that I had no previous impression to confirm or deny.  Only the people really made an impression on me.  Their energy and commitment is boundless and seems genuine and sincere, even under all the slogans and propaganda.

They are far more open, generous, and receptive than their Soviet counterparts, far less paranoid and frightened, especially now that they feel themselves free of the Cultural Revolution and the Gang of Four.  Their own relief is obvious all over; the question is not whether they live better, but whether they feel they do – and they do.

And their curiosity about us – from our clothes to the more intellectual levels (our economy, culture, city life, etc.) is boundless.  It is very impressive what has been done here in a scant 30 years, especially when 10 (1966-76, the Cultural Revolution) were retrogressive.

My prevailing impression of the Soviet Union 15 years ago [I went there on a school trip in 1965; that journal will be appearing on ROT in the near future] was that life there was drab and gray and without energy or hope of improvement in material ways; here the impression is very different.

Though strictly controlled by government policy and the needs of the country, life, though below our standards, is improving and is productive and progressive [I didn’t mean that in the political or ideological sense, just that modernization was moving forward].  Cooperation, though enforced, seems intuitive.

My one small fear is that with all their hunger for modernization, they don’t import too much of our plastic, throw-away culture and destroy that which is old and good in their own.  (Our American-built hotel in Peking is a foreboding example – built and furnished like a roadside motel with Holiday Inn décor and atmosphere, it probably will be run-down and tacky in two years.)

Another small feat is that as the influx of tourists increases, the Chinese do not lose the charm and earnestness they evince now.  Already with the buying and shopping, are coming the complainers – those who expect the Hilton slickness and American food and cannot accept the cultural hardships as someone else’s way of life to be accepted and adjusted to with some grace and tact.  In our group alone were several who wanted to turn China into another American Chinatown or large Taiwan.

HONG KONG

Canton [Guangzhou]/Hong Kong – Saturday, 3 January

Our departure from Canton was uneventful (though delayed by a small number of our group), and we got on an express, non-stop train to Hong Kong.  The ride was both pleasant and scenic.  I  hadn’t notice the scenery coming in, except the New Territories on Kowloon and the farms – I never saw the hills and picturesque bays and inlets we passed on the way back.

I got Patsy to recommend a tea house that served a dumpling lunch [dim sum], the Luk Ye Tea House on Stanley Street, and walked over after check-in at the hotel.  It wasn’t the kind of place that served from carts, and I got a menu to mark my choices all in Chinese.

I got the waiter to recommend four dishes (all were very good) and had a pleasant lunch alone.  (After 13 weeks of eating with 92 other people, I needed the privacy!)  [Actually, of course, there were only 93 of us in one place the one time the three IPTIC groups crossed paths in Wuxi (see entry of 28 December, Part 3).]

After lunch, I walked to the bus terminus and rode to Tiger Balm Garden.  I met Yosif, an Iranian Jew now living in D.C. and teaching at Howard University (after studying at Georgetown).  We wandered through Tiger Balm and he asked me all kinds of questions about China.  He was on a very extended trip around Asia and on to Europe (he has family in Israel).

[In 1935, Sino-Burmese businessman (best known as founder of Tiger Balm, an analgesic heat rub), entrepreneur, tycoon, and philanthropist Aw Boon Haw (1882-1954) built a villa in the Wanchai section of Hong Kong.  The Haw Par Mansion was surrounded by an ornamental garden that was open to the public. 

[The centerpiece of the 8-acre garden was a 7-story pagoda, and the rest of the phantasmagorical park was festooned with hundreds of figurines and sculptures that depicted ancient Buddhist beliefs (because Aw was a devout Buddhist).  It was a popular spot for many Hong Kongese on their day off. 

[The garden was closed in 1998, the year after Hong Kong reverted to Chinese control, and sold to a property-development company.  It was demolished in 2004 and the site is now occupied by a residential high rise.  The Haw Par Mansion is still standing and has been renovated as a museum.]

After Tiger Balm, a Chinese whimsical fantasy land, I took the Peak Tram up Victoria Peak to see it in daylight.  The train was odd in that on the way up, we felt straight [i.e. level] and the buildings looked tilted!

[The Peak Tram opened in 1888, originally for the use of the British colonial governor and the Peak’s (expatriate) residents.   It now is available to everyone as one of the oldest funicular railways in the world.  The tram has undergone several up-dates since its beginning, including a comprehensive rebuilding in 1989 and a substantial upgrade starting in 2015 and continuing today.  

[The Peak Tram runs at 10- to 15-minute intervals between the Peak Tram Lower Terminus in Central to the Peak Tram Upper Terminus at the Peak and the journey takes approximately 8-10 minutes.  The fare, when I was in Hong Kong, was HK$2 (40¢).

[It’s a visual experience, as I observed, as skyscrapers glide past at what appear to be impossible angles while the tram makes its ascent.  This phenomenon, known as the Peak Tram Illusion, is explained as “induced by a change of the subjective vertical caused by the tilted visual environment and reclining body position of observers inside the tram.”]

For dinner, I arranged to go to a Szechuan restaurant near the hotel, the Sichuan Garden Restaurant in The Landmark commercial complex at the intersection of Des Voeux Road Central and Pedder Street.  I met Norman and Cherna Weinstein on my way, so they joined me for a very fine dinner.  We had a few drinks on me afterwards, and then we split for the night.  (The Weinsteins were staying an extra day gratis.)

DEPARTURE, TOKYO, & HOME

Hong Kong – Sunday, 4 January

On our day of departure, I took a walk to the Hong Kong Zoo (not very impressive as a zoo, but pretty and with a nice view of Hong Kong below) and, in the afternoon, to Wanchai [pinyin: Wanzai], the Suzie Wong district, full of night clubs (many topless) and tattoo parlors.

[The 14-acre Hong Kong Zoological and Botanical Gardens, on the northern slope of Victoria Peak, is one of the oldest zoological and botanical centers in the world, and the oldest park in Hong Kong.  It was founded in 1864 and opened to the public in 1871.

[The zoo is too small to house large mammals—so no pandas—but it has a varied collection of birds (including flamingos and parrots), monkeys, orangutans, sloths, meerkats, and tortoises.

[The reference above to “Suzie Wong” is to The World of Suzie Wong, a 1960 British-American romantic drama film directed by Richard Quine and starring William Holden and Nancy Kwan.  Although set in Wanchai, the film was shot in locations around Hong Kong and serves as a historical record of 1960s Hong Kong and some of the lifestyle was depicted in the movie. 

[(Interesting, but irrelevant factoid: in the Broadway play of Suzie Wong, 1958-60, the part played by William Holden in the film was played by William “Capt. Kirk” Shatner; he won a Theatre World Award for his performance.)]

I had a quick lunch (Western – Salade Niçoise) in the coffee shop and we left for the airport and the flight to Tokyo.  We said good-bye to Linda Chan, Group C’s IPTIC guide, at the hotel and Patsy (Pepsi Cola) Cheung at the airport.  We are on our own from here on out!

Both Patsy and Linda were wonderful and helpful along the way.  Patsy was a little more patient with some of our less tactful and easy members, but Linda took her share of hardship, too.  She let herself get angry too easily, but she did her best.  (Both had some tough challenges to meet, and I wonder how well I would have done!)

Anyway – we’re on the way home now – for better or for worse!

[That’s where the journal ends.  The flight home, on JAL again, had an overnight stop in Tokyo; the airline put the continuing passengers up at an airport hotel which was like a high-tech, white molded-plastic, stationary sleeping car on a mid-20th-century train.  We slept in little cubby holes no wider than the single bed; there may have been a sink. but I’m not sure.

[I had a little problem with jet lag after my return to New York.  I had an acting class the next afternoon, but I actually slept through it!  I don’t remember now if I woke up while the class was still in session or if it was over by the time I opened my eyes, but I remember having to apologize to my teacher and I felt a little sheepish when I explained why I missed class. 

[I used to be such an inveterate long-distance traveler that a little body-clock disruption was a small matter.  The worst I remember was on the first morning after a trans-Atlantic trip to Rome: I awoke in the predawn morning because bedtime had come sooner than I was ready for it.  A friend on the same trip also woke up in the wee hours of the morning, and we came across one another wandering in the residence where we were staying.

[So as not to disturb anyone else with our restlessness, we decided to go out for a walk.  We walked from Trastevere into downtown Rome as the dawn came up.  We watched—and heard—the city wake up.  It was about a five-mile stroll one way, then we went back and joined everyone for breakfast.  After that, I was fine!]

[There were a couple of occurrences during this tour that more or less spread across the whole excursion.  They’re part of what I remember about the trip, so I’ll recount them here, at the end of the journal report.

[Almost every morning, when we boarded our bus for the first outing of the day—this really didn’t start until we began our travels in the PRC—someone inevitably asked the guide who greeted us, what was happening with the hostages.  We were, of course, asking about the U.S. embassy workers in Tehran who’d been held by Iranian “students” since November 1979. 

[Negotiations for their release had heated up after our 1980 presidential election in November in which Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) defeated President Jimmy Carter (b. 1924; 39th president of the United States: 1977-81) and we all felt that the release of the Americans might occur on any day, perhaps while we were in China. 

[The first morning we asked about the hostages, I think it flummoxed the guide, who was unprepared for that question.  She said she’d check at her next opportunity and tell us what was happening.  After that, our morning guide was always ready to answer the daily inquiry. 

[As it happened, after many delays and glitches, the hostages were returned home on 20 January 1981, the day President Reagan (40th president of the United States: 1981-89) was inaugurated—and 16 days after we all got back to the States.

[The other event was a story one of my tour mates told me one day early in the trip.  It was one of the Long Island matrons, but I’ve long since forgotten which one.  We must have been driving somewhere on the bus and she was my seatmate, but I’m not exactly sure of the circumstances; it could easily have been on one of our plane or train rides.

[In any case, the woman told me an incredible story—and I’m not sure I believed it completely at the time.  Not until we got back and I heard some of the details recounted on TV; then I checked it out.  Some readers who are old enough may remember this tale, which continued to make news every now and then for almost 20 years.

[My travelling companion’s account went like this: The son of a friend of hers on the Island had transferred from one New York State community college near his home to another one upstate.  When he arrived in September—that would be 1980, just before we left on the trip to China—other students whom he didn’t know began greeting him as if he were a good friend.  Men clapped him on the back and bro-hugged him; women kissed him.  And they all kept calling him Eddy, though his name was Robert.

[When he protested, the schoolmates explained that he looked exactly like a friend who’d been at the school the previous year.  Finally, a friend of Eddy’s discovered that Robert had been adopted, just like Eddy, and that the two young men had the same birthday.  Some checking led Robert and his schoolmate to conclude that he and Eddy were identical twin brothers, and after some phone calls to Eddy’s home, they confirmed that that was, in fact, the truth—Eddy and Robert were twins adopted separately and raised from birth by different families.  Neither adoptive couple knew their son had a sibling.

[The story of the remarkable coincidences that led the young men, then 19, finally to meet and be reunited, was picked up by the local newspapers, particularly Long Island’s Newsday, and when another adopted young man with the same birthday read the front-page coverage of the fantastic story and saw the photo of the twin brothers, he suspected he, too, was a lost sibling.  Sure enough, the adoption agency confirmed that there had, indeed, been triplets, and that David was the third boy.

[After the three brothers met for the first time, they discovered that they had had remarkably similar traits, habits, tastes, and experiences—even though they had been separated since just after they’d been born and didn’t even know of their brothers’ existence.

[When I got home and started to hear reports of this event, and saw the three young men on TV—they made the rounds of daytime talk shows and even appeared in some movies and television series episodes—I did a little research and collected some articles on the story.  (I later taught writing and kept a collection of provocative articles for reading assignments.)

[I won’t relate the rest of the story of the triplets, who’d all be 60 now (Eddy committed suicide in 1995) except to reveal that the young men’s names were Robert Shafran, Edward Galland, and David Kellman, so readers can look up the story.  I’ll also report that there was a documentary by CNN, aired in 2018, called Three Identical Strangers.  I will also reveal, but without details, that the story is not all happiness and food fortune—but, of course, I didn’t know any of that in December 1980 and January 1981.]