I’ve been told that years ago, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s marketing team vainly sought an alluring title for a show by the obscure French Romantic painter

Théodore Chassériau,
an exasperated curator suggested “Why don’t we just call it ‘

Vincent van Gogh
’?” Visitors’ enthusiasm for the troubled Dutch painter of sunflowers and irises helps to explain the apparently nonstop run of Van Gogh exhibitions organized internationally since 2001, including a superb drawing show at the Met in 2005. That turbulent life story (see: mutilated ear) adds to the fascination the work exerts, along with the instantly recognizable ferocious brushwork and the remarkable brevity of his career. Vincent van Gogh devoted himself to painting for only the last 10 of his 37 years—born in 1853, he died by suicide in 1890. The works that sustain his reputation date between 1884 and 1890, while the majority of his most acclaimed canvases were made after 1888, during a period marked by illness, psychological and emotional upheavals, voluntary sojourns in mental hospitals, and intense dedication to art-making.

Given the countless catalogs, scholarly articles, books (including three volumes of a catalogue raisonné, plus six volumes and a superb website dedicated to his letters), movies, questionable novels, and museum gift-shop items, is there anything left to be said? Astonishingly, there is. “Van Gogh’s Cypresses” at the Met offers a fresh look at an important theme never before studied in depth. Apart from the crowds, the tightly focused show is a pleasure and a revelation. Organized by

Susan Alyson Stein,
the Met’s curator of 19th-century European painting, it assembles about 40 significant paintings and stellar drawings, plus some illustrated letters, beginning with a drawing made soon after Van Gogh’s arrival in Arles, in March 1888, with a cypress in the background. It ends with works made in Auvers, in northern France, informed by memories of Provençal olive trees and cypresses. The installation is punctuated by excerpts from Van Gogh’s letters about his responses to cypresses, such as the challenge of painting towering black trees in a light-struck yellow wheatfield and his “need” to paint cypresses and stars.

We see his first images of the trees in paintings made in Arles; shown in the distance, they are clusters of dark, spiky vertical strokes linking flat fields and sky, or in the periphery, as windbreaks surrounding orchards whose blossoms attracted him. We come closer to the cypresses, as a couple of portly pyramids in “The Public Garden” (October 1888), painted about the time

Paul Gauguin
joined him in Arles in hope of establishing “a school of the South.” The cypresses are pushed away again when Van Gogh committed himself to the asylum in Saint-Rémy, early in 1889, after his disastrous quarrel with Gauguin the previous December. (See: ear, time of mutilation.) They dominate some of the strongest paintings on view, such as “Cypresses” (June 1889), in which two flame-like trees fill half the canvas, against a narrow glimpse of roiling clouds and a crescent moon, above dramatic hills; everything is evoked with tightly curled, flickering brushstrokes of thick paint. Van Gogh’s expressed desire to paint cypresses and stars was fully realized by the celebrated, done-from-memory “The Starry Night “(June 1889), here informatively contextualized. Because of that context, we note that the painting’s slender, pointy trees are made more economically, with longer, straighter strokes, than any of his other cypresses, as if all of Van Gogh’s energy had been expended on the swirling stars and moon.

There are illuminating moments throughout. Early on, we see him testing the possibilities of both Impressionist divided color and crisp shapes influenced by Japanese prints, and watch him invent ways of suggesting windswept wheat and trees with repeated touches of the brush. Later, we can follow his urge to simplify and clarify, and to lighten and heighten his palette, in two versions of a wheatfield with cypresses, under agitated clouds, against equally agitated hills, painted at Saint-Rémy after he was allowed to leave the asylum grounds to set up his easel in the neighborhood. But the high points of the show are the rhythmic, obsessive reed-pen drawings, with their dots, squiggles, loops and staccato bars standing for brushstrokes and color. Done not as studies, but from the paintings as records sent to his brother Theo or his friend

Émile Bernard,
the drawings are notable for their manic energy and richly varied expanses of marks. Lively as the large “portraits” of cypresses done in June 1889 are, for example, the drawings that reproduce them are even more vital.

Van Gogh is so famous, his work so frequently reproduced, that it can be difficult to concentrate on what we are seeing when we encounter the real thing. “Van Gogh’s Cypresses” makes this over-exposed artist engaging again. Even “The Starry Night” looks unexpected. And the informative catalog, with essays by the curator and other scholars, encourages new considerations of the work. It’s worth braving the crowds.

—Ms. Wilkin is an independent curator and critic.