SUFFERING FOR HIS ART; VAN GOGH'S TRAVAILS MAKE EXCLUSIVE L.A. EXHIBIT ALL THE MORE ANTICIPATED.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

He was modern art's first pop saint, impoverished and obscure during his too-brief life, yet elevated through death to the stature of a holy man, who suffered so that the rest of us might see the world differently.

He was proletarian before prole was cool. He jump-started his career by reinventing his style. Today, we might consider him some distant, Flemish spiritual ancestor of, say, Kurt Cobain, slashing away at his canvases in a controlled fury of creativity. He lived fast, died young, left an amazingly beautiful body of work.

Even the most casual art lover may need little introduction to Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), the Dutchman who is the star of ``Van Gogh's Van Goghs: Masterpieces From the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam,'' the career survey of 70 works that opens Sunday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

We feel we already know him, this unsmiling figure of shabby gentility and weather-beaten dignity, whose ferocious gaze is the human correlative to his churning suns and writhing wheat fields, his wobbly bedrooms and woozily regimented farmhouses.

Even hanging flat against a museum wall, van Gogh's landscapes bend and sway like cypresses in a storm. Even at rest, his agitated self-portraits seem wrapped in some infernal atmosphere.

Yet van Gogh's fitful shapes and violently juxtaposed colors - ``brutal extremes,'' the artist called them - somehow resolve themselves in tranquillity and harmony. Madness? Yes, but there's method in van Gogh's near-insane intensity of feeling and expression.

How could we not know van Gogh, when he is everywhere? On postcards, neckties, tote bags, dozens of Web sites and in a half-dozen movies. On posters and ``Starry Night'' coffee mugs. In cartoon parodies and easy-listening pop homages:

Starry, starry night/paint your palette blue and gray/look out on a summer's day/with eyes that know the darkness in my soul.

How could we not know van Gogh? He left us so much. Not only the paintings, perhaps 700 altogether, still fetching record sums, but also the stacks of eloquent, self-revealing letters written to his steadfast patron and brother Theo.

How could we not know van Gogh, when his life conforms to all our cherished ideals of what a long-suffering artist should be?

``It is a sort of post-romantic, bohemian myth,'' said Graham W.J. Beal, LACMA's director. ``With van Gogh, you have the bohemian artist, slightly mad clinically, inventing a new way of painting, despised by his contemporaries, and then of course the suicide, the ear.''

And now, the mobs.

Los Angeles is getting ``Van Gogh's Van Goghs'' thanks to a unique occurrence.

Organized by the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the exhibition consists entirely of works from the latter collection, the world's single largest van Gogh repository.

Spanning the artist's entire career, the works trace an arc from the gloomy austerity of ``Potato Eaters'' (1885) through such late-career masterpieces as ``Self-portrait With Felt Hat'' (winter of 1887-1888), ``The Zouave'' (1888), ``The Bedroom'' (1888) and the dazzling ``Wheatfield With Crows,'' painted shortly before van Gogh put a gun to his heart and shot himself in July 1890. He died a few days later at age 37.

The priceless paintings are being allowed to travel to the United States while the 25-year-old Dutch museum is closed for eight months to undergo a major renovation and expansion.

At $20 a ticket, ``Van Gogh's Van Goghs'' at LACMA reportedly will be the most expensive public art show ever. So far, that hasn't discouraged the public from snapping up nearly a quarter of the available tickets. To meet demand, LACMA recently extended the show's running time by six weeks, to May 16.

A concurrent LACMA exhibition, ``Van Gogh and the Japanese Print,'' will open Jan. 21 and run through April 4. Located in the museum's Pavilion for Japanese Art, it will showcase approximately 35 works illustrating the influence of Japanese woodblock prints and Japanese aesthetics on van Gogh's own sensibility, whose other major influences were the French impressionists Camille Pissarro and Georges Seurat, and J.F. Millet, the tender but unsparing chronicler of harsh peasant lives.

The projected attendance for ``Van Gogh's Van Goghs'' in L.A. is 900,000, about double the number that are estimated to have seen the show at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., the tour's only other stop. Attendance here will even exceed the 547,000 who paid $12.50 apiece to view the Cezanne retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1996, pumping $86 million into the Pennsylvania economy.

In Washington, because the National Gallery is a publicly funded facility, all ``Van Gogh'' tickets were distributed free, along with an additional 1,800 same-day passes daily on a first-come, first-served basis.

The result: long lines leading to other long lines, and scalpers cashing in on the hottest ticket in town.

There will definitely be long lines at LACMA, too. But officials hope to help offset the huge crowds by keeping the new LACMA West extension (the former May Co. building), where the exhibition will be held, open 12 hours a day, seven days a week. That's an extra day per week and more hours per day than the rest of the museum is open.

All tickets will be dated and timed, and visitors will be admitted at regular intervals. Museum officials estimate the average museum goer will take 45 to 50 minutes to navigate the 70 works.

Although that sounds like an abnormally quick pace at which to take in so many paintings from a renowned artist, LACMA officials say it is reasonable.

``Some people are going to take longer,'' said museum media relations director Adam Coyne. ``But some people are going to whip through it. Some people just like to take a look and leave. With the audio tour, you can comfortably get through the exhibition in an hour.''

UCLA art professor Henry P. Hopkins, who recently retired after 4-1/2 years running the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum, said the pace seems a bit brisk, however.

``Some people will certainly take longer, and may even be there for hours in some cases,'' said Hopkins. ``But even the average viewer, if they take a minute a work, it's well beyond 45 minutes. It seems like 45 minutes is not quite giving the public its due.''

Hopkins said crowd-control problems early on are a likely result, although typically, museum officials use the first few days to gauge how to manage the flow of people. LACMA generally has done a pretty good job of crowd control in the past, he said.

To help maintain a steady traffic flow, there won't be a single bench in any of the galleries.

``These are all things we hope will mitigate the craziness, and the fact that the tickets do have a cost,'' said a LACMA spokesperson.

Besides tickets sales, LACMA also figures to reap increased membership from ``Van Gogh's Van Goghs.'' Last July 1, before its Picasso retrospective opened, LACMA had 64,000 members. It now has 95,000.

Yet blockbusters like ``Van Gogh's Van Goghs'' have become increasingly expensive to mount, as the costs of insurance, marketing and security climb, particularly for shows of popular painters such as Picasso and the impressionists.

``I want to make clear that while this is great news financially, it's not a windfall,'' said Andrea Rich, LACMA's president and CEO, who declined to reveal how much it's costing LACMA to bring ``Van Gogh's Van Goghs'' to Los Angeles.

``There is a downside to these blockbusters. They're an artificial bump and you can't do it every year, and it masks the institution to the public.''

``If that's all we did, one would wonder what's the seriousness,'' Rich continued. ``You could just be a rental hall. Blockbusters aren't our mission. Our mission is to build a great collection and to explore things that are not (as accessible as van Gogh). A show like this allows us programatically to do things that are arcane or with a narrower focus.''

No matter how you look at it, ``Van Gogh's Van Goghs'' figures to be the cultural event of the year in a city that since last year's opening of the Getty Center has begun to see itself as a destination for more than sun, surf and Space Mountain.

Like Coca-Cola and the Olympic Games, van Gogh is a brand name others want to buy into, including L.A.'s hotels and restaurants. It's Robert Barrett's job, as associate vice president specializing in cultural tourism for the Los Angeles Convention & Visitors Bureau, to help them do so.

``I think we have done our best to create a comprehensive marketing plan,'' said Barrett from his offices on the 60th floor of the Library Tower in downtown L.A.

A major component of the $1.5 million national marketing campaign is a deal that offers free admission to the exhibition to anyone booking one or more nights at one of eight participating L.A.-area hotels.

``So hotels bought into this program; they then owned the brand name,'' Barrett said. ``They had a right to the brand of LACMA and van Gogh.''

To help draw visitors from outside Southern California, ad spreads up to 12 full pages have been taken out in seven national magazines and newspapers such as Travel & Leisure, The New Yorker and USA Today.

The visitors bureau also is promoting mini-tours of works by ``Van Gogh and His Contemporaries'' scattered throughout the region: at the J. Paul Getty Museum; UCLA at the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center; the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena; and the Huntington Library, Art Collections & Botanical Gardens in San Marino.

``No one knows that 10 van Goghs live in four L.A. museums, so we're here to tell you. So if you come to see 70 van Goghs, you can see 80,'' Barrett said.

Barrett said LACMA recognized the necessity for such a marketing push after observing the success of similar efforts for the Cezanne show in Philadelphia. The visitors bureau will pay close attention to local economic spinoffs from ``Van Gogh's Van Goghs,'' hoping to use the data to attract future blockbusters.

``This exhibition we will track very, very carefully,'' Barrett said.

What van Gogh - who sold just one painting during his lifetime, for $80, and adopted the lifestyle of a working stiff - would make of all this adulation and attention is anyone's guess.

The son of a Protestant minister, van Gogh was a failed teacher, preacher and art dealer before finally turning to painting.

Rather than staking his place in fashionable Parisian cafe society, he found spirituality in the orchards and wheatfields, living among miners and farmers. For the minister's son, painting became what scholar Richard Kendall refers to in a catalog essay as ``evangelism by other means.''

``One must paint the peasants as if being one of them,'' van Gogh wrote his brother Theo.

He was, in fact, no saint, but a man given to consorting with prostitutes and to deep depression. But his mood swings also resulted in one what one admiring critic in 1913 referred to as the ``hallucinatory monstrances'' on van Gogh's canvases.

``If I do not give vent to my feelings, I think the boiler would burst,'' van Gogh told his brother.

To some, van Gogh's art may look too simplistic, too broadly accessible. It's the old saw: If everybody likes something, how good can it be?

``It looks like democratic parity,'' said LACMA's Beal. ``There's no iconography, there's no saints, there's no myths. It's a day in the country.''

But it would be a mistake, Beal suggests, to suppose that because van Gogh's paintings are concerned with everyday subjects and ordinary lives, they don't raise critical interpretive and art-historical issues.

``He is, in a way, the original modern expressionist,'' Beal said. ``He was the man who made paint color itself directly express the inner mind of the artist and imposed the innerness on whatever he painted. That then freed Fauvists up to paint noses blue.''

Keeping van Gogh's achievements in perspective may be difficult over the next five frenzied months. When you stand in LACMA's galleries, try to look past the 25 people around you and absorb van Gogh's blazing brush strokes. Relish the religious ecstasy he drew from the mundane. Savor his struggle.

``There are half a dozen really great pictures,'' Beal said. ``There are a couple of dozen wonderful pictures. You don't get this monolithic view of one, great singing picture after another.

``I think what really comes across in this exhibition is the distance he traveled in such a short time.''

THE FACTS

What: ``Van Gogh's Van Goghs: Masterpieces From the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.''

Where: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd.

When: Jan. 17-May 16. Exhibition hours: 9 a.m.-9 p.m. daily.

Tickets: LACMA members receive two free tickets to this exhibition. For membership information, call [phone]. General admission prices: adults $17.50 weekdays, $20 weekends; seniors $10 weekdays, $15 weekends; children (ages 6-17) $5 weekdays and weekends; children 5 and under free. To purchase tickets through Ticketmaster, call [phone].

What: ``Van Gogh and the Japanese Print.''

Where: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd.

When: Jan. 21-April 4. Regular museum hours are noon-8 p.m. Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays; noon-9 p.m. Fridays; 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Closed Wednesdays.

Admission: Adults $7; students 18 and older and seniors 62 and older, $5; children/younger students $1; children 5 and under free. The second Tuesday of every month is free to all, excluding the ``Van Gogh's Van Goghs'' exhibition.

CAPTION(S):

8 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) POP! GOES VAN GOGH

How did a depressed 19th-century Dutchman become the toast of L.A.?

(2--3--Color) Above, ``The Zouave'' (1888), oil on canvas. At right, ``Wheatfield With Crows'' (1890), oil on canvas.

(4--Color) ``A Pair of Leather Clogs'' (1889), oil on canvas.

(5--Color) ``The Bedroom'' (1888), oil on canvas.

(6--Color) Peasants huddle around a table in ``Potato Eaters'' (1885), oil on canvas.

(7--8) Van Gogh was influenced by Japanese print artists, including Keisai Eisen, whose ``Courtesan'' (circa 1820s), far left, was reinterpreted by the Dutch artist in his painting ``The Courtesan'' (after Eisen, 1887), near left.

Photos courtesy of Los Angeles County Museum of Art