Background trees

I thought the exhibition "Van Gogh's Cypresses" at the Met would be one of the highlights of a treeful summer but I'm underwhelmed. Cypresses are key to the landscape of Provence, and capturing their strange darkness in a region of luminous colors seems to have been one of Van Gogh's aspirations in Arles. But the 40 works on view, few as compelling as the New York City stars brought together in the poster, tell you little about what cypresses meant to Van Gogh, or should mean to us. They're associated in western art with death (as in Arnold Böcklin's "Toteninsel" paintings, one of which hangs in the Met) - was Van Gogh working with or against that? We never find out. He didn't know, as we did, that the two years in which he painted cypresses (among other subjects) would end in his death, or did he? 

It's not that I didn't find works to like, such as "Landscape from Saint-Rémy" (June 1889), from the section of the exhibition where cypresses are not the main concern. (This was included also because its landscape is a precursor to the painting at the center of this show.)

Arguably the cypress wasn't a particular object of the luminous "Tree in the Garden of the Asylum" (October 1889) either, where leaves of all colors are dancing together in a bath of light and wind. Cypresses were around, but so were olives and mulberries. I wasn't convinced they were of special interest. 

Except in one place, a small canvas he painted while confined to his room in April 1890, "Reminiscence of Brabant." There are many 

more colors here than initially meet the eye, but this landscape shows a different, duller world. Except for the cypresses which have snuck in at the left! 

What are they doing there? Now I'm interested. Or could have been... Reviews I've read of the show are similarly unpersuaded by its premise, if grateful for the chance to spend time with a concentration of works by a great artist. For my part I wonder that the show didn't bother to tell us anything about cypresses - what they look like, how they've otherwise been represented, how they are like and unlike other trees in Van Gogh's oeuvre and imagination.