A pervasive mythology surrounds the meteoric career of Vincent van Gogh (1853-90), the missionary and largely self-taught painter, who cut off his ear, spent time in asylums, and, after a mere decade-long commitment to painting during which he sold virtually nothing, fatally shot himself.

Matisse identified van Gogh as the major link between Delacroix and Cezanne in the “rehabilitation of the role of color, and the restitution of its emotive power.” Yet van Gogh is celebrated as much for his neurosis as for his highly innovative works – as if his high-key color equaled his high anxiety and his madness were in fact his muse. He is too often seen as the epitome of the misunderstood and tormented modern genius – a role that has since been wrongly interpreted as an essential part not only of the artistic temperament but of the practice of art making itself. “Vincent van Gogh: The Drawings,” a stupendous and illuminating exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, should dispel some of the myths.

In the first gallery of the show is a quotation from the artist’s letters that reads: “drawing is the root of everything.” Van Gogh took this observation to heart – for, in the show’s 120 works, mostly drawings, we can see the seeds, roots, growth, and fruit of everything essential to the artist. He completed approximately 1,100 works on paper, developing much more rapidly with drawing than he did with paint (he could rarely afford the latter), which is not unusual. Van Gogh did not approach drawing as an end in itself but rather as a way to coalesce on the rectangle his quickly evolving genius and his numerous and competing strains of influence. It was a way for him to work out and clarify his ideas and to find his own voice.

The range of his voice was tremendously diverse. It included the heavy browns and grays of his early northern peasant pictures (influenced by Millet); the naturalism of Bruegel; and the bright, stippled, anxious strokes and vibrant light of French Impressionism. He reinvigorated the contest between flat plane and volume (as well as the radiant gold leaf) experienced in Byzantine icons – a resurrection that, along with his invented color, would help to usher in abstraction. He also incorporated the swirling, thunderous rotundities of Rubens and the faceted decorative patterns, spare drawing, and flat color of Japanese prints.

“Vincent van Gogh: The Drawings” was jointly organized by the Met and by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The exhibition is organized chronologically, except when related drawings, made out of sequence, are hung next to paintings. This straight-ahead curatorial approach to van Gogh is as refreshing as it is unobtrusive. Focused on drawing, it includes masterful paintings from both venues – still lifes, portraits, self-portraits, sea- and landscapes – that in each room beautifully anchor the works on paper.

The show is worth it alone for the late masterpieces “Harvest in Provence” and “The Zouave” (both 1888). The two paintings, on loan from Amsterdam, are, as with all the paintings in the show, accompanied by multiple drawings that – through line, dots, smudges, tones – reveal the artist’s enormously inventive, nearly inex haustible approaches to light, form, movement, and space.

“Harvest in Provence” (a work van Gogh himself said he was “rather keen on”) is worthy of Bruegel’s “Harvest” (1556). Van Gogh’s landscape, variously paced, steps incrementally toward the horizon, which feels miles away – as it also rushes deep and headlong into the distance. You can feel its filtered, afternoon sunlight – ever so slightly changing in response to passing clouds – drift down through the turquoise sky and over the glowing yellow waving wheat. The subdued landscape – activated by tiny toy like figures, carts, houses, and trees – as if rousing from sleep, releases its absorbed crystalline light in a long, slow exhale. Yet the painting also appears to burst forth like that of an explosion or an annunciation.

The drawings for “Harvest in Provence” (all 1888), some done before the painting, some after, reveal the landscape in multi ple personalities. One, a stark contrast of dark ink and white paper, is as varied and fluid as the best Asian calligraphy. Another, in ink, watercolor, gouache, charcoal, and wax crayon, is as varied in approach as a work by Rembrandt and as natural as one by Constable. Another, in mostly stippled ink and graphite, conveys a multitude of shifts in light.

“The Zouave” is a monumental half-length portrait in which landscape and man merge. A masterful play of red and green, the painting transforms man into mountain; his blue belly into ocean; his chest into a night sky lit by flowers and stars and moons; and his head, a virulent, almost sickly yellow-green, into a plant. A The figure’s sculpted head is topped by a fiery red hat. The hat twists and torques the head, screwing it deeper into, as it also wrenches it away from, the ever-frontal and advancing brick wall and grassy green plane – a blistering, artificial green that burns like gold leaf. “The Zouave,” as rich and full of tension as a Duccio Madonna, is as good as portraiture gets.

And, strange as it is to say with an artist as omnipresent as van Gogh, we have been starved for a comprehensive view of his art. The last American retrospective of the artist, mounted at Washington’s National Gallery in 1999, had only a few great paintings and no drawings. Two great recent shows focused on van Gogh’s portraits: MoMA’s “The Postman” and the traveling show “Face to Face,” which came to nearby Boston and Philadelphia. In the 1980s the Met mounted two fabulous exhibitions: “Van Gogh in Arles” and “Van Gogh in Saint-Remy and Auvers,” but these two shows focused only on the last two years of the artist’s life, when van Gogh was at the height of his powers.

All these shows contained many masterpieces but did not give us the full story. The new exhibition tells it like it was, firmly showing that van Gogh did not merely arrive, like a brilliant flash of light, out of nowhere. It also establishes that he was cogent and in complete control of his faculties from beginning to end; that he did not madly flail away at the paper or canvas, chasing colorful fantasies; exorcizing demons.

The exhibition opens with a number of drawings from the early 1880s. Each shows the beginnings of a different side, a unique power and interest, of the artist. “Windmills Near Dordrecht (Weeskinderendijk)” (1881), a subdued tonal view of a fence and distant windmills, shows us, in the undulating fence posts, the sleeping giant that would become van Gogh’s contribution to the curving, snakelike forms of Art Nouveau. In others, we see a delicacy in the trees worthy of Claude or Corot, or a heavy Realism worthy of Courbet. In others still, van Gogh approaches an almost abstract flutter reminiscent of late Monet.

Some of the early Dutch drawings can be a little overwrought, especially those that take on sorrow, but always I feel him gathering his forces – trying this, trying that. “Landscape in Drenthe” (1883) is a single burst of light that foretells his later passion for the subject. We are being shown omens; when we can see black crows in the sky, they cannot but remind us of those that van Gogh would put in “Wheatfield With Crows” (1890), his last work.

In 1884, van Gogh seems to fall in love with the sun, grass, and trees. In his hands, trees become weird and agitated, like strange personages, as if out of Frederic Church, “The Wizard of Oz,” or Edward Gorey. They turn and twist and reach, and they are infinitely varied in feel.

The first real show-stoppers, though, are a grouping of three small heads from 1885 that are as solid and clear as works by Durer, Daumier, or Rembrandt. In 1885, van Gogh moved to Antwerp, where he enrolled in classes at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. He encountered the works of Rubens, in which van Gogh seems to have rediscovered himself. From here on out, especially after he moved to Paris, in 1886, he advanced with considerable confidence and speed, taking everything in stride.

In the works that follow, van Gogh’s miraculous marks are declarative and exact. He was in command of his increasing repertoire. By 1888, he could get whatever he desired out of hatch marks, smudges, or a sprinkling of dots. Each mark is angled just so, weighted just so, and sparks everything around it. Trees, bushes, haystacks, and smoke plumes; clouds, suns, fields, thatched roofs, and ocean waves all roll and twist; interlock and turn. They swipe the space like scythes. And they appear to dance, to writhe like snakes, even at times to burst into flames. By now van Gogh’s remarkable hand is unmistakable. Yet it all feels natural – never like that of an expressionist; never overstated; never forced. No matter how agitated his forms; no matter how bright his color, light permeates his landscapes. Foliage is naturally dense yet open. Wind can be felt rustling through grasses, clouds, and trees.

Not all of the van Gogh drawings at the Met are completely successful, at least not before 1885. Yet every one of them is genuine, heartfelt, and unique. And together they tell us about the development of a master. They show how an artist wrestles with his influences and with himself; how he discovers order and beauty in a world of chaos. They also reveal to us what drawing at its highest state can do. Van Gogh may not have been able to deal with the intensities of the world, but he damn sure knew how to bring those intensities to us.

Until December 31 (1000 Fifth Avenue, at 82nd Street, 212-535-7710).