Few written documents have the power to immerse readers in the mind of an artist — to get at the heart of how an artist thinks. This is partly because nothing can get us closer to art than art itself: Everything else is ancillary or anecdotal. It is also because few artists with literary gifts choose to put pen to paper, when they could be putting brush to canvas or chisel to marble. There are exceptions: Leonardo’s notebooks, Delacroix’s journals, Klee’s Bauhaus teaching notebooks, and van Gogh’s letters all come to mind as chief literary works that also help open us up to the experience of art.

“Painted With Words: Vincent van Gogh’s Letters to Émile Bernard,” a lively and scholarly exhibit that opens tomorrow at the Morgan Library & Museum, celebrates the power of both the artist’s words and his art. Curated and lovingly installed by Jennifer Tonkovich, the show corresponds with the publication of the book “Vincent van Gogh Painted With Words: The Letters to Émile Bernard” (Rizzoli, 384 pages, $50). Written by the van Gogh Museum curator Leo Jansen, the fascinating book, which serves as this show’s catalog, is the most thorough treatment yet of a selection of van Gogh’s letters. It is the first in a projected series that will, by 2009, translate, annotate, and reprint the complete correspondence of the artist.

Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) wrote approximately 800 letters, mostly to his younger brother Theo. He also corresponded with other family members and friends, as well as with artists, including Gauguin. His letters convey in clear and poetic prose the practical, passionate, and spiritual impulses involved with the making of art. They show how artists respond directly to nature, working metaphorically with structure, symbol, rhythm, and color. And they document a fervent shift in art from Realism to Modernism, written by one of Modernism’s founding fathers — a painter who was cited by Matisse as being responsible for restituting color with emotive power. They convey also how van Gogh, after becoming a successful art dealer and failed minister, eventually found God in painting.

Many of the most important and beautifully written letters were penned during the last two years of the artist’s life. It was then, after van Gogh had left Paris for the south of France, away from the city’s distractions — red meat, wine, dance halls, and prostitutes — that he was able to clear his head. He wrote down his convictions about art and life in letters to Theo and to the French artist and poet Émile Bernard (1868–1941).

Bernard, who remained in Paris, was 15 years van Gogh’s junior. Van Gogh met him in 1886 and took a liking to the artist, treating him not unlike a long-distance apprentice. It is the famous cache of 20 never-before-exhibited letters written by van Gogh to Bernard between December 1887 and November 1889 (none of Bernard’s letters survive) that is the subject of the Morgan’s show. Nineteen of the letters, which belong to Eugene and Clare Thaw, have been promised to the Morgan. They, along with 22 paintings, drawings, and watercolors that the two artists discussed or exchanged, make up the Morgan’s exhibit.

One of the common pitfalls with van Gogh exhibits is that his fluid, insightful, and often penetratingly self-reflective prose is used to emphasize particular aspects of his life and character — the selfmutilation, the schizophrenia — over the genius of his work. This back and forth creates an environment in which his paintings become illustrative proof of the tormented artist’s soul. This show is unusual in that it gives equal weight to his art, his letters, and his thought. Perfectly placed at the Morgan, an intimate venue that has long encouraged the perusal of both image and text, epistolary documents and illustrated manuscripts, “Painted With Words” demands that you slow down and read what van Gogh has written, in the hopes that you will also be able to take in thoroughly what he has drawn and painted. The installation, which offers full translations of the letters, many of which are illustrated, marries image with text, providing us with an immersion in the full twin powers — writing and painting — of van Gogh’s genius.

In the letters to Bernard are oftquoted lines such as, “The most beautiful pictures are those one dreamsaboutwhensmokingpipes in bed, but which one will never paint.” But we are also reminded by the show that it was during the period of the two artists’ correspondence that many of van Gogh’s greatest and most innovative pictures were created.

Van Gogh discusses, draws thumbnail sketches, or includes finished drawings of such masterpieces as “The Starry Night,” “Wheatfield with Setting Sun,” “Mousmé,SittinginaCaneChair,” “The Bedroom at Arles,” and “The Night Café.” “Zouave, Half Length” (1888), an oil portrait as clear, bright, and bold as any van Gogh ever painted, is one of a handful of masterpieces on view at the Morgan. Anchoring the exhibit, the portrait’s frontal impact and its competitiveness between flatness and volume are straight out of a Byzantine Madonna.

The relationship between the two artists was not without tension, but it was also mutually beneficial: van Gogh introduced Bernard to Japanese prints, which had an enormous impact on that artist. Van Gogh invited Bernard to the Yellow House in Arles (Bernard never made it) and he counseled the younger artist, writing passionately about art, literature, religion, southern light, color, army life, and clean living. And van Gogh warned Bernard about thedangersoftoomuchsex, which would drain him of his artistic prowess.

Bernard, in turn, introduced van Gogh to Toulouse-Lautrec. In time, though, he shined not as a painter but as an art critic. Even before van Gogh’s suicide in 1890, Bernard became one of the chief spokesmen for van Gogh. He wrote about the artist, mounted shows of his work, and published his letters.

This is all despite the fact that van Gogh broke off relations with Bernard, seemingly a lost cause, because he had begun painting illustrative, sentimental religious scenes. In the last letter van Gogh chastised his protégé: After a long description, in which van Gogh personifies the colors in one of his own paintings, he warns: “It is — no doubt — wise, right, to be moved by the Bible.” However, “to give an impression of anxiety, you can do it without heading straight for the historical garden of Gethsemane; in order to offer a consoling and gentle subject it is not necessary to depict the figures from the Sermon on the Mount.”

Van Gogh was right about Bernard as an artist. Bernard’s paintings are generally lukewarm at best, and they are in danger in the exhibit of being subsumed by van Gogh’s heat. That heat includes amazing ink sketches of landscapes, and a painting of olive groves, in which churning fields suggest writhing snakes and seas of fire; gorgeous, annotated thumbnails of larger masterpieces; and van Gogh’s “Self Portrait” (1886), a stippled picture with burning turquoise eyes. It was made in Paris shortly before the artist had merged Impressionism, Northern heft, invented color, and the lightness of Japanese prints into something wholly new.

Van Gogh’s letters, like his pictures, reinforce that art is visual, expressive, and intuitive; yet they also emphasize the fact that art is ordered, logical, and rational. The making of art, like the experience of art, is a titillation of the mind no less than the senses. Van Gogh’s writings cannot explain or replace the experience of his paintings and drawings; but there is something reassuring about the power of the artist’s word when, standing before a work of his art, words fail us.

Tomorrow through January 6 (225 Madison Ave., between 36th and 37th streets, 212-685-0008).