Vincent van Gogh

That’s why we love him.

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

I’m still plenty daft enough to not want to know what my birthday treat is. (Not that I get loads, to be honest). So when the ‘kids’ – my wunnerful offspring, aged 21 and 25 – tell me firstly to keep Weekend X free and then ‘get my ass to London’, I do, after a week of supporting my somewhat ailing mum, Up North. There’s nearly an accommodation trauma (none of us are quite in the position to book hotels) but in fact this works out fabulously: we can stay at one of my soul-bro’s, in Walthamstow. We arrive Friday.

We do stuff; lots of walking around both locally and in the city proper. Riverside, Spitalfields, coupla bars – all that. No hints dropped *at all* and none asked for… until I hear it’s a Sunday morning do.

Oh. So not the Cure or Bunnymen gig I had maybe posted highish on the list of possibles. Sunday morning? Outdoors, I wonder? But again don’t ask. I settle into just enjoying the friends-and-family thing, with maybe just the thought that Somerset House, for a wildish and medium-dangerous dollop of skating might be where we’re headed. (We went about 15 years ago and we’ve been skating in Spain (weirdly) and Finland (I think), so the kids know I’m mad for it). That would be fun – and kinda suitably silly for a juvenile delinquent like my good self.

But no. We’re on the tube and daughter reads out part of an incoming message. With details. Wow. I learn we’re off to the Van Gogh, at the National Gallery. Oof. That’s BIG.

Another great friend, ‘knowing I like me art’ has very kindly used her membership to get us in. 9.45, Sunday morning. We fill out Saturday with more yomping and gawping and then drop into the Do Not Adjust Your Set-ville that is ‘God’s Own Junkyard’, in a spectacularly unassuming mini-industrial estate in Walthamstow, for just a couple of gobstruck sherberts. (It’s wild; it’s neon; it’s a mad treat). Then we have to be up, early-doors.

Regular readers will know I am a clown… but I do like my art. I’m both dumb and serious over that. My general punkiness means that I can’t stand the pretence and the exclusivity that separates too much art from us Normal Guys ‘ n Gals, but I have been known to attend galleries and even read – like, choose to read – cosmically deep and dense stuff about art theory and history. I find it tough, but cleansing – yup – and inspiring.

I can’t help but be drawn to relatively modern art – say from 1870-odd forwards – and this may be because I’m suspicious of allegory and pomp, finding it easier to identify with things beyond or closer than that whole history-painting malarkey. And I should say that despite being conflicted in the modern, Guardian-reading way about the Industry that is Van Gogh, I have loved the boy Vinny for decades.

So wow. Being a resident of faaar West Wales, I may have been distantly aware of the ‘exhibition of the century’ up The Smoke. Maybe. But, being privileged in so many other respects, we pseudo-taffs let these things go easily enough. It’s that other world. We only go there rarely: until we’re there, walking to Walthamstow Central; then Victoria-lining(?) it to within a coupla stops and Bakerloo-ing it the rest. Blimey. Trafalgar Square… and not many pigeons! Ten minutes early so the daughter needs a coffee. Pret, just on the corner. Then meet J and son C and in.

I did cheat the night before and have a look. But skimmed, so as not to know which of the truly big-hitters were on show. Logged that it was called ‘Poets and Lovers’: not much more.

I’d forgotten what a building this was. Like a roman town, or an empire, or some appalling/wonderful stately home. Bloody enormous – but we’re in. Inevitably, we get a strong full-frontal at the gift shop as we spin off into the gallery. It’s quiet: not for long, but it’s quiet. The ceiling is eight miles high and the space is open; until your eyes begin to train in. Ok. There are just the three paintings, here in Room 1. Do I read the bumpf? Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s crap. This is good. I’m going to use it to cut to the quick.

‘The careful planning behind Van Gogh’s art extended to creating works in groups or series, and to thinking about how these might be displayed both at his home in Arles and for exhibition in Paris. By gathering a selection of these paintings – many of which are amongst his most famous and beloved creations – and showing them alongside his carefully developed works on paper, a less familiar Van Gogh emerges; an intellectual artist of lucid intention, deliberation and great ambition’.

The lover and the poet are both in Room 1; Lieutenant Millier and Eugene Boch respectively. Between them is ‘The Poet’s Garden’, all from Arles, 1888. I’m familiar with the two portraits, as many would be. Again the wall-verbals are helpful, pointing us at what may be the central revelation (or re-affirmation) around knowledge, planning, licence, intention. These are wonderful, expressive, thrillingly ambitious symbols. Do not underestimate this man – even in the loving of his work. We are already being pointed towards the idea that despite being bi-polar/’mad’/intermittently stricken, Van Gogh was a supremely intelligent man, making brilliant, outrageous choices.

‘Boch was ideal as he had a narrow face that reminded him of the thirteenth-century poet Dante. The deep blue sky (was) intended to express a man who dreams great dreams, was essential to the symbolism of the work’.

There is knowledge here: there are things by design. This is not a loony.

Room 2 contains 17 works on the theme of ‘The Garden: Poetic Interpretations’. These include several that most of us will not have seen. (One of the glories – yes, bugger it, I WILL use that word! – of this exhibition is that the mighty National, with its world-level clout, has gathered paintings and drawings that may never be seen together again. It’s BIG; it’s astonishing; it’s expansive in a way that’s supposed to be kinda thrilling – and it is). There are inks and chalks and graphites alongside the great, gripping, three-dimensional oils, here, depicting gardens in Arles, close to Yellow House and at the asylum at Saint-Remy. Some of the oils are staggeringly loaded. (One or two *really did* anticipate Jackson Pollock for me, in their lush execution). You will need to walk in and out, to feel that texture and then ‘take in the view’.

There is melancholy, both symbolized – for example by the ‘sawn-off tree – and real and felt, through both the rhythm and energy of the pieces and through our basket of knowledge. But again and again we may note what we might rather stiffly call the technical choices amongst and arguably under-pinning the undeniable and radical creativity.

Van Gogh, in a letter to Emile Bernard, describes the sawn-off pine as ‘a dark giant – like a proud man brought low’. The accompanying notes add that he ‘detailed how he combined composition, colour and technique to convey the anxiety felt by his fellow patients at the hospital’. Things are stylised or exaggerated or invented in order to serve the academic(?)/poetic(?)/artistic intention. This is intelligent work; during or adjacent to a period of powerful turmoil.

Room 3 is dripping wonderfully with icons. We are in the Yellow House, which has been conceived in order to host certain paintings in certain places. Sure the overall intention (and here lies much of the tragedy, yes?) was to welcome and impress Gauguin, Bernard or the other painters Vincent hoped to bring to the South. ‘Van Gogh’s Chair’, ‘Starry Night over the Rhone’ and ‘The Sower’ are side by side on the same wall. They are show-stopping, of course. All are moments: ‘Starry Night’ for its beautiful, rich depth (in so-o many senses) and ‘The Sower’ for its almost shocking design – part Japonais, part colour-field.

But it goes on. ‘The Yellow House’, ‘The Bedroom’ and *that* ‘Self-Portrait’. Staggering vibrancy, simplicity and earth-shifting heft. And probably driven, essentially, by that desire to furnish the gaff with homely and appropriate pictures! Box ticked.

Room 4 features ‘Montmajour: A Series’. Done in pen or quill or with chalk, on paper (or wove or buff paper, whatever they are), these mark the artist’s fascination for the locality. The moody higher ground and ruins of the abbey stirred something, perhaps with that rich vein of landscape and history and spirituality? Whatever, Van Gogh returned many times to make strikingly different works, some alluding to Zola, some obviously redolent of Japanese art – particularly woodblock printing. But is it just me, or there a sort of equanimity about what’s going on, (in this room), at this moment? (We are still in 1888).

With Room 5 we are back with the theme of ‘Decoration’. And therefore to the idea that Vincent planned – in particular in relation to the Yellow House – but also with regard to how his art should be displayed and seen in Paris. (So more tragedy at the margins). We see two ‘Sunflowers’ pictures flanking ‘La Berceuse’, as Van Gogh intended them to be shown. If we are not blown away enough by that, we can gawp with the specifically poignant wonder that perhaps this artist alone can trigger at paintings such as ‘Portrait of a Peasant’, ‘Oleanders’ or even ‘Still Life with Coffee Pot’, none of which are sad or traumatising per se, but all of which either sink or lift us to a place where a kind of impassioned humility seems in order. Such incredible beauty! The man’s a god.

We see the final chunk of our art – paintings 47-61 (and one pencil/brown ink) – in Room 6. Again there are big-hitters (‘The Arlesienne’ x 2 and a ‘Wheatfield, with Cypresses’) plus a pleasing or revelatory bundle of lesser-known works. (Happy to repeat that this is one of the joys of this National experience). We are reminded – and I may be one who needed this – that not everything was painted outdoors. Indeed the ‘retreat’ into the studio(s), for whatever reason, may well have facilitated bolder choices – in some cases more stylised ones. The notes speak off ‘calligraphic strokes’ and ‘imagined figures’. The artist is taking diabolical liberties, editing, inventing. Meaning supremely conscious choices.

I came away from this sensational exhibition feeling tired, privileged, happy. I also felt strongly that we should be nudging the Van Gogh-ometer yet further from the dominating talk of breakdown and lunacy. This event speaks, skilfully and deliberately, to his intelligence. He may be the most intelligent human (and artist) that ever lived. Maybe that’s why we love him?

Van Gogh: the letters.

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

Our view of van Gogh feels so blanketed in known imagery and so ripe with cliches about art, ‘psychology’ and sentiment that maybe we can’t know what’s real. He’s arguably the one we all have some grip on but given the industry of tragedy and romance that time and coverage has engulfed his life and work in, the temptation may be to sit with our collective understanding – that of a man who couldn’t cope with the depth of his own feelings – rather than delve towards unlikely or potentially less satisfying clarity. Why learn more? Don’t we *just know* that he poured himself into his art more wholly and relentlessly than almost anyone who ever lived, and that therefore it figures the dam burst? Aren’t those central truths true enough and big enough?

They probably are… but given the genuine, affecting, visceral enormity of the man’s achievement, maybe we owe him another look. In this case – and does this sound feeble? Maybe? – via the stuff he wrote.

Yup. I’ve gone back to the letters; specifically the Thames and Hudson ‘Vincent van Gogh, A Life in Letters’ which beautifully and skilfully presents 76 of the 820 surviving missives. Chapeau to the editors – predictably all senior figures at the van Gogh Museum of Amsterdam – who a) select well and b) present compelling, authentic, believable chunks of the extraordinary content. There are plates, of course, and many of the letters feature the sketches that the artist so often embedded (and described so revealingly and copiously) within the text. (Guess what? The sketches alone make this an essential read, for their astonishing, three-dimensional but also emotional/symbolic life).

It’s a fabulous, poignant book and a truly historic record. Hard to imagine that there could be a fuller or more generous account of the business of human expression anywhere. The very first bit of puff inside the cover describes it as ‘A literary masterpiece that would be worth reading even if the paintings were rubbish’ – Jonathon Jones, The Guardian – which saves me a line or twelve. All I would add is that all of us who (with or without vanity) wish to be passably cultured should be well familiar with this material. It may define the word ‘seminal’.

The letters prove that van Gogh was an immensely cultured man, as well as a kind of gloriously honest empathist for peasants and The Lowly. His knowledge of literature, music and art, from Dickens to Delacroix via Wagner or Zola or Rembrandt, was remarkable, but also figured, given the family art business and the profoundly religious, rather scholarly, early home environment. Letters to Theo, his brother and saviour-benefactor, are deeply concerned with habits and trends and meaning in art, as well as the endless supplying of materials and living expenses. Vincent was all of the following; a religious ‘weirdo’ (early-doors); bookworm; philosopher and theorist. All to a high level of intelligence. Meaning the notion we may have of a Troubled Artist-of-the-Soil-and-the-Night Cafe is a poor under-estimation. The guy could think.

He could think and he could learn. He learned to draw: look at the sketches! From a late start he scorched or ground himself towards a kind of revolutionary draughtsmanship. Unique: brilliant; technical but deep and soulful and evocative in a way that may be unrivalled. (Meaning this image of him as a godlike but rather fearsomely crude colourist, devouring our eyes with the coruscating Sunflowers or cavorting Cypresses is again a travesty). Van Gogh worked tirelessly to understand structure and perspective and body: he did this knowing he needed it – and probably before he knew how his facility for ‘figures’ might light up the universe of possibilities (and the universe!) in tandem with his colours from the South. He also unquestionably felt that he had to earn the right to be taken seriously – to emulate or follow the masters – by working incredibly hard, with (somehow) invincible integrity.

His correspondence beyond Theo – with Bernard, Gauguin, Signac and others – confirms both that van Gogh was a theorist and intellectual and that this idea we have of him as a tragic failure in public or commercial terms is also an inadequate view. Sure there was no widespread appreciation of his genius or his work. But the artists swapped paintings and drawings, out of mutual interest and respect. And some of van Gogh’s works were hung, publicly. He earned a little money teaching and what we might now call mentoring. If it’s true he was so brilliantly revolutionary with his painting that the world simply wasn’t ready for him then a) this is surely a familiar tale, in the arts and b) this again hardly counts as failure. He was a powerful source and a focus for discussion around art in the contemporary artistic community whilst he lived.

Despite his tremendous feeling for historical giants such as Rembrandt and Holbein, Vincent both rated and respected modernists and those who challenged: but my god they had to it well, and with conviction. He became something of a semi-detached Impressionists, alongside or parallel to the likes of Bernard and Gauguin and despite his being challenging and undiplomatic (or worse), their correspondence alone validates the intellectual contribution the man from the dull grey North made. Of course Gauguin did play a role in the breakdown at the Yellow House (and did flee, arguably rather ignominiously after the ear-loppage) but the two great painters of colour did continue to exchange letters, after the event. Touchingly, van Gogh, having had a genuinely positive review from the precocious critic Aurier, deferred very much to Gauguin’s superiority and importance.

With regard to the ending (that we all feel we know something about), a few thoughts. Look at the letters, look at the paintings. The latter, from the yellow but iconically ‘purple patch’ at the house in Arles, to the ravishing-but-maaaybe-tormented cypresses and the last cornfields, painted in Saint-Remy or Auvers, are amongst the most affecting works of art in any medium. In both locations the artist was very much ‘in recuperation’, post crises. It’s therefore become classically tragic but let’s not that obscure the quality – the qualities – of the painting. It reaches more of us than almost anything in the entire history of art; this despite not being immediately easy on the eye. The mystery around how van Gogh found a gun, and what *exactly* triggered its use *at that time* does nothing to undermine the sense of hurt and of waste, that registers with all of us, even now.

Having re-read these letters I suspect that the family gathering, to discuss a long-contemplated potential escape for Theo from his unhappy employment (and the subsequent setting-up of an independent art dealership) was instrumental to Vincent’s suicide. Both brothers had been hugely anxious for some time about how they might proceed if some new way was not secured. Theo’s hopes lay with a brother of his wife, Jo… but it was not to be. No agreement meant Theo and family remained vulnerable to his own poor health and material angst, and that meant even less stability for his elder brother.

Scared, disturbed and no doubt feeling somewhat guilty and even responsible for much of Theo’s predicament – he had, after all, been utterly reliant upon him for a decade – Vincent shot himself, not immediately fatally, in a cornfield in Auvers-sur-Oise, dying two days later. Theo was devastated. He also succumbed to mental illness (although it is generally believed this was just a part of a medical picture including advanced, untreated syphilis) and died himself, six months later. It was Theo’s wife who published the letters, in 1914 and went on to further champion Vincent’s art.

Without the letters, the art is godlike. But the letters are huge. I deliberately choose not to direct you to a particular place. Read them all.

Let sleeping gods lie?

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

Most of us have some understanding or some knowledge of the work and the life of Vincent van Gogh. Its essence has been reduced to a kind of coffee-table-friendly caricature of the tragic but inevitable demise of a tortured artist. Whether we as individuals see in him beast or brilliant and radical thinker and actor upon urgent truths, he remains a force; perhaps because though he may have been fauve, he was magnificently the antithesis of faux. What Simon Schama has rather beautifully called his ability to paint “the fullness of our hearts” has set Vincent the wonderstruck loner apart. I have taken no significant poll of the population but feel none is necessary for the following cornball assertion – that he is loved more by more people than almost any artist that ever lived. And this does mean something.

Now, suddenly – or it feels sudden – there is another twist, perhaps, to the story. It seems possible that van Gogh’s predictably(?) messy suicide(?) may need relieving of some of its interrogation marks. Or more likely, that newer questions might be inserted into the parable. But forgive my cynicism if I am reluctant to move from the admittedly highly coloured current understanding; that Vincent may have either accidentally or deliberately shot himself, in either an acutely disturbed moment or a moment of sensationally crystalline tragedy, compounded by poor or inadequate treatment. I simply wonder how, at this distance, safe new truths can replace the existing.

Van Gogh: The Life is an understandably epic look at the life and death of the painter of sunflowers. Authors Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith have allegedly spent ten years researching the book and have reportedly unearthed ‘thousands’ of previously untranslated letters. (Learning this, I did I confess ask myself how even given Van Gogh’s propensity to write almost daily letters, quite that many could lie undiscovered?) But perhaps there I am being cynical. May I balance that notion with the confession that I am one of those who is so drawn to the man’s fires that in my dreams I have swum and then crawled from West Wales to the Cincinnati Art Museum in order to kneel before “Undergrowth with Two Figures” and weep, cathartically. Suspicion and closed-heartedness are not, I promise my chief attributes.

However, the claim the author’s make that the art historian John Rewald, who after visiting Auvers in 1930 concluded that one of two youths is likely to have accidentally shot Vincent has some degree of plausibility. Vincent and the boys were drinking companions – or possibly adversaries. The boys had a dodgy gun; that kind of thing. But can we be sure? At all? Perhaps this theory is more appropriate than actually true; yet another level of curdling tragi-farce. There is the suggestion that Vincent may have willingly taken the rap (to his grave) rather than risk letting a comparative (or at least younger) innocent suffer any punishment. There is quite a lot, I think, of informed speculation.

Yet it may be that my own view of Vincent van Gogh is so full of the unprovable that these further contentions are veritable pillars of the narrative in comparison. I can’t prove that I was moved to tears at the sight of Cypress Trees in a chest-heavingly resonant moment aged about twenty. I can’t prove that there is something invincible in Wheatfield with Crows of 1890. My dreams of a pilgrimage to Cincinatti could be about… baseball. I just doubt it.

I am happy to acknowledge this extraordinary man in many ways – in the following way; by expressing my concern that our feelings are befuddled and interfered with unnecessarily in this matter. Vincent was at once rooted and true and radical to the point of volcanic. Better to stand before the work and be drawn in; by the greatest and most generous and – why not? – the most popular artist who ever graced the earth.