Van Gogh up close
The National Gallery is celebrating its 200th birthday with a very special exhibition. Surprisingly, it’s the first show it’s every mounted devoted to the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh. To be able to look at them intently and quietly, in the privileged conditions of a private view, is quite an experience.
The exhibition is special for other reasons. First, the Gallery succeeded in borrowing many important works from public galleries from around the world, as well as many private collections. The result is startling juxtapositions. Some were intended by the artist but never realised in his lifetime, like the triptych of La berceuse flanked by two Sunflowers, one from the Gallery’s own collection, the other on loan from Philadelphia. Almost half of the works on show I’d never seen before, even in reproduction.
Second, this isn’t a general account of Van Gogh’s artistic career. It concentrates almost exclusively on the two years he spent in the south of France from 1888 to 1890, in Arles and later in the asylum of Saint-Paul de Mausole in Saint-Rémy de Provence. This was a period during which, between episodes of mental collapse, he produced streams of daring new paintings (and drawings) lit by the intense light and bright colours of the Midi.
Third, the curators avoid the traditional critical focus on Van Gogh’s mental states, and how they ‘drove’ him to express his tormented feelings on canvas in this period. Instead, they emphasise how he consciously and deliberately planned his painting around specific themes and his plans for future exhibitions, and how he saw himself as a leading member of the artistic avant-garde. The art’s the thing. It’s his art that Van Gogh concentrates on when he writes letters to others, notably his saintly brother Theo, who supported him practically and morally, and kept him supplied with canvases, paint and brushes. The curators remind us that during his breakdowns Van Gogh could produce nothing, but when he was painting, he was a fully intentional and highly productive artist.
Seeing the exhibition at close quarters, without feeling pressure to move aside for others, means that you can linger on the details of the works, and the individual brush strokes and colours Van Gogh used. He’s an artist who’s wholly unafraid to let you see the ‘workings out’ of his solutions to the problem of putting paint on canvas.
Behind the asylum at Saint-Rémy was a wheatfield, and it’s the crop in the field that most interests Van Gogh in painting Landscape from Saint-Rémy. Above, a giant white cloud with bulbous ‘knobs’ is a sign that a violent gale has recently blown through the field, leaving the plants bent, forward and back, in all directions. Counterpointed clumps of curly brushstrokes, combined with rapid changes of colour, build a picture of nature in turmoil. With different colours this could easily be a stormy sea scene. Van Gogh’s own description of the painting’s theme was ‘a landscape of extreme simplicity’ (simplicity was for him a great virtue).
The green vineyard shows an even more complex interplay of extravagant growth. Above, a crystalline, sapphire blue sky, lightened by white passages and darkened by crows. Below, a riot of vine branches and leaves reaches out to us, all the way from the distance, where women with red parasols are walking, to the very front of the picture, where you can make out individual leaves. Colours flash and crash together. Van Gogh thought it worthy to be exhibited in the Yellow House in Arles.
Van Gogh devotes a whole series of works to olive trees. He was shocked that Gauguin, who stayed with him in the Yellow House till they fell out, painted himself as Jesus in his Christ in the Garden of Olives. His own, more indirect and respectful approach was to reflect in paint on Christ’s suffering by recalling the biblical Garden. In The olive trees (1889), where a giant white cloud passes through the sky like a god, the tree trunks writhe in agony, as they surf the rolling green and white breakers of the earth below.
Among the series of still lifes is a majolica jug full of Oleanders, their spiky leaves punctuating the rich pink blossoms, for Van Gogh a symbol of luxuriant love. On the table below lie two books. The top one is a novel by one of his favourite authors, Émile Zola, La joie de vivre (1884). Maybe he saw parallels between himself and the book’s heroine, Pauline, who, despite the many pains and tragedies of her life, succeeds in hanging on to her optimism and concern for others.
Yellow, though, was the supreme colour of the south for Van Gogh, and sunflowers the ultimate symbol of love and joy. He painted his Sunflower series in a sense of heightened expectation, as he waited for Gauguin to join him in the Yellow House. This building was now to be a shared home as well as a ‘Studio of the South’. The Philadelphia Sunflower has a green-blue background, with a broken-stemmed flowerhead at odds with the other, blazingly upright blooms. The National Gallery version in the pair is more radical, yellow-on-yellow. It caused Gauguin to exclaim, ‘Merde, merde! Everything is yellow! I don’t know what painting is any longer.’
The sunflower paralleled the sun itself, and in Van Gogh’s paintings the southern sun suddenly grew in size, brightness and significance. In The sower a gigantic halo-like sun hangs over the head of the farmer, throwing his shaded body into near darkness. Its origin was Jean-François Millet’s Sower, but Van Gogh abandons that picture’s realist elements, simplifies his composition, and evokes the Japanese artists he so admired in the reddish blossoms of the central tree.
Several years ago we visited the old asylum in Saint-Rémy, where you can see Van Gogh’s room and the viewpoints for many of the pictures he painted outside. Afterwards we went up the road to see the impressive remains, including a large funerary monument and a triumphal arch, of the Roman town of Glanum. Van Gogh never seems to have taken any interest in any of this. He was the very opposite of a traditional, picturesque painter. His interests were entirely in the present, and his concerns much more urgent.