An Arbitrary Colourist, Van Gogh, Poets & Lovers
Exhibition at the National Gallery, 14 September 2024 – 19 January 2025, press preview 11 September; Catalogue of the exhibition, Cornelia Homburg, featuring the essay ‘Art of the Future’; reviewed by Leslie Jones
Le Christ sur le lac de Génésareth, Delacroix, credit Wikipedia
The art critic Paul Mantz described how Eugène Delacroix, in Christ Asleep during the Tempest (1853), achieved a “terrifying” symbolic effect by using blue paint to distinguish Christ’s raiment. In ‘Art of the Future’, likewise, Cornelia Homburg, the curator of this exhibition, observes how Van Gogh used “heightened colour” to “express the intensity, imagination and emotion he wanted to convey in his art”*. “The Provençal landscape, with its intense light and beautiful weather”, was ideally suited to this end and in February 1888, he moved from Paris to Arles. Van Gogh’s objective in moving to the south of France was to set up a studio in the Midi. Other sympatico artists, such as Bernard, Signac and Seurat, would hopefully follow. However, his dream of a “Studio of the South”, a colony of like-minded artists, remained just that.
Gauguin, The Wine Harvest. Human Misery, credit Wikipedia
From 23rd October to 23rd December 1888, Gauguin and Van Gogh lived and worked together in the ‘Yellow House’, the afore mentioned “Studio of the South”, with a guest room decorated with The Sunflowers (1888). Van Gogh agonised at this time how to incorporate memory and imagination into his art rather than merely observe or copy nature. Something of a philosopher manqué, he wrote to Émile Bernard, “imagination is a capacity that must be developed … that enables us to create a more exalting and consoling nature than what just a glance at reality … allows us to perceive” (letter 596, Vangoghletters.org)). Gauguin, who had contemporaneously created The Wine Harvest. Human Misery (1888) entirely from memory, urged Van Gogh to follow suit. In The Sower, accordingly, although he incorporated sketch work of the walled fields visible from his room in the private Maison de Santé in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence (which he entered voluntarily in May 1889), the figure of the sower (indebted to Jean-François Millet, like Delacroix another painter he admired) was drawn from imagination/memory in the studio. And in Memory of the Garden of Etten (Ladies of Arles) (1888), the figures are his mother and sister Willemien, whom he had not seen for years but transposed to a Provençal landscape.
Van Gogh, The Sower, credit Wikipedia
Collaboration with Gauguin evidently helped to free Vincent from the thumb of “vulgar resemblance”. He said of The Sower, “There are many touches of yellow in the soil…but I couldn’t care less what the colours are in reality” (June 1888, quoted in The Guardian, Jonathan Jones, ‘Poets and Lovers review, a riveting rollercoaster ride from Arles to the stars’). As Jones contends, his transformative art tore up the Impressionist rulebook
This is the “first major exhibition devoted to Van Gogh in the National Gallery’s history”. As such, it bears comparison with the 2010 exhibition at the Royal Academy, entitled The Real Van Gogh; the Artist and his Letters (see Quarterly Review, spring 2010, ‘Van Gogh, by himself’, Leslie Jones). Notwithstanding a “bleak narrative”, involving his notorious act of self-mutilation and the falling out with Gauguin, and repeated mental breakdowns requiring hospitalisation, paradoxically Van Gogh’s “southern sojourn” produced “some of the most astonishing paintings of the modern era” (Rachel Spencer, Financial Times, ‘Poets and Lovers review, burning visions from beyond reality’).
Van Gogh, Sunflowers (1888), credit Wikipedia
Each stage of Van Gogh’s chequered career before becoming an artist in 1880, to wit, junior apprentice at international art dealer Goupil & Cie, trainee teacher, would be evangelist etc was a search for his god given calling or Beruf, as posited by Luther and subsequently analysed by Weber in The Protestant Ethic & the Spirit of Capitalism. Ernest Renan maintained that “Man is not placed on the earth merely to be happy…he is here to accomplish great things through society, to arrive at nobleness and to outgrow the vulgarity in which the existence of almost all individuals drags on”. Van Gogh concurred. (Quotation from Renan, letter to Theo dated 8 May 1875, vangoghletters.org, letter 33).
In Wheat Field with Reaper at Sunrise (September 1889), Van Gogh saw “the image of death, in the sense that humanity would be the wheat being reaped…But in this death nothing sad” (letter 800, to Theo 5 & 6 September 1889). Although the suffering and transience bound up in human existence are recurrent themes in Van Gogh’s mature work, he also offered “something consoling, like a piece of music” (letter 673).
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[* (as in Portrait of a Peasant (Patience Escalier) (1888), with its enhanced colours of gold and orange to suggest harvest time). The “painter of the future”, Van Gogh proclaimed, “is a colourist such as there hasn’t been before”, quoted by Emily LaBarge, ‘A New perspective on Van Gogh’s Final Flowering’, New York Times, Sept 13]
