The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters - Assignment Example

The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters Today, Vincent Van Gogh is widely regarded as one ofthe most famous artists of all time. His talent, use of color and heavy use of impasto to help illustrate his vision and emotion regarding his subject has long inspired artists of all types to study his work. He is, perhaps, the most famous post-impressionist, giving birth to the style known as Expressionism thanks to his emotive form of creating images. Most lay-persons in the general community are able to name at least one of his works despite the fact that his paintings command some of the highest prices in the marketplace. Reproductions of his work appear on posters, calendars, mouse pads, and other widespread consumer items. His influence was especially strong on the French Fauvists and German Expressionists immediately following his death. Even those works not immediately known today are quickly recognized by his unique style and approach, yet Van Gogh himself saw little of this success or popularity while he was alive. The modern-day impression of the troubled yet brilliant artist stems largely from Van Gogh’s history. Painting in an almost frenzied emotional state, using his brush strokes to help evince these emotions in his finished product, sometimes with enough fervor to leave bristles stuck in the paint, Van Gogh’s tragic life is highlighted in the modern mind with his dramatic act of mutilating his ear with a razor. However, if Van Gogh had realized the success and impact he would have on future generations, he may not have experienced such despair. The exhibition currently on view at the Royal Academy of Arts, “The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters”, strives to illustrate the close connection between the artist and his emotive style as it is expressed through his letters in conjunction with the paintings he was creating at that time. The aims of the exhibition are to demonstrate the artist’s genius with ink as he expresses himself through his letters, making it clear how he felt about the colors he used, the observations he made and the lucid way in which he saw the world. Its central argument is that Van Gogh was not a raving artistic maniac but instead a thoughtful, brilliant conveyor of thoughts. It intends to show that Van Gogh’s brilliance was contained in his continuous revolution of thought. One assumption made that is conveyed by the form of display is the sudden transformation Van Gogh made when he moved to Paris. This is shown as the switch is made from one gallery to the next just at the dividing line in the letters where Van Gogh made his move and where his paintings came alive with new color and exploration and made possible by the show’s chronological organization. During the span of his short artistic career, Van Gogh produced at least 1700 works, 900 drawings and 800 paintings still survive. Among these are 40 self-portraits, made both before and after his ‘ear incident’. However, he was only able to find a buyer for one painting during his lifetime, proving to be highly discouraging to the artist, whose last recorded words were “But what’s the use?” (Wallace, 1969: 7). He studied art in his homeland for some time, although essentially self-taught, and consistently alienated his benefactors through a steadfast refusal to paint what was popular in favor of illustrating the plight of the peasants. His heavy use of impasto emerged during this early period, but his colors remained the darkened tones of the Dutch painters. It wasn’t until he left Holland in 1885, following his father’s death, that he began to see color in a different light. His association with other artists in Paris especially opened his eyes to a new use of color and exploration of technique during this period. He lived with his brother Theo and became acquainted with many of that eras more famous impressionists, then struggling artists much like himself. Pissarro was the patriarch of the band, showing many of these artists his techniques and discussing his approaches with them. Even this early, Pissarro recognized Van Gogh’s potential, both as an artist and as a possible mental patient (Wallace, 1969: 52). He also became acquainted with Toulouse-Loutrec, whose precise lines, bold blocks of solid color and exciting use of line reflected the strong Japanese influence that had hit Paris at the time. Van Gogh was also excited by Georges Seurat’s Divisionist technique, particularly paying attention to his scientific theories of complementary colors. However, Van Gogh considered his greatest friend to be Paul Gauguin, five years older than Vincent and a man of culture, wealth and family who gave it all up to pursue his altruistic visions of art. With a growing antagonism developing between himself and his brother Theo, who had been sharing his apartment with him, Vincent moved to Arles to pursue his painting in 1888. Van Gogh first acknowledged his encroaching madness in a letter to his brother Theo in October of 1888 as he was living in Arles and expecting the arrival of his friend and fellow artist Gauguin. Here, Van Gogh managed to rent a small yellow house for himself. The brilliant colors of this house, which he described to Theo as “the yellow color of fresh butter on the outside with glaringly green shutters; it stands in the full sunlight in a square which has a green garden with plane trees, oleanders and acacias. And it is completely whitewashed inside, and the floor is made of red tiles. And over it there is the intensely blue sky” (cited in Wallace, 1969: 94), reawakened Van Gogh’s dream of creating an artist’s commune. Letters written by Gauguin during this time indicate an increasingly unstable behavior pattern coming from the already difficult artist, yet Van Gogh’s letters to Theo betray none of this change in attitude. Gauguin’s writings indicate a titanic clash of personalities – a great untidiness in housekeeping, material maintenance and finances. He describes Van Gogh’s condition upon his arrival as floundering. “With all his yellows and violets, all this work with complementaries … he only achieved soft, incomplete and monotonous harmonies; the sound of the trumpet was lacking. I undertook the task of explaining things to him, which was easy for me, for I found a rich and fruitful ground … From that day Van Gogh made astonishing progress; he seemed to become aware of all that was in him, and thence came all of the series of sunflowers after sunflowers in brilliant sunshine” (Gauguin cited in Wallace, 1969: 96). It was during this period that Van Gogh produced his Sunflower series as well as paintings such as The Chair – bright, stable images filled with color and light. By this later period, Van Gogh’s technique had evolved into a highly expressive yet quickly executed procedure that nevertheless remained focused on subject and color as emotive essentials. “It was his method to fuse what he saw, and what he felt, as quickly as possible into statements that were revelations of himself” (Wallace, 1969: 7). In many ways, this technique alone reflected the inner nature of the man himself, prone to violent tempers, frantic energy and brilliant observation fused into one flesh. In some ways, this method of working was brought about by the special conditions he encountered in Arles. The mistral winds that caused his canvasses to move while he painted forced him to either stake them down or work on his knees with his canvas lying flat on the ground as well as to work quickly to capture the scene before the wind drove him indoors again. He could often be found working at night as well, when the winds typically died down, with candles stuck into the brim of his hat to provide light for his paintings. His approach to painting was evidently quite different from his approach to drawing as was observed by one of his few friends in Arles, Lieutenant P. Milliet who wrote, “This fellow who had a great taste and talent for drawing became abnormal as soon as he touched a brush … He painted too broadly, paid no attention to details, did not draw first … He replaced drawing by colors” (cited in Wallace, 1969: 92). In this period, Van Gogh almost never made preliminary sketches on the canvas prior to splashing it with color. Instead, he drew with his brushes and applied his paints in ways that would create the contours he wished to create of their own accord. In his eagerness ‘to exaggerate the essential, and purposely leave the obvious things vague,’ he worked with dazzling haste and remarked that he had ‘no system at all. It hit the canvas with irregular touches of the brush, which I leave as they are. Patches of thickly laid on color, spots of canvas left uncovered, here and there with portions that are left absolutely unfinished, repetitions, savageries … Working directly on the spot all the time, I try to grasp what is essential in the drawing – later I fill in the spaces that are bounded by contours – either expressed or not, but in any case felt – with tones that are also simplified, by which I mean that all that is going to be soil will share the same violet-like tone, that the whole sky will have a blue tint.’ (Van Gogh cited in Wallace, 1969: 93). The ‘spaces’ that were left behind, those broad flat plains of color that characterize much of his paintings, were filled with the characteristic latticework brush strokes that have become the telling mark of a Van Gogh painting. In some cases, these strokes became ‘haloes’ that rippled out from a face, a star, a sun or a moon or other expressive marks that indicate Van Gogh’s emotions regarding the subject at hand. “Far from having ‘no system at all,’ he developed a style so distinctive that even a layman can recognize his unsigned canvases almost as readily as those bearing his name” (Wallace, 1969: 93). Although the only reports regarding Van Gogh’s initial breakdown come from the dubious accounts provided by Gauguin, there is physical evidence that Van Gogh was beginning to lose his mind as on December 23, 1888, Van Gogh slashed his left ear with a razor and presented it to a prostitute before running off. He was found the next morning sleeping in his bed, alive but not expected to live long after his transfer to the hospital. He eventually recovered from his loss of blood, but began showing more and more signs of mental illness. He suffered another collapse in February of 1889 for which he was again hospitalized and then released. This time, he reported hearing strange unearthly sounds and voices and was convinced that someone was trying to kill him. Refusing to admit anything was chronically wrong with him, he again returned to his painting. Citizens of Arles, however, took offense at his strange behaviors and petitioned the mayor to have him locked in the hospital ward, which was done, removing him again from his work. After a visit from the artist Paul Signac at the request of Theo, Van Gogh was once again permitted to paint, but he admitted to feeling a much greater sense of anxiety and sadness following this episode. As a result, arrangements were made for him to take up residence at Saint-Remy, a mental hospital approximately 15 miles from Arles. He was admitted on May 8, 1889 with a special permission to continue his paintings in a second room that was assigned to him. He was also permitted to roam the countryside with a guard and it was during these walks that he became enamored of the cypress trees. “At Saint-Remy he was powerfully drawn to nature under stress: huge whirling clouds, bent and gesticulating trees, hills and ravines alive and turbulent. Sometimes he combined this agitation with quiet sadness” (Wallace, 1969: 144). After two months at the hospital, Van Gogh had shown few signs of relapse and was allowed to return to Arles on a day trip to collect paintings and supplies he had left there. However, shortly afterward, he suffered another attack, this time one severe enough that only the interference of his guards kept him from killing himself and from which it took him several weeks to recover. His attacks continued on a regular basis for the remainder of the year he spent in the asylum, producing paintings between each bout as much as he was able. Finding life at Saint-Remy intolerably constrictive, Van Gogh moved for the last time in May of 1890, this time to Auvers. After having received news of Theo’s misfortunes in Paris and perhaps fearing he was becoming too much of a burden to his brother’s growing family, Van Gogh walked toward the wheat fields on July 27, 1890 with his easel and paints and with a revolver in his pocket. He shot himself in the abdomen standing behind a manure pile and returned to his little room with the bullet in his gut. It took him 36 hours to die, but he died with Theo at his bedside. References Royal Academy of Arts. “The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters.” Wallace, Robert. (1969). The World of Van Gogh: 1853-1890. Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books. Read More