The Royal Academy of Arts’ The Real Van Gogh exhibition, which opened on January 23, 2010, is reportedly the first major loan exhibition of the works of this great artist that has been seen in London in over forty years. In light of this fact, it might be thought that the exhibition needs no further justification, at least not for an institution “whose purpose is to promote the creation, enjoyment and appreciation of the visual arts through exhibitions, education and debate”. [1] Certainly its attractions were described in traditional aesthetic terms in some of the Academy’s pre-publicity, the artist Maggie Hambling venturing in a radio interview that
people are going to come out of this exhibition, if they’ve spent time with these pictures, looking at trees in a different way, looking at streets in a different way, looking across a landscape in a different way…it transforms the way we look at the world, and you can’t ask more than that. [2]
The title of the exhibition, however, suggests that there is, in fact, more to the exhibition than this. The Academy is purporting to show the ‘real’ Van Gogh, presumably as distinct from the Van Gogh of popular imagination. Its chosen means of so doing is by placing 35 or so of Van Gogh’s extant letters alongside 65 paintings and 30 drawings of his, thus allowing visitors to get “extremely close to him”, according to the art critic Martin Gayford, “near enough to register the surging highs and lows of his emotional thermometer, to follow his swirling thoughts, almost to hear his voice”. [3] In this, the Academy has been inspired by the launch of an impressive new edition of Van Gogh’s letters in hardcopy and via the internet, [4] and by an exhibition, similar in conception though not in execution, entitled Van Gogh’s Letters: The Artist Speaks hosted by Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum in 2009. [5]
So who was the Van Gogh of popular memory, the image of which this exhibition seeks to dispel? Simply put, he was a self-harming and ultimately suicidal genius, whose derangement served to feed his creativity. This account relies for its plausibility not so much upon the most traumatic (and well-known) details of Van Gogh’s biography as it does upon a lazy assumption about the general capacity of mental ill-health to act as a crucible for artistic insight and endeavour. According to the critic Frank Whitford, it is responsible for “the widespread belief that, because Van Gogh endured so much, living in poverty and at the brink of mental collapse, it is every artist’s duty to experience the same if he is to approach greatness”, as well as for “the view that, because Van Gogh was so passionate a painter, he never soberly considered what he was doing”. [6]
Van Gogh’s letters give the lie to these damaging assumptions. They are not the disjointed scribblings of someone whose grasp of his senses was unreliable at best. Instead they reveal “a profoundly thoughtful man who lived a life of single-minded dedication as he painstakingly taught himself to be an artist”, according to Anne Dumas, the curator of the Royal Academy’s exhibition. “His letters are a work of great lucidity, an intimate meditation on life and art expressed in the most immediate, eloquent and often moving words”. [7] Many of them (of which numbers 650, 678, 732 and 870 may be cited as examples) attest to the artist’s mental distress, certainly, but also to the fact that he maintained his extraordinary creative output despite his experience of depressive illness (episodes of which interrupted his work), not because of it. “I believe that at present we must paint nature’s rich and magnificent aspects”, Van Gogh wrote to his sister in 1888. “We need good cheer and happiness, hope and love. The uglier, older, meaner, iller, poorer I get, the more I wish to take my revenge by doing brilliant colour, well-arranged, resplendent”. [8]
Moreover, the letters show that Van Gogh’s feeling for light and colour predates his embrace of art as a vocation, reaching back to his early life as a would-be evangelical preacher. On Boxing Day, 1878, while a Protestant missionary in rural Belgium, he wrote to his brother Theo
You surely understand that there are no paintings here in the Borinage, that in general they [its residents] haven’t the slightest idea of what a painting is…but this doesn’t mean that this isn’t a very special and very picturesque country…full of character. There was snow these last few days, the dark days before Christmas. Then everything was reminiscent of the medieval paintings by Peasant Bruegel…and by so many others who were so good at expressing the singular effect of red and green, black and white. [9]
Anne Dumas is surely right to observe that “both his words and his painting have the same immediacy of expression. What comes across is his incredibly intense response to nature – a kind of epiphany – an exaltation of nature that never gets tarnished…He channels his religiosity into his art”. [11] She is less astute, perhaps, in pronouncing elsewhere that Van Gogh “went through a period, really, of virtual religious mania” in the 1870s. “The letters are stuffed with quotations from the Bible…but there’s a big turning-point in 1879-80 when he really hits upon the idea of becoming an artist”. [11] The letters do indeed bear plaintive witness to a turning-point in Van Gogh’s life in the wake of the forced termination of his preaching career.
You mustn’t think that I’m rejecting this or that; in my unbelief I’m a believer, in a way, and though having changed I am the same, and my torment is none other than this, what could I be good for, couldn’t I serve and be useful in some way?...Such a person doesn’t always know himself what he could do, but he feels by instinct, ‘I’m good for something, even so! I feel I have a raison d’être! I know that I could be a quite different man! For what then could I be of use, for what could I serve? There’s something within me, so what is it?’ [12]
Yet the pathologization of the dominating ideas of Van Gogh’s early life proposed by Dumas (into “religious mania”) is no more supportable than the pathologization of his artistic career (as a “mad genius”) that her exhibition appears to be designed to combat. [13]
The Academy’s Real Van Gogh exhibition is presented in seven rooms which follow a broadly chronological sequence through the artist’s life and works, and broadly characterise each successive period. Room 1 is devoted to ‘Dutch landscapes’, for example, and Room 2 to ‘The Peasant in Action’. The walls of each room are painted in different colours, presumably to help orient the visitor to this progression. In each room, the artist’s paintings and drawings are placed alongside a selection of his letters, some of which contain drawings and many of which contain details of the technical means employed to achieve particular effects. Labels provide English translations of extracts from these letters. This juxtaposition left me with an abiding impression of a hard-won talent, rather than one which had somehow sprung fully-formed from a tortured psyche. Not only does this exhibition make the case against Van Gogh’s art emerging from ‘madness’, it also makes the case against it emerging from ‘genius’, and in so doing it challenges the very notion of ‘genius’ as an entirely trans-historical, trans-cultural phenomenon. According to the critic Tom Sutcliffe, it shows Van Gogh as a “really talented ‘Sunday painter’…[who] crammed fourteen Sundays into every week of his life until he transformed himself into this most extraordinary artist”. [14] Perhaps, then, ‘genius’ is earned more often than it is bestowed.
This insight, more than the details of Van Gogh’s biography, is the true focus of the exhibition. [15] Indeed, none of the letters cited in this review’s account of his life form part of it. Those that are on show have been included because of a technical link with a drawing or painting on display. To take one example, in Room 7 Van Gogh’s letter to his brother Theo of 25 June 1889 (on loan from the Van Gogh Museum) is displayed alongside his Cypresses (on loan from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art) because the letter describes the concept behind the painting.
The cypresses still preoccupy me, I’d like to do something with them like the canvases of the sunflowers…the green has such a distinguished quality. It’s the dark patch in a sun-drenched landscape, but it’s one of the most interesting dark notes, the most difficult to hit off exactly that I can imagine. [16]
In the event, ‘dark patch’ cannot do justice to the vortex-like intensity and tactile depth that Van Gogh actually achieved with this image. Nor, incidentally, can any two-dimensional reproduction of this painting. The heavy impasto technique employed by the artist leaves a vivid impression and makes this image (for me at least) one of the most arresting in the entire exhibition.
The exhibition is supported by a published catalogue – which, as well as being a guide to its contents, is a weighty piece of scholarship in its own right. [17] It run until April 18. So far it appears to have won nothing but critical acclaim, and rightly so – the luminosity of Van Gogh’s vision has in no way been dimmed by its curatorial touch. Perhaps to say that the exhibition has transformed the way this reviewer looks at trees and streets would be to claim too much. Or perhaps I did not spend enough time with the paintings for that? Either way, I have been inspired to keep looking.
Colin Gale is an archivist, a student of museum studies and a lay member of Rochester Diocesan Synod.
Notes
[1]About the Royal Academy of Arts. Retrieved from http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/about/
[2]Rotsos, A. and Baxter, L. (Eds.) ( January 20, 2010). Today programme. BBC Radio 4.
[3]Gayford, M. (Winter 2009). A beautiful mind. RA Magazine, number 105, p. 46. Retrieved from http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/ra-magazine/emag/emag.html
[4]Jansen, L., Luijten, H. and Bakker, N. (2009). Vincent Van Gogh: The Complete Letters. London: Thames and Hudson. Retrieved from http://vangoghletters.org/vg/
[5]Whitford, F. (December 18/25, 2009). Dark powers. Times Literary Supplement, no. 5568/69, pp. 4-5; Gayford, M., Soriano, K. and Dumas, A. (Winter 2009). Behind the scenes. RA Magazine, number 105, p. 50
[6]Whitford (December 18/25, 2009), p. 4.
[7]Dumas, A. (Winter 2009). Poet in paint and painter in prose. RA Magazine, number 105, p. 60.
[8]Jansen, Luijten and Bakker, 2009, vol. 4, p. 265.
[9]ibid. vol. 1, p. 236.
[10]Dumas, A. (Winter 2009), p. 60.
[11]Bland, K. (Prod.). ( December 29, 2009). Van Gogh: Seeing Red. BBC Radio 4.
[12]Jansen, Luijten and Bakker, 2009, vol. 1, pp. 247, 249.
[13]Even if “the religious faith of Van Gogh’s early years was later replaced by a pantheistic view of nature”, as the introductory text to Room 6 of the The Real Van Gogh exhibition states.
[14]MacLeod, T. (Prod.) (January 23, 2010). Saturday Review. BBC Radio 4.
[15]A ‘Reading Room’ devoted to a chronology of his life in Room 6 notwithstanding.
[16]Jansen, Luijten and Bakker, 2009, vol. 5, p. 46.
[17]Royal Academy (2010). The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters. London: Thames and Hudson.
These posts are by guest authors for Fulcrum