By Victor Greto
Quick: name the artist who personifies suffering and being misunderstood; who descended into madness and cut off all or part of his right ear; who shot and killed himself; and whose paintings now sell in the multi-millions of dollars.
Easy, right? Especially after the ear part.
Vincent van Gogh is back – although he never actually left – at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in a major exhibition of some rarely-seen later work, Van Gogh Up Close, organized by the museum and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. The 40 landscapes and still-lifes have never been seen together and reveal, the exhibition’s co-curator Jennifer Thompson says, the artist in a different light.
“He is one of the most celebrated and popular artists, but we are taking a new look at his work, noted occasionally in the scholarship, but never examined fully,” Thompson said. “We have chosen to bring together a large group of pictures of him zooming in on nature, and what we’ve found is that these pictures are some of his most radical works.”
Several of the them were the last among Van Gogh’s to sell.
“They are pieces that don’t fit entirely with our vision of who Van Gogh is,” Thompson said. “He’s pushing the boundaries of how you make pictures, changing proportions, bringing it right to the forefront of the canvas.”
The Dutch artist’s in-your-face work was created in France between 1886 and 1890, first at Paris, then in southern France at Arles – where for a short time he shared his famous yellow house with fellow post-Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin – then at the asylum at Saint-Rémy after his breakdown, and, finally, at Auvers, where he shot himself in 1890.
The exhibit will not be organized chronologically but by subject and motifs, Thompson said, from the way the artist gazed at blades of grass at his feet, to seemingly disembodied tree trunks.
Unique for the time, Van Gogh “doesn’t give us the entire picture,” Thompson said. “He crops out the rest – vertical tree trunks that show no top or bottom. He takes a subject that’s unassuming, but they’re painted in such a beautiful wide range of colors, and the dotting of the brushwork evokes a tactile sense that speaks to people.”
The idea for the exhibit came from Van Gogh scholar Cornelia Homburg, now living in the south of France, but who had been a curator of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
“She approached us and Ottawa about it, and we jumped at the chance,” Thompson said.
The exhibit is only going to two museums in North America because lenders were only willing to let their paintings out of their collections for a short time, she said. Although most of the loans are from museums, about eight of them are from private collections; seven come from Amsterdam. The Philadelphia museum has five Van Goghs in its permanent collection.
Danielle Rice, executive director of the Delaware Art Museum and who used to work at the Philadelphia museum, said she’s impressed by the scope of the exhibit.
“No museum likes to talk about value, but they were able to secure loans from so many locations around the world, and each Van Gogh is valued in the millions,” she said. “Think about the insurance.”
All of the paintings in the exhibit, Thompson said, were done from the time Van Gogh lived in Paris for two years, beginning in 1886, when the first flush of Impressionism began to swallow up the art world. Challenged, Van Gogh radically embraced both color and texture.
“He was shocked by the Impressionists, anxious about making a name for himself, so he took traditional painting and turned it around,” Thompson said.
Van Gogh’s engagement with nature close-up also helped calm his emotional and psychological turmoil.
As Van Gogh himself expressed to his sister one year before his suicide: “I…am always obliged to go and gaze at a blade of grass, a pine-tree branch, an ear of wheat, to calm myself.”
Thompson said Van Gogh often compared those blades of grass to Japanese art.
Japanese art’s colorful flat surfaces were then in vogue, especially with himself and Gauguin. One of Van Gogh’s famous self-portraits shows himself as Japanese.
“His painting’s distortions and play of space work well for someone who is psychologically sensitive,” Thompson said. “There are cases when he’ll pull a tree trunk to the front of the picture, and to see the landscape you have to look through the branches. This happens a lot in Japanese prints.”
Van Gogh’s relentless popularity is inspired not only by the romantic notions most of us have about his life, filled with misunderstood suffering and agonizing mental illness, but in his ability to communicate a passionate and unique vision of nature and himself.
“His life is extraordinary,” Thompson said. “He dies when he’s 37, after having painting for only 10 of those years. In that time, he produces 850 canvases, which is astonishing – he is painting feverishly.”
He also wrote an extensive, heartbreakingly poetic correspondence, she said (all of which may be accessed at http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters.html).
“We get a great picture of who he was,” she said. “It’s all so rich and appealing.”
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Vincent van Gogh may be the ultimate example of a person who led a nearly completely miserable life, who failed at winning the love of any woman in whom he expressed interest, was probably a manic depressive, and whose work was mocked – but whose suicide helped propell him into becoming the definitive artistic icon.
“He has become for us a classic story of a tortured artist,” said Jennifer Thompson, the Philadelphia Museum’s Gloria and Jack Drosdick Associate Curator of European Painting and Sculpture before 1900 and the Rodin Museum, and co-curator of the latest Van Gogh exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “I’m always very concerned about making people stop and look at the paintings, step away from his biography and examine the paintings on their own merit.”
Well, for now, we’re going to talk about the iconic and romantic stuff.
“Honestly,” said contemporary – and perhaps greater – post-Impressionist painter Paul Cezanne, when Vincent showed him some of his work in Paris, “your painting is that of a madman.”
How and why did what some present-day observers diagnose as manic depression and bipolar disorder become so romantic?
“If you ask anyone who’s been to an art museum to name an artist, they’ll say undoubtedly Van Gogh,” said Danielle Rice, executive director of the Delaware Art Museum. “Picasso comes in a close second. Immediately what that tells you as an amateur scholar of pop culture is that the image of the artist is still strongly entrenched in people’s minds as someone who is brilliant, misunderstood and crazy.”
His life inspired Kirk Douglas to yet again overact, this time in the 1956 Hollywood movie based on the Irving Stone mawkish 1934 biographical novel, Lust for Life. It even inspired a 1990 revisionist mini-series/movie directed by Robert Altman, Vincent and Theo, as well as given birth to dozens of allusions and illusions on TV series over the decades.
And then there are the coffee mugs, mouse pads, refrigerator magnets, posters and prints and – the list seems unending.
Still, what about the ear? There’s even a Spanish band called Van Gogh’s Ear.
“He cut off his ear in a fit of madness,” Thompson said, “perhaps driven by alcohol. From some of the recent medical diagnoses – all speculative – that’s a feature of some of the illnesses, a tendency to mutilate body parts.”
It’s dangerous to reason with madness, but art critic Martin Gayford in his book, The Yellow House, reports that letters Vincent wrote at the time indicate he was obsessing about several things that curiously had to do with sliced-off ears, including: the part in the Gospel of John (18:10) after Christ’s agony in the Garden of Gethsemane when his disciple Peter slices off the right ear of a Roman soldier; repeatedly writing about an Emile Zola novel where one of the characters hacked away at his own ear; and, finally, Vincent – and everyone else at the time – had been reading about England’s Jack the Ripper, who was terrorizing London, and who had sliced off the ear of one of his victims.
And then Vincent did something a smidge even weirder: he wrapped up his ear and gave it to a prostitute named Rachel.
Enough said? Just one more thing: this peculiar fit of madness occurred after fellow painter Paul Gauguin told Vincent he was leaving the house in Arles they had been sharing for the previous two months. Vincent had wanted to start an art school there, but even Gauguin – who was fairly weird himself – began to notice Vincent’s odd behavior and wanted to clear out.
Speaking of weird, how do you say the great artist’s name?
Ever since Diane Keaton’s pretentious character told Woody Allen in 1979’s Manhattan that she thought – among other great artists – that “Van Gock” was overrated – there’s been an on-and-off popular debate on how to pronounce the painter’s name.
So, is it pronounced “Van Gock” or “Van Go?” Or neither? If you’re Dutch, Keaton is evidently more right than not.
“It depends on your nationality,” Thompson said. “I have a colleague who is Dutch, who pronounces it like ‘Van Gock’ – but not so harsh, more nuanced. Since I can’t reproduce that sound, I say ‘Van Go,’ because that’s the most familiar in America.”
In Britain, some pronounce the Gogh as if it rhymed with cough. But for non-pretention’s sake, let’s stick with Thompson’s compromise.
Then there’s the question as to why Vincent and not, say, Howard Pyle, became the icon of the great artist.
This is actually both interesting and pertinent, and not just because Delaware Art Museum’s Danielle Rice is shilling for the Howard Pyle exhibit at her Wilmington museum.
Both artists were born in 1853: one was very popular during his lifetime, the other obscure. After their deaths, the situations reversed, big-time. Vincent mentions Pyle at least five times in his letters and liked his work. Pyle did not know Vincent existed.
Why is Pyle unknown outside of Delaware and Van Gogh become an often-mispronounced household name?
“The reason has to do with the history of art,” Rice said. “We tend to value as so-called ‘high art’ the work that went into an abstract direction. The artists who went there went to Van Gogh, not to Pyle,” whose work is representational and illustrative.
On top of that, popular culture and its crystalline manifestation, Hollywood, became obsessed with the romantic (and profoundly misguided) idea that great art must come from great suffering and even madness, both of which somehow give birth to creativity.
“We’re struggling with what happened around Pyle’s death in 1911,” Rice said. “The art world separated practical arts from fine arts.”
Up to that time, many artists – such as N.C. Wyeth and Pyle – were illustrators (you could look at the Sistine Chapel as one great illustration, Rice said). “There was no separation of ‘fine’ artists from ‘commercial’ artists.”
That all changes when art patronage dies. Way back in the day, before, say, the 19th-century, most artists had to suck up to a patron – like the pope or a prince or a rich merchant – to survive, so they often produced work made to order.
But after that old order ends, artists “do work on speculation,” Rice said, so art had to catch people’s eyes. A myth of the avant-garde developed by the end of the 19th century , married to the mystical belief that art shows us a higher form of truth – and, really, how can truth be commissioned?
“The only artists who could do this were the artists in touch with their own inner nature,” Rice said. “Art by definition must be ahead of its time, and artists must be misunderstood because they are tuning into an inner truth that most of us can’t see.”
Add to this the kicker of his mental illness and the ear incident, no artist can really compete in typifying this myth better than Vincent van Gogh.