Art
Those Abominable Sunflowers
By SIMON HODGSON
THE recent large exhibi- tion of works by van Gogh at the Musee Jacquemart Andre in Paris raises two questions in my mind. First, why are this painter's works so universally popular? Second why do I dislike them all so intensely? Granted that they are colourful, bold, excited, and that the artist was an odd fish; but the answer to the second question would be that they are also crude, obvious, hyster- ical, and that the artist, although self-taught, never taught himself enough. Unlike Gauguin, van Gogh lacked the technical adaptability and visual intelligence to handle oil-paint in any but the most arbitrary and elementary fashion; more- over, unlike the famous bank clerk, he lacked any of those qualities of mind or spirit that turn sub- jects to private ends, that create new images out of old, that create and reveal at one and the same time. His tragedy demands sympathy, but it is not enough to be periodically mad and to paint pictures for those pictures also to demand sympathy and affection. He is an unlovable painter because he lacks any form of gentleness, and, again, it is no excuse for him that he was desperate and sad, that he longed (as the letters show) to do better and to widen his range. In his personality and character he just wasn't good or deep or interesting enough to deserve the attention and consideration he so loudly demanded. Who shall blame Gauguin for pack- ing it in? It was hot enough in the Midi already
without van Gogh': sultry attitudinising; and in fact it was only from a doctor whose meat after all he was, that he at last obtained sympathy.
And yet the sunflowers' baleful glare is on every wall and has been there for a generation; and cypresses in darkest mood writhe in a most uncharacteristic and undignified way into skies that may be deep blue, but through which the sun has never penetrated; they tower above cornfields inches thick in pigment, whose dull metallic surfaces, resulting from too much paint too quickly dried, are divided by this hag-ridden master into sharp channels in the pigment, an equivalent for brush strokes, which the light, if the picture is at right angles to the window, throws into brisk chiaroscuro so that we may see the direction in which the wheat is growing! This is not an exaggerated description of many landscapes and more faults leap to mind, indeed assault the eye, where portraiture has been attempted. Gauguin, to stick to contemporary painters the superficial outlines of whose careers are superficially similar to van Gogh's own, could draw an arm, turn an elbow, suggest the weight and grandeur of a thigh with economy, exactitude and complete conviction. Van Gogh could do none of these things; he could not even put a nose on a face; he didn't know where to begin, and he hadn't the resilience to draw on examples, to experiment and, above all, to reject the unsuccessful attempt. It could be answered that he didn't need to do any of these things, that his virtues lie in the direction of intense experience, in southern suns too hot to be handled slowly and reflectively, in a mood too urgent to be delayed by the brakes of disci- pline; to which I would say that those virtues are precisely the faults which destroy any possi- bilities of greatness he had in him. His control in the landscapes (leaving the portraits well aside) is, where it exists, the unreflecting grip of a drowning man on a log, the unreasoning and, no doubt, devastating need to get a mass of paint on the canvas before the sun goes in which can spare no time, in fact has no equip- ment, to consider other ways round the problem of Provencal summer. I say Provencal summer, because the pictures from Arles are those which are most his own, which are in fact the most unusual that he did. In other parts of France he was influenced greatly by the painters with whom he was working. It may be true that his mania for sunlight, the paint becoming thicker and beastlier the more desperate he was, amounted in itself to madness, which shares with fanaticism its inability to comprehend more than one range of facts or emotions at a time.
To see how badly Van Gogh failed one has but to turn to a landscape by, say, Soutine to realise that private despair and the public com- munication of that despair may involve indisci- pline and wildness, but not the manic, unimagi- native dullness of those abominable sunflowers.
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