FINE ARTS SPECIAL
Exhibitions 1
Vincent Van Gogh: Paintings (Rijksmuseum Vincent Van Gogh, Amsterdam, till 29 July) Vincent Van Gogh: Drawings (Rijksmuseum KrOiler-Milner, Otterlo, till 29 July)
Triumph of a humble spirit
Giles Auty
There are few things like the know- ledge that the kind of extraordinary exhibi- tion one is seeing will not be repeated during one's lifetime, if ever, to bring on acute intimations of mortality. Looking at the marvellous Van Gogh exhibitions cur- rently in Amsterdam and Otterlo or the equally splendid showing of Degas and Gauguin in Paris during recent years makes one realise there is precious little chance that one will pass this particular way again.
When I was in Amsterdam in 1987 for the opening of Masterpieces of Dutch nth-Century Landscape Painting, another no-repeat blockbuster, I was the only British critic who made the trip. However, this year I was walking a path well-trodden already by the press of the world and by scores of thousands of others. Van Gogh, the centenary of whose death falls this year, exercises a powerful hold on the imaginations of millions who would prob- ably respond less promptly to any other name. During my visit, crowds of ordinary Dutch, German, French, Japanese and English mums and dads were peering closely at paintings and drawings, many of which they had probably never seen be- fore, even in reproduction. Far from this being an irritant to me, I found the well-ordered throngs moving and sym- pathetic: Van Gogh wanted, above all, to paint and draw for the pleasure of common humanity. A hundred years on his wishes have been fulfilled in a manner beyond even the happier limits of his dreams.
Perhaps we should not forget here that his less happy imaginings caused him final- ly to end a brief life at the sadly young age of 37. Van Gogh had been working as an artist for only ten of those years. The previous decade of his life had been spent as an art dealer, assistant in an English prep school and probationary preacher to the Belgian coal-miners of the Borinage, one of the most distressed industrial areas of 19th-century Europe. While art-dealing Van Gogh turned to God, while preaching he turned to art and when finally making art he turned increasingly to the bordello and the bottle. Absinthe, the Green Fairy, was addictive and hallucinogenic and is luckily no longer available, since un- doubtedly many would drink it now. In states of poverty, loneliness and self- doubt, Van Gogh ate too little and prob- ably drank too much. But it was his health rather than his art which suffered most. Van Gogh worked at and guarded the latter assiduously. Contrary to popular belief he did not provide an appropriate role-model for later, self-destructive drink- ers like Jackson Pollock and even less so for rebellious and fundamentally lazy art students. Few have ever worked harder or more consciously than Van Gogh at draw- ing, which he believed to be the basis of all art. Similarly no artist has ever discussed, on a day-to-day basis, the issues involved in making art more lucidly, perceptively or completely than Van Gogh, in hundreds of letters written to his brother.
What was wrong with Van Gogh in terms of present-day clinical diagnosis? The treatment of mental illness was prob- ably an even more inexact science in Van Gogh's time than it is today. A number of close members of Van Gogh's family, including uncles and the artist's closest lifelong intimate, his brother Theo, suf- fered from bouts of debilitating mental illness. Euphemisms were found for these periodic attacks. I believe a book exists somewhere, written a few years ago, which analyses Van Gogh's troubles in the termi- nology of present-day psychotherapy. I have not read this and so must wonder what it might contribute to our understand- ing. A great many artists of all kinds, together with people of high moral pur- pose, probably live closer to the edge than they or we imagine. In the works of the last two years of Van Gogh's life, the artist's pain and ecstasy are there for all to see. A terrible and often heartrending beauty moves us, unless we are made of stone. Sometimes it is the artist's strange, con- torted configurations but just as often it is his haunting combinations of colours that transfix us. It is from the last that artists of this century have concluded that combina- tions of colour on their own can possess this extraordinary power. They are wrong. It is subtle combinations of colours which, when allied to known forms, create such moving and mysterious poetry. Colour which describes nothing cannot have this edge. It is the process of transcribing the known which provides the vital parameter.
Like Cezanne, Van Gogh did not pos- sess God-given graphic gifts or lightness of touch. Looking at some 250 of his drawings at the Kroller-Mfiller museum at Otterlo, one and a half hours' pleasant and conve- nient coach ride from the door of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, I was sur- prised continually by how consistently good they are. Even so there are often gauche and clumsy elements, in the form of wrongly weighted, ill-directed or tentative marks. Sometimes the hamfistedness spills over overtly into Van Gogh's paintings, particularly those in which his distinctive personal calligraphy has primary import- ance. In 'Avenue with Flowering Chestnut Trees' and 'Rowing Boats on the Banks of the Oise', to name only two paintings, Van Gogh makes horizontal marks to do with the avenue and river respectively which fail for once to describe form adequately and so stick out like proverbial thumbs. This reveals unusual carelessness on the artist's part rather than mere expressiveness. Van Gogh, great artist though he was, made mistakes, just as important artists continue to do today. Compared with Whistler, say, or one of the better pre-Raphaelites, Van Gogh drew none too convincingly. Indeed, his early drawings sometimes tell us more about the quality of the man than about the quality of the artist, for the two do not as is often wrongly assumed — amount automatically to the same thing. On the other hand, Van Gogh possessed self- belief and staying power, qualities no less essential than primary talent for the achievement of ultimate artistic success.
Walking round the exhibition of 133 paintings at the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam, I found greater competence in Van Gogh's early paintings than I had previously credited and also early evidence of the power and individuality of the artist's vision. Even when he had progres- sed very much further, Van Gogh could not always make his space work effective- ly, for example in such a well-known work as 'Fishing Boats at Sea' or, largely be- cause of the choice and density of his sky colour, in the less renowned 'Garden with Weeping Tree'. Often Van Gogh created brilliant work even from unpromising sub- ject matter, sometimes in spite of fairly crude handling. I noted also that his distinctive artistic 'handwriting' appeared earlier than I had thought. On the whole, he organised his picture areas thoughtfully and drew a great deal more accurately than many now imagine, partly through his extensive use of a drawing frame. '
From time to time the artist's colour is weird rather than merely haunting. Look- ing at 'Enclosed Field with Peasant' and `The Garden at the Asylum at Saint-Remy' in the flesh, rather than in reproduction, brings this point home forcibly. In 'Wheat- fields with Mountains in the Background', 'Wheatfield with Cypress' and 'The Alpil- les with Olive Trees in the Foreground' the cloud shapes contain forms which I am sure are readily transcribable psychological, probably sexual, metaphors. 'Stacks of Wheat near a Farmhouse' bursts with vitality and vision, yet it is paintings such as `Pine Trees against an Evening Sky' which give even greater insight — perhaps be- cause more tragic — into the artist's raw Van Gogh's 'Olive Grove', 1889, from the Kroller-Muller collection, now on show in Amsterdam soul. 'Cypresses with Two Women' is so heightened and sharpened that it lifts emotion almost to breaking point, not least for the receptive viewer.
The great charge of Van Gogh's paint- ings and drawings derives in part from the fact that his extraordinary spirit was often engaged humbly in making simple trans- criptions of real places as, for example, in the lovely drawing 'View of Arles from Montmajour'. Van Gogh was certainly not trying to be tragic, interesting or excep- tional. There is a vital lesson here for an awful lot of artists working today.
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