Role models
Nicholas Powell
Vincent's Choice: The Musee imaginaire of Van Gogh Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, until 15 June
Alate starter who decided to be an artist at the age of 27. Vincent Van Gogh was virtually self-taught. Only briefly enrolled at the Academy in Brussels and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, he found relationships with dead artists, or at least artists with whom he had no personal contact, infinitely more bearable, and more fruitful, than his few and inevitably quarrelsome dealings with real teachers. With the lonely ardour of a convert, he desperately sought out role models to emulate by collecting prints and cheap reproductions, visiting museums and galleries whenever he could, to marvel at and analyse their contents.
Inspired as much by 17th-century Dutch painting as he was by the Barbizon and Hague schools. Van Gogh could be as fulsome in their praise as he was critical of his own shortcomings. Works which he found particularly moving he described, often at length, in letters to Theo, his sounding board of a brother. Curators at Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum — which owns some 700 of the 900 or so of Vincent's letters which have survived out of a mass of probably twice as many — have sifted out those references.
Comprising nearly 200 works, the exhibition Vincent's Choice is based on those findings, a posthumous, imaginary museum to mark the 150th anniversary of Van Gogh's birth. Or, as one organiser cringingly put it at the opening, 'a birthday present for Vincent'. Art-world birthdays have become tyrannical obliga
tions, all too often sacrificing reflection to a commercially driven desire to 'celebrate'.
Though it was hard to come up with (the Van Gogh Museum having organised a huge Van Gogh retrospective for the centenary of the artist's death in 1990 and a blockbuster Van Gogh and Gauguin show last year), the idea behind Vincent's Choice is original and enlightening. Divided into 13 sections based on themes predominant in Van Gogh's art, such as 'Nature', 'Rural life and labour', 'Visit to the museum' and 'Colour and light', devoted to his crucial discovery of Impressionism in Paris, the exhibition is admittedly short on heartstoppingly beautiful pictures and heavy on prints which require a lot of patient concentration to enjoy.
Coming from a strict Protestant background and a failed preacher himself, Van Gogh was steeped in religious precepts which invested his often confused thought and art alike with an idiosyncratic brand of mysticism. In the section devoted to religion, 'The Old Churchyard at Nuenen', painted in 1885 in the dirgy tones characteristic of the period preceding his epiphanic journey to Paris in 1886, shows a dank-looking, moss-encumbered church tower surrounded by peasants' graves — as an institution, the Church was crumbling, Van Gogh believed, while the life and death of peasants, he thought, bizarrely, was 'unchanging'.
An innovative artist not always capable of appreciating innovation in others and a sentimental traditionalist in matters of religious art, Van Gogh loved Holman Hunt's 'The Light of the World'. 18511856, and Ary Scheffer's no less gooey 'The Agony in the Garden' of 1839. The Dutch artist described as 'appalling', however, the technically ground-breaking 'Road to Calvary', 1889, by Emile Bernard, railing against what he considered its unharmonious palette and holding up as an example of mystical propriety Camille Corot's leafily old-fashioned 'The Agony in the Garden' of 1849.
Van Gogh's three main idols were Delacroix, Millet and Rembrandt, all of whose works are well represented here. The Millet-Van Gogh rapprochement was of course abundantly illustrated by the exhibition at Paris's Musee d'Orsay in 1998, but the sturdy peasants which Van Gogh copied in such awe more than bear looking at again.
In 1888, while he was fumbling his way towards using bold colour contrasts in his own art. Van Gogh raved over the 'terrifying emerald green sea' in Delacroix's 'Christ Asleep During the Tempest', circa 1853. By then Millet was beginning to loosen his grip on the Dutchman's imagination. Rembrandt, meanwhile, was a lifelong hero. Van Gogh occasionally lifted ideas, using the single source of light he had seen in Rembrandt's 'The Holy Family at Night', 1638-40, for example, in two of his own, intimate family scenes: 'The Potato Eaters'. 1885, and 'Night (after Millet). 1889. The juxtaposition of Van Gogh's 'Self-portrait as an Artist' of 1888 and Rembrandt's 'Self-portrait' of 1669, however, reveals few resemblances other than similar posture and intensity of expression.
Van Gogh's experience of Paris counted more than anything else in the maturation of his art. Having enrolled in the studio of the reactionary history painter Fernand Corrnon, he befriended the anything but conservative Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Emile Bernard. Van Gogh also went out painting with Paul Signac but decided, after a few attempts, that the fastidious technique of pointillism was not for him, ruling it would never become 'universal', Vincent's Choice features a delightful comparison between Signac's 'Snow, Boulevard de Clichy', 1886, and Van Gogh's 'Boulevard de Clichy' painted the following year, not so much in points, or dots, like the former, as in nervous, impatient dashes. Van Gogh's 'Courting Couples in the Voyer d'Argenson Park in Asnieres', also of 1897, meanwhile, uses a similar, barely contained pointillist technique and forms an interesting contrast to both Georges Seurat's tightly controlled 'La Luzerne, Saint-Denis', 1885-86, and Camille Pissarro's equally serene 'View from my window in cloudy weather', 1886-88.
Van Gogh's hopelessly tumultuous friendship with Paul Gauguin and his utopian dream of setting up a painters' colony in Provence are illustrated, among other works in Vincent's Choice, by a reconstitution of the Dutch painter's studio in his famous 'yellow house' in Arles, complete with copies of engravings, including his much-loved Japanese prints, pinned on the walls. By then, Van Gogh was unleashing the colour contrasts he adored onto canvas. He was less than two years away from suicide and the end of a flowering which was to have been as brilliant as it was brief.
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