When two giants lived together
Martin Gayford on Amsterdam's fascinating exhibition of work by Van Gogh and Gauguin
In Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen, a single wartime meeting between the physicists Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr is replayed time and time again, each time differently, leaving open the question of what really happened. The bare two months — 23 October 1888 to 23 December 1888 — which the painters Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin spent living together in Arles could sustain similar treatment. Indeed, in a way this is what that art-historically drama-packed period receives in the remarkable exhibition that has just opened at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South, until 2 June).
It is one of those episodes that are at once well-known — the denouement, in which Van Gogh cut off part of his ear, has entered popular folklore — and at the same time mysterious. What went on between those two giants of Post-Impressionism while they were cooped up together in the four rooms of Van Gogh's tiny Yellow House? In what direction, if any, did the influences flow? And which, if either, was responsible for the final explosion? These are the questions that the exhibition tackles and, to a considerable extent, answers.
The result is one of those shows that at once has enormous public appeal, and also breaks a great deal of new ground. It could be enjoyed simply as a large collection of paintings — most of them done in those 60-odd days, plus many from before and afterwards — by two outstanding forerunners of modernist art. But the real fascination lies in the to-and-fro between the two, and to grasp that fully it is necessary to engage with the catalogue (published in Britain by Thames and Hudson).
This, though densely written, is a real bit of art-historical detective work, mapping the activities of the two principals day by day during the crucial period. There are maps of the environs of Arles, marking exactly where each sat while painting certain scenes. Perhaps most striking of all is the cutaway cross-section of the Yellow House, revealing, for example, that in order to reach his own small bedroom Gauguin had to pass through Van Gogh's (the one in the marvellous painting by Vincent, executed just before Gauguin arrived). The domestic arrangements of the two were almost comic in a poignant sort of way. Gauguin emerges — in a very uncompetitive race — as the more practical; he takes over the domestic budget, and is apparently shocked at the state of the kitchen (Van Gogh attempted to make soup for their supper on one occasion, but this was a disaster). As a combination, Van Gogh and Gauguin had the type of chemistry that makes for a truly bad marriage: there was enough in common to assure a degree of mutual fascination, and sufficient deep dissimilarity to guarantee that harmony would hardly ever be achieved.
We meet them at the start of the exhibition in two self-portraits, both shadowy, nervous, and wary, Van Gogh's from 1886, Gauguin's from 1885. Their starting points — each both developing from Impressionism and in reaction against it — were quite close. Some influences, such as Japanese art, they had in common (as is demonstrated in the early sections of the show).
But they were in key respects opposite not just in their aims, but also in their artistic and physical rhythms. Gauguin was inclined to work more slowly and reflectively, working up in the orthodox manner from drawings and sketches to the finished work, the tableau. He often painted de tete, or out of his head. Van Gogh, lacking in self confidence, felt that he should do the same; in reality, he functioned best in a spasm of nervous energy, working in front
of what he was depicting, and often completing a picture astonishingly rapidly, in an hour or two. Consequently. Gauguin was much less productive, turning out around half as many pictures in those two months — though still a surprising number.
Add to this the fact that they were a couple of neurotics, touched with that megalomania which — if it is not essential — certainly helps its owners to become major artists. Van Gogh was considered crazy by his family, and whatever his physiological or psychological problem may have been — there has been much speculation on that point — he was evidently unbearable to live with.
He had to an extreme degree the Dutch habit of bluntly speaking his mind, while finding criticism intolerable, and believing fervently in the mode of friendly verbal wrestling known in Dutch as wnjving. Gauguin was wily, occasionally violent, and cantankerous — he spent a good deal of time during his last years in the South Pacific composing libellous attacks on other expatriates for a local paper. And these two were locked up together, in a minute house day after day — the weather was bad that autumn in Arles — working in the same studio, The experience, for Gauguin, must, as the catalogue suggests, have approximated to being shut in a room with a continuous taped reading of Van Gogh's Letters. It's no wonder things went wrong.
The influences, it is clear from the show, ran in both directions — and were not all beneficial. Each stubborn individualist worked, possibly against their better judgment, using the other's methods. Thus Van Gogh worked de tete on several pictures, with generally disappointing results — 'A Novel Reader', for example, is a real stinker. Indeed, though the show consists of work by two great artists, plus a few items by Emil Bernard, it contains some interestingly had stuff amongst the masterpieces. How many of us, I wonder, would buy an example of Gauguin's rough-hewn pottery if we saw it on show anonymously in a craft shop? It is fascinating to compare paintings done — from different angles — of the same sitter at the same time by these two idiosyncratic masters.
Of the two, Gauguin got the most out of the experience, trying as it must have been. And that was because though Van Gogh was the younger — 35 to Gauguin's 40 — at this stage his was the more fully formed artistic personality. That is clear from the exhibition — which Van Gogh wins easily on a masterpiece count. though Gauguin was just coming to maturity. Shortly before he left Brittany for Provence to join Van Gogh he had completed 'The Vision of the Sermon', his first great picture. Of course, Gauguin had 14 years and the bulk of his best work ahead of him, whereas poor Van Gogh had only 18 months.
The situation was intrinsically tragic. Van Gogh, pitifully lonely, longed for company and clung to his notion of a Studio of the South, a colony of like-minded avantgardists — of which the ménage with Gauguin was to be the core. But Van Gogh was unfit for communal living, especially with other strong-minded individualists.
Gauguin probably put up with a lot, and can hardly be blamed for leaving (he only came at all because he was under a financial obligation to Van Gogh's brother). For Van Gogh, his desertion was the last straw, and he acted out his martyrdom by selfmutilation.
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