Artist's amnesty
ART BRYAN ROBERTSON
Van Gogh was the first artist to achieve a world-wide popularity that has never declined. He was also the first to establish an amnesty, as it were, for a vision clearly in excess of normal physical circumstances and whose exaggerations were not conditioned by religious fervour or historical sentiment. Last, but most important for the consequent development of painting, he was the first artist for whom an informed body of opinion, speedily accepted the fact (soon after unconsciously accepted by the public) that the concrete tactile means selected for representing a familiar scene in nature— the marks made by the brush on a canvas or. by a reed pen on paper, as rhythmic expressions of patterning and linear construction—could assume an independent abstract life of their own, wholly beyond the descriptively circum- scribed requirements of the scene itself.
A nearly manic intensity is an integral and consistent ingredient in Van Gogh's work : the same glare, as much mental as physical, rages through interior scenes with their harsh lighting and intensity of individual detail as burns through vistas of landscape. Van Gogh ex- panded the popular notion of normality, or at least of what is permissible—not in terms of eroticism or pain but purely in terms of claustrophobic, almost stifling, intensity of colour and manipulation of paint, or drawn line. Everything is writhing, convulsed by energy : movement is all.
The beautiful exhibition installed by the Arts Council at the Hayward Gallery will disclose these obvious enough facets of Van Gogh's work. Physical impact reigns supreme in terms of colour and intensity of contour—and that curious milky-green light which appears so often in Van Gogh's paintings, in each case at such odd variance with the hot resonance of the scene. But the impact, and especially that idiosyncratic pale colour which transmits this greenish light, would be more easily de- scribable if there were not something peculiarly
upsetting about the lighting at the Hayward Gallery. It is perhaps too soon to criticise the gallery in detail: best to wait and see how different kinds of exhibition may affect or modify that tough and over-detailed interior in the future. In the meantime, the Van Goghs are distinctly swerved from their true and maximum impact; and the reason is connected
with the lighting. Certain kinds of painting, with strong colour, are best left to give out their own light from the interior, as it' were, of the canvas. At the. Hayward Gallery the process is muffled.
I am still very thankful for this splendid show, and for a notably helpful and informative catalogue and hook of reproductions. Alan gowness deserves high praise for the sensitive and scholarly text and notes, and for much fascinating information regarding Van Gogh's contacts with London. But, above all, the sheer painterly and pictorial intelligence of the artist shines through everything: time and again the urgency, the stridency, the galvanic tumult of movement and agitation, are all subordinate to the man's artistry, which of course means control and discipline and the instinct to re- order nature.
It seems almost insulting to attempt to de- scribe.. Van Gogh's paintings: they exist so immacidately and inviolably as visual records of his 'incessant head-on collisions between a passionate sensibility and the world he loved and which so tormented him. Words are absurd in the face of these paintings. But if one last quality, gently and sadly but unmistakably distilled by every painting and drawing, comes clearly across, it is. that of absolute aloneness: loneliness would seem a sentimental reduction to describe this dignified, if urgent and emotion- ally raked solitude. Van Gogh consistently
underlined that alienation of the spirit which so afflicts men and women in modern society. In' trying to discharge it on nature, on scenes of. uninhabited stillness; Van Gogh created a profound paradox which gives his work its particular edge and disquiet; he made possibly, also, the last great equation in visual terms between man anduature: an equation verifiable by the facts of natural phenomena. The later equations, made by Mondrian for example, de- mand a stronger trust, or. faith, from us and already are aimed at guile ideal state of affairs in the future. Van Gogh came heroically to terms with the living present and it is hard to tell which takes the greater courage.
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