The title of the Royal Academy’s groundbreaking new show, The Real Van Gogh: the Artist and his Letters, signals the intention of the curators to dispense with the myth of the madman touched with genius, to present instead the art of a consummate professional.
From the first gallery, we realise that Van Gogh’s primary purpose in writing (about art or anything else) is to communicate his thoughts and needs as clearly as possible. The artist whose voice we hear in this show speaks not about suffering, but about the practical business of how to draw and paint, whether telling a friend about a new type of pencil he’s discovered or drawing pictures of the kind of brushes he wants his brother Theo to send him from Paris.
If that makes the show sound a trifle dull, trust me, it is anything but. With 65 paintings and 30 drawings, including major loans from abroad, dramatically displayed and beautifully lit in the great galleries, it’s that rare thing, a blockbuster on a manageable scale. Just don’t expect to breeze through it. With the written word given equal importance to the painted image, you have to concentrate from the first picture to the last.
Sometimes, the letter itself is of such intrinsic interest it stands on its own. In the summer of 1882, for example, he describes learning to master the science of perspective by using a perspective frame — a wooden frame with wires stretched across it, through which the artist views his subject “as if through a window”. Then, a few days later, he sends Theo a sketch that shows him at work on a beach, a tiny figure looking out to sea through a perspective frame, palette in hand, painting directly from nature.
More often, though, Vincent’s letters are shown next to the pictures they describe or illustrate, so that by turning from one to the other we can see the paintings through his eyes. Only after reading his description of an early watercolour showing a bird’s-eye view from his attic studio in The Hague do you notice among the myriad details the “bird on the wing, the chimney smoking, the figure far below ambling along”. Other letters discuss the artists he reveres (Rembrandt, Delacroix and Millet), the books he is reading in the original English, French and Dutch, or his developing sense of how colour can be intensified by placing complementaries side by side (“No Blue without Yellow and without Orange”).
You can see him experimenting with colour combinations in a wall hung with flower paintings and still lifes, that begins with the relatively crude Vase of Cornflowers, Daisies, Poppies and Carnations (1886) and culminates four years later in one of the last pictures he painted in the asylum at Saint Remy, the monumental Roses, cascading over a background of light green irradiated by waves of creamy white paint.
And when there are no letters to help us chart his development – as in the transitional years 1886-88, when Vincent was living with Theo in Paris and in contact with Gauguin, Signac and Seurat – the pictures themselves show how he incorporated into his art non-Western perspective, asymmetry, flat tones and strong colour of Japanese woodblock prints. In these years, colour is at last separated from its descriptive function in pictures that fuse Japanese decorative patterning with realism based on direct observation.
Van Gogh frequently mentions that he has taken only an hour or so to paint a picture — but what he doesn’t always say is that before he started, these pictures were carefully planned.
One of the masterpieces of the Arles period, Tarascon Diligence, is so freely painted that it looks and feels as though improvised on the spot. But the more we look the more see how artfully Vincent has structured his composition. Our eye enters the picture through the upward diagonal of the ladder at the left, which is immediately countered by two downward diagonals —the driver’s whip at front of the diligence and the whip protruding from the carriage behind it. Together, these diagonals turn the vehicle, which otherwise would float unanchored in space, into a stable triangle locked in place by an astonishing smear of violet shadow linking it both to the ground and to the yellow wall behind it.
When we turn to the letter to Theo in which Vincent talks about the picture, we see that, far from being accidental, the diagonal line formed by the coachman’s whip was important enough to his composition to include it in the little sketch at the bottom of the page.
Composition is one thing, painting technique another. To paint the two coaches, Van Gogh “draws” their intricate outlines in black paint. His brush hardly loses contact with the canvas, as he then neatly fills the interstices between the black lines with thick green, red and white paint.
But to paint the yellow wall and the medley of white, yellow and blue in the foreground, he uses a different technique, letting his hand move quickly over the canvas with a loaded brush in what looks like a loose, slapping motion.
What this means is that before his brush touched the canvas he had mixed or chosen the precise colour and tone he wanted to use, and calculated how much turpentine and linseed oil to mix it with. When he began to paint, he knew exactly how much paint he needed to have on his brush and how much pressure each of the hundreds of brushstrokes in a picture required. Though he worked quickly, there are few corrections and revisions in his pictures, indicating that he must have known exactly how he wanted each one to look before he began it. All this took as much forethought and sustained concentration as you find in the paintings of Cezanne. And here is the point: it is simply not possible to paint like this in a mad frenzy.
If you didn’t know who was writing these letters, it would be hard to guess the long hard struggle Vincent endured to become an artist, or the terrible illness that stopped him from working for long periods in the last years of his life. We do not know the precise nature of that illness, but what we can say is that unlike the schizophrenic Richard Dadd, whose pictures are symptomatic of his madness, Van Gogh’s mental state hardly finds its way into his art at all. And so, Vincent painted his Still Life with a Plate of Onions soon after his first breakdown in Arles.
There is nothing about the way the picture is painted that suggests the recent turmoil in his life, though some of the objects in it – a handbook on homoeopathy, a coffee pot and an empty bottle of absinthe – are reminders of his illness, and the letter on the table is the very one in which Theo told Vincent of his engagement — a psychological blow that is sometimes cited as a factor contributing to his breakdown.
In the last letter posted to Theo, written on July 23 1890, only two days before he shot himself in the chest, Vincent writes not of depression or anxiety but that he is applying himself to his canvas “with all my attention”. He encloses a sketch of Wheat Fields After the Rain, which hangs nearby and is one of the most radiantly serene pictures in the show.
In it, Van Gogh is working at the height of his powers, so completely in control of his medium that he uses two different viewpoints – the foreground seen from close to (painted with short flicking brushstrokes) and the patchwork of fields in the distance painted with parallel ribbons of light yellow, apple and forest green edged with dark blue. The newly washed fields stretch on forever under an aquamarine sky filled with blowsy whorls of woolly white clouds, an image of pure bliss.
It is easy to let what we know about Van Gogh’s life to colour the way we look at his art. The genius of this show is that the artist himself tells us in his own words to look again and see what is really there, not what our imaginations have added to it.
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