On Art
MELLOW, JAMES R.
On Art THE REAL VAN GOGH BY JAMES R. MELLOW vINCENT VAN GOGH IS One of those unfortunate artists who have been worked to death by the media. Several years ago Hollywood made a high-powered,...
...One of his early pictures, for instance, shows his father's open Bible next to the closed yellow covers of Zola's novel, The Joy of Life...
...Although the image is graphic and striking, the effect of the picture can only be appreciated by following from one finical detail to the next—the fluttering stroke of each petal, the tiny, delicate pink buds that disappear altogether in reproduction...
...The obsessive texturing of his pictures, which always looks crusty or haphazard in reproduction, is, one discovers, the result of a meticulously controlled technique...
...There is a good deal of what we now term Op Art in Van Gogh's painting...
...The intense and vibrant blue that outlines the legs and rungs of the chair creates a repeated visual shock against the mottled-brown foreground...
...Yet there is good reason for doing so, particularly now that the Brooklyn Museum has mounted (until April 4) an impressive exhibition of 114 of his paintings and drawings...
...The current exhibition—having visited Baltimore and San Francisco—ends with the Brooklyn presentation...
...His oeuvre is comprised of 800 known paintings and 900 drawings, virtually none of them sold during his lifetime...
...Remy—one a study of his room with its barred window, the other of the entrance hall with its door opened to reveal the garden...
...It is an almost too-facile contrast of ideologies, but the forcefulness of his style carries it off...
...In his art...
...Nearly everything that is relevant and interesting in Van Gogh's art resists easy translation into another medium...
...In fact, he was dismissed from his job as a lay preacher in a coal mining district in Belgium for having given all his clothes and personal belongings to the poor...
...The plates in the exhibition's fully illustrated catalogue are perfect examples of what happens to the colors in Van Gogh's paintings through the mechanics of printing and with the necessary reduction of scale...
...Although these scenes are comparatively innocent, the painter has combined a soured, dun yellow with a pale icy green, eliciting an ambivalently pleasant and unpleasant feeling...
...It is unlikely that so sizeable a portion of the family collection will be loaned again...
...He had a bent for sermonizing and moralizing in paint...
...Yes, that picture by Millet, 'The Angelus,' " he wrote to Theo, "that is it—that is beauty, that is poetry...
...It was a mode of art, complete with its own stars and styles, that was swept out of existence by photography and the advent of new photo-printing techniques—the very same technological advance that has done so much to reduce Van Gogh's stature as an artist...
...Despite his many difficulties, marked by periods of confinement in lunatic asylums and hospitals, Van Gogh was a prolific artist...
...The idea seems more strange than anything the disturbed painter might have concocted...
...The actual Van Gogh—whom one may not have bothered to see in the original for years—is a good deal more interesting and significant than the media's mass-produced replicas...
...These works cover the entire range of Van Gogh's extraordinarily brief, 10-year career, starting with the drawings he executed in 1880-81, when he began to take himself seriously as an artist...
...The quality of the light in these pictures is remarkable, too, like the strange yellow that precedes a summer squall...
...Inherited by Theo's son and Vincent's namesake, Dr...
...Van Gogh took the hardships and privations of the peasants to heart...
...Several years ago Hollywood made a high-powered, maudlin film of his tragically disordered life, with Kirk Douglas reenacting the Dutch painter's private agonies chiefly by means of a jutting jaw and strenuously clenched teeth...
...Another of his idols was Millet, whose prints of laboring peasants Van Gogh studied as models for his own work...
...Across the back of the painting, however...
...His many paintings and drawings of pollard birches and willows—trees severely pruned back to gnarled stumps, allowing only new growth—also convey a sense of Van Gogh's fear of and fascination with a rampant nature that had to be brought under control...
...Van Gogh never ceased to extol the peasantry...
...Unlike many of his painter-colleagues...
...This preoccupation is revealed in one of his letters to Theo, written during a melancholy stay in the country: "You know that it is impossible to conquer nature and make her more amenable without a terrible struggle and without more than ordinary patience...
...The pictures in the present show are from the large collection that the painter left his younger brother Theo, the person on whom he was most dependent and with whom he quarreled least...
...The authorities evidently thought he had taken his Bible too literally...
...Van Gogh constantly emphasizes the twisted, the broken, the stunted, everything that might bloom all the more profusely for having been pruned by adversity...
...The well-known picture of Gauguin's chair — commemorating the disastrous two months the painters lived and worked together in Aries, which ended in the bitter quarrel that seems to have precipitated Van Gogh's final bout of madness—employs the technique very successfully...
...Aside from the physical images, like Millet's "The Sower," which he borrowed and adapted to his own needs, his collection of prints and illustrations provided him with the amazing repertory of graphic techniques—stippling, hatching, shading—that make Van Gogh's drawings unique...
...His father was a pastor in Holland, perhaps partially accounting for the serious God-driven side to Van Gogh's nature...
...The poor, bent peasants he liked to portray, the twisted sunflowers, the blazing wheat fields, have become such familiar images that it almost seems superfluous to look at the paintings...
...Then there is the queer, jarring exactness of his colors: those varied, tinged yellows, for instance, that every reproduction ruins with too much greening...
...An equally persuasive instance of this lapidary quality can be seen in a stunning late picture of flowering almond boughs...
...Supplementing its Van Gogh exhibition, the museum has also assembled an interesting display of the artist's personal collection of 19th-century prints and illustrations...
...A case in point is the oddly disturbing color scheme repeated in two of the gouaches he painted while in the asylum at St...
...This large canvas of gnarled branches silhouetted against a suave, dense, blue sky was painted in 1890 to honor the birth of his nephew...
...Like Gauguin and Picasso (in his Rose and Blue Periods), Van Gogh has become a giveaway at the supermarket: The reproductions are free, but the frames go for $2.98...
...The tufted, bristling centers of his sunflowers are obvious examples...
...At times, standing before a Van Gogh painting, one perceives an almost paranoiac attention to detail, as if each picture were a sworn deposition as to the artist's grasp of the visual facts, down to the most minute particular...
...The show ends with the sundrenched, tumultuous landscapes that preceded his suicide in July 1890...
...Vincent W. Van Gogh, now 81, the collection will soon be housed in a special museum the Dutch government is building for it...
...When the painter exhibited several drawings at an art club in Amsterdam, one of them depicting a village street with a round sun emblazoned overhead, the academics of the club passed a resolution that artists should not paint or draw the sun...
...The quality in Van Gogh's work that reproductions reinforce, unfortunately, was his penchant for hardcore illustration...
...Color reproductions of this picture bleach out the effect, making it little more than an interesting sketch, drawn in colored lines...
...As an example of Van Gogh's mastery, take the small, frequently reproduced picture of a twig of flowering almond stuck in a tumbler of water...
...Its colors are low-keyed and subdued: the soft, grayed background, the pale yellow and white striping of the cloth in the foreground, the hesistant pink of the partially opened buds...
...Until then, his life had been a series of false starts and failures: a lengthy period in business, a brief stint as a teacher and, finally, an unsuccessful attempt to prepare himself for the ministry...
...The engravings and lithographs he saved from English and American magazines—the Graphic, the Illustrated London News, Harper's Weekly—as well as the French publications that featured Daumier, Gavarni and Dore, influenced his own imagery...
...In the catalogue his nephew provides a poignant anecdote about Van Gogh's tendency toward the il-lustrational...
...Van Gogh has drawn a livid horizontal stripe in cadmium red that vibrates insistently among these tentative colors...
...His particular vision—his queer, crabbed way of depicting the world—has suffered as well...
...Van Gogh had a high opinion of journeymen illustrators and once aspired to work for the Graphic or Harper's Weekly...
...His American favorites were the cartoonist Thomas Nast and the illustrator Howard Pyle...
...The exhibition, it should be noted, offers a rare glimpse of the extraordinarily varied and operative world of 19th-century magazine illustrators...
...It is like studying a precious piece of enamelwork or cloissone...
...The presentation provides a valuable documentation of the sources of Van Gogh's inspiration...
...Van Gogh's pictures have been endlessly reproduced in cheap color slides, bad color plates (advertised, nonetheless, as suitable for framing) and innocuous, ready-framed facsimiles...
...The 68 oils on display include one version of his first important painting, "The Potato Eaters"—a dark, awkward, belabored picture of Dutch peasants sitting down to their meager evening meal —a work that establishes his emphatic proletarian sympathies...
...An Op artist today could construct an entire painting around this relatively minor effect...
Vol. 54 • March 1971 • No. 5
