An essay on the Van Gogh museum journey

If there is anything to learn from the great artists it is this: They rigidly learn the rules then they break them. In the case of Van Gogh, he doesn’t break them, he smashes them to smithereens. ‘The Potato Harvesters’ is to our eye an attempt at a late 19th Century painting. A little less detail than the realists hanging around in Paris, but Van Gogh mimics the Barbier & Hague schools which focus on ‘keeping it real’ and painting the peasant life

Even when Van Gogh is trying to keep to muted tones he dumps buckets of thick gooey medium and oil paint. He drags the pointy end of the paintbrush through the paint to provide a depth and dimension to ‘Entrance to a Quarry’. It’s all brown, greens and muck.

When he gets to Arles he paints ‘Field with Flowers near Arles’. When you’re a dumb tourist and you stand too close to this picture it’s just a diagonal row of colours. Stand six to eight meters back from the painting and it is truly breathtaking. The excess of paint on the canvas is truly stunning. It must have taken weeks, if not months to dry.

But before we get to how Van Gogh arrived at ‘Field with Flowers near Arles’ the ‘Van Gogh Museum’ in Amsterdam sets up the painting schools or styles that were in place before Van Gogh cut loose. A case in point is Theodule Ribot’s (1825-1891) ‘A Kitchen Boy’ I defy any Australian familiar with ‘The Fossicker’ not to notice the similarities.

Van Gogh tries religion then discovers the religion of art. In 1880 he wakes up and thinks I don’t want to be an artist, I AM an artist. Or in his own words:

“A strong desire to leave a certain souvenier to humankind in the form of drawings and paintings not made merly to comply with this or that school but to express genuine human feeling’.

It’s a bit ambitious, and if any mere mortal was to write this today they’d be mocked on twitter and facebook before the hour was out. When he starts out, he starts out like all artists do, be they musician, writer, painter or actor, they start out with an earnestness to tell it like it is. Artists can’t help it we want it guttural and real. However, even in these early works as a painter we get hints of what is to come. Take ‘Avenue with Poplars in Autumn’ it screams greens, browns, greys. The light is restrained, the paint thin on the canvas. Only the trunks of the poplars have any real goopy thickness of paint. The figure walking down the avenue is a mere 5-10 brush strokes tops.

In the early paintings it looks like Van Gogh works very hard at getting the technical details of portraiture ‘just right’. Then he goes grotesque for ‘The Potato Eaters’ deliberately setting out to create a masterpiece. No one wants the painting – particularly as ‘The Potato Eaters’ appears to have been painted with mud, dirt and gunk not paint at all. The faces of the people in the painting are almost the origin of ‘Mr Potato Head’.

It makes me wonder has any artist who sets out to create a masterpiece actually created a masterpiece with that work?

I think that Van Gogh must have been angry at his presumption of success and then not achieving it. So he goes back to Paris – where the art market is, and befriends some painters. He also likes the idea of pointillism. Today to our eye, pointillism is nothing more than pixels, and in a digital age all of us can understand that concept. Pointillism is the same thing, just a larger pixel size. Van Gogh experiments with pointillism up to a point, then he quickly moves away from that idea and changes it from a dot to a dash. They start off as short dashes but if you’ve ever been up close to Van Gogh in his final years, you know those dashes become thick, artline graffiti texta thick lines. Thick, dense, three-dimensional paint, which again, makes me think that the canvas must have groaned under the weight of all  that paint.

To get by in Paris, Van Gogh does lots of still life paintings, because they are popular, he doesn’t have to pay for a sitter, and he can experiment. When he immerses himself in the art scene he befriends Monticelli and Pissaro (one of my personal favourites of the Impressionist school). The colour explodes off the canvas with ‘Poppies, Cornflowers, Daisies and Carnations’. It is the whitest white, the bluest blue and the reddest red in this still life. Yet his initial response to the Impressionist school is one that rings true to anyone who doesn’t understand the art they are looking at:

“One is bitterly, bitterly disappointed and finds them slap dash, ugly, badly painted, badly drawn, wrong in colour, utterly inadequate’.

Then he meets Talouse-Latrec and Van Gogh discovers the vivid colours used in the Japanese prints. Within two years his style has been completely reinvented. I tend to want to say for dramatic purposes ‘his style has been set free’.

He moves away from Paris and tries to set up an artists colony in Arles. He paints sunflowers for Matisse’s room. Five of the paintings survive, three on a yellow background (seen all three) two on a  blue background (none seen in the ‘flesh’).The harder light of Southern Europe (familiar to us Australians) results in an explosion of strong colour. The early Arles works ‘The Harvest’ and ‘Orchard in Blossom’ fully explore this harder light. If you have ever driven back to the Barossa Valley from the Clare Valley there is a view not too dissimilar to ‘The Harvest’ although the Australian landscape is more bleached in colour than the south of France.

Up close with Van Gogh it is all about texture, the brush strokes, the medium, the oil paint, the bold colours sitting on top of each other on the canvas. However to understand how brilliant Van Gogh’s new style is you need to look at the triptych ‘The Pink Orchard’, ‘The Pink Peach Tree’, ‘The White Orchard’. These three paintings need distance about 10 meters distant from the work to really appreciate how good the perspective and Van Gogh’s vision of these orchards and tree is.

In May of 1898 Vincent admits himself to a psychiatric hospital at Saint Remy. He stays in this hospital for nearly a year. The colour explosion that had happened up to the move to Saint Remy declines. His paintings of the hospital and garden surrounds are muted. You know this at the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam because you can see several of the preceeding works. Not just an example. What is the key thing to note is that Van Gogh’s dashes don’t become aligned to the landscape or the still life object. Skies no longer become broad brush strokes to act like a solid wash of colour. What Van Gogh does instead is short, sharp, deep dashes – even for the brightest of blue skies. This is why Starry night (in the Musee D’Orsay – but currently touring) strikes us so. Those stars are circles of dashes.

While at Saint Remy he also sets to paint the masters, but all he has to go on for reference is some early black and white prints and his own memory. He sets out to repaint Dalacroix, Rembrandt and Millet. But instead of trying to reproduce the words of these masters he reinvents the colour palette completely. In my minds eye I can see the process flow, original sighted and remembered, at Saint Remy a black & white reproduction print to prod Van Gogh’s memory and then he paints the colours he thinks are there.

For me one of the more stunning Van Gogh paintings is the one that doesn’t need to rely on the colour show so much. It is a snow scape of pale creams, pale greens and pale pinks. This is where the thickness of the paint is almost held contained by the black outlining marks. It’s a lesson for the teaching: Van Gogh doesn’t need the primary colours to bring a scene alive.

After Vincent’s time in the asylum he heads out to the country. It’s clear for all of his life Van Gogh had been torn between the city and the country life. What is to come is hinted at with the majestic ‘Wheatfield with Reaper’. The Reaper of the wheat being a mere idea in pastels set against the brilliant gold and yellows of the wheat field.

Then in 1890 he moves further away from the asylum. In a few paintings he returns to the solid wash of colour in the backgrounds to some of his works. However, in ‘The Undergrowth’ the dappled light is well caught as it shines through the canopy onto the undergrowth below. Up close the ideas seem only a suggestion. Step back 5 to 8 meters and ‘The Undergrowth’ is as sharp and as deep as any painting can be from a perspective point of view.

This is followed by ‘Landscape at Twighlight’, although it is missing the characteristic brightness of Van Gogh’s later works.

Then there are his two last works he ever painted. ‘Wheat fields under Thunder clouds’ where the strokes have become wider, longer and deeper. There is very little depth in the paint on the canvas with the singular exception of the thunderclound, however that storm cloud in the top left of the painting almost seems to be an afterthought – or that he is using the canvas as his palette. But that’s the close up version, walk five to eight meters back from the canvas and that thundercloud is as clear and obvious as any thundercloud in a summer storm.

The last work Van Gogh ever painted was ‘Wheatfield with Crows’. The crows are just two strokes of the brush, the sky is vivid, the wheat field luminescent. Or it would be if it was on display. On my visit – this particularly painting was being restored.

Then on 27th July 1890 Vincent Van Gogh shot himself in the chest and died three days later.

I could have only had made this discovery of the journey of Vincent Van Gogh’s art by coming to Amsterdam and visiting the Van Gogh museum. You need to see paintings from the entire period of Van Gogh’s artistic life and put it in context with the work of his contemporaries. There is nowhere else in the world where this can be done. The Musee D’Orsay has about 5-6 but they are all from the later period. The NG London has one or two„ but at the Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam they have fifty or so works from his whole life as an artist. In viewing these paintings in sequence, we don’t only discover the artist, we discover the man.

(original published on my tumblr blog (http://deccles26.tumblr.com)