Letter 252 from Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh: Pollard Willow, c. 1 Aug 1882, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)
The real Van Gogh is hard to pin down, so many and various are the accounts and interpretations of the artist’s life. Famous for cutting off his own ear and dying penniless only to achieve inordinate posthumous fame and recognition, Van Gogh is the ideal incarnation of “the tortured artist” in the popular imagination. A new show at the Royal Academy in London takes a less sensationalist approach to his oeuvre.
“The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters” is the first major Van Gogh exhibition in London for 40 years and coincides with the recent edition of the letters edited by Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten and Nienke Bakker of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. A selection of the rarely displayed letters, written in Dutch and later, French (with select passages translated into English), provide a unique opportunity to see Van Gogh’s approach and attitude to his own artistic production in the context of the very works he is describing. With 65 paintings and 30 drawings, hung chronologically, the show is both informative and visually intoxicating.
Early sketches and drawings from the beginning of his (self-taught) career in Holland are far from the latter-day greetings card Van Gogh but are no less arresting. “A sombre landscape” he writes to Theo, his brother and financial crutch,
“ — that dead tree beside a stagnant pond covered in duckweed, in the distance a Rijnspoor depot where railway lines cross, smoke-blackened buildings — also green meadows, a cinder road and a sky in which the clouds are racing, grey with an occasional gleaming white edge, and a depth of blue where the clouds tear apart for a moment.”
Reminiscent of Northern landscapes this composition is filled with the leafless chill of the Northern European climate.
After his exploits in Dutch landscape and experimental peasant studies, à la Millet, Van Gogh moved to Paris, where he was confronted with the whirling and color of the neo-impressionists and the vogue for Japanese prints and compositions. Without becoming part of any particular movement, Van Gogh absorbed the trends in painting and theory into his own pursuits. Color, in particular, was to be one of Van Gogh’s main concerns, heightened by the sun-drenched landscapes he encountered in Provence. What the letters show, alongside the evolution of his work, is Van Gogh’s commitment to his artistic production and his incessant inquiry into visual practices.
But the 35 letters on display barely scratch the surface of the artist’s indefatigable letter writing. In his review of the new edition of the letters in the London Review of Books, Julian Bell likens it to an epic novel, with incidental characters one might find in any nineteenth century fiction – Joseph Roulin, the postman, or Madame Ginoux, “l’Arlésienne” who ran Van Gogh’s local haunt in Arles (both of whom feature in portraits in the show). Bell concedes that “its protagonist, though, is larger than anything outside Dostoevsky or Tolstoy”.
And that is what is most fascinating about “The Real Van Gogh” – the portrait of the main protagonist through his art and words. Long considered to be a raving genius, Van Gogh was certainly not a mentally balanced individual by anyone’s standards. But in the mythologizing imagination the link is too easily made between the disturbed artist and his tumultuous, vividly colored canvases. What his letters illuminate is his engagement with the technicalities of his métier and his keen interest in the developments of art and color theory. He may have been passionate and impulsive but each work is a measured attempt to capture light and color, to produce something as beautiful as the nature around him.
“The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters” is on at the Royal Academy in London through April 18.
“Vincent van Gogh: The Letters” is published in six volumes by Thames and Hudson.
All the correspondence can be found online here as transcripts, facsimiles and translations.
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