Arte: The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and his Letters
In the dazzling heat of Provence in July, Van Gogh drags his easel up an ankle-turning hill. He has nothing to drink but sour milk. But the toil is worthwhile, for below him is a beautiful sight: "An immense flat expanse," he writes, "of vineyards, fields of harvested wheat, all of it infinitely multiplied, streaming away like the surface of the sea towards the horizon."
The mistral scorches his face, blows mosquitoes into his eyes. He can hardly keep the easel steady. A companion thinks the view too vast (read dull) for art, but Van Gogh persists and you can see the astonishing result about two-thirds of the way round this epochal show at the Royal Academy.
Sky, crops and trees become an immense force field of whorls, dots and loops of zigzags and curlicues, commas and minims, of notations that flow like music while following the exact undulations of the landscape. Furze tangles in cable-knit patterns, threshed wheat softens the fields with a smoky haze. Whispery specks drift into the distance, growing smaller and smaller until they mimic the effect of dissolving light.
And the colours – parched sandy roads, lilac meadows, the faded rust of a little train with its puff of blue-grey smoke – well, the colours are all shiningly there. Except that, technically, they are not, being transmitted in pure black and white.
Landscape Near Montmajour is a drawing, not a painting. It was made using a sharpened reed pen and ink. The common question applied to painters such as Velázquez, say – how could they achieve such illusions with a mere brush and paint? – becomes exceptional and no longer rhetorical in this case. For how did he do it? To stare into this sparkling image is not just to enter the view, but to share the artist's transforming vitality. It is no exaggeration to say it has a spellbinding aura.
Van Gogh and his genius with ink turns out to be the theme of this show. Its occasion is the publication of a new edition of his letters, of which nearly 900 survive, running to a total of 2,000 pages. Extracts appear alongside 90 or so pictures. Originals are displayed in vitrines, blown up on gigantic screens and even, with the final letter, presented as if they were art works themselves. And why not, since they are frequently beautiful, and always eloquent, trenchant and impassioned.
That last letter, not incidentally, which was found in his jacket after Van Gogh shot himself, is characteristically lucid and composed. The handwriting holds fast in the service of communicating reassurance to his brother, Theo, unlike the nearly illegible scratchings of his contemporary Nietzsche, which, in their every word and mark, express a mind vanishing into the tunnel of insanity. Van Gogh's last letter is not a suicide note, either.
Now you might say that this famous correspondence is just another pretext, or curatorial armature, for a show. And who needs words when faced with such images: the irises, sunflowers and blazing cherry blossom, the auraed suns and starlit haloes, the crisp flakes of sunlight seen through dark leaves and the burning black cypresses? The redoubtable postman Roulin, blue eyed and true, the peasant-apostles bent over the dark earth, the bull-necked zouave: his friends who became ours through art.
But the letters are full of insights – quite literally. Look close and you see, as he writes, how a certain green "saddens" grey, how yellow against cobalt stimulates hope, how a farmer may be shaped by the landscape. Patterned nature, sonic colour, the moods of water, the multiple personalities of black: the letters offer new ways of seeing all the time. And once you have discovered his ambition for a particular work, it tunes your eye to the next. What a revelation when Van Gogh imagines his canvas of Madame Roulin propped in a boat, rocking "even Icelandic fishermen" to easeful sleep: the portrait as melodious lullaby.
Van Gogh's brain speeds, but his writing keeps up, page after page, night after night, words tucked between lines and curling around them. Some letters include incidental sketches – a cross-section of the actual pencil he is using to show its strange shape, a lifesize portrait of the paintbrush he needs to make another such image. But many climax with what he humbly calls "scratchings" – fully finished drawings for Theo that show no loss of power because of their size.
The first masterpiece here, indeed, is a vision of winter so still the very air seems frozen solid, worked in a chip of black chalk on the outside of a modest envelope.
But there comes a point where the letters have done their work, directing the eye so well that the visitor no longer needs them. Which is as it should be, for the images are stupendous, and some rarely displayed in Britain, whereas the correspondence, superb as it is, can be read for nothing day or night on the internet.
Stubble, dank furrows, pollarded willows, reedbeds and thatch, the hunched and straitened worker: to begin with, it seems as though Holland was made for Van Gogh or, rather, his drawings. Those bony figures, those monochrome scenes of reaping and sowing in the gloomy fields feel sacramental: a gospel of sorrow and humility inscribed in cross-hatched ink.
But very suddenly – and the shock is mimicked here in the stunning transition between two galleries – the painting bursts into life. Van Gogh has gone to Paris, seen impressionism, absorbed its lessons. But he turns out to be less interested in the ever-changing effects of light than in the world's more profound and jubilant truths.
There is a table top of oranges in this show so incandescent one takes a dazed step backwards. The white cloth scintillates, racing up towards the brilliant blue aura of a basket formed of twining, dancing willow. The oranges within form a troupe of glowing spheres. The very walls seem to be watching the show, admiring the celluloid crackle of sunshine on peel, the singular beauty of each fruit, the sensational all-together-now performance. Why should oranges not be some kind of miracle?
Each painting is a breakthrough and an advanced act of praise. Each feels like the very thing Van Gogh believes he can never achieve, namely the painting of the future. Look at his raging-red crabs rampant against an arsenical green ground, as if protesting their independence: the wildest crustaceans in art, perpetually avant-garde; or the dynamically worked surface of his white roses, incandescent against a pale green wall. The flowers are stunning enough, but the power is in these electrifying brushmarks that channel the flow of sensation, still live with the maker's touch.
It is as trite by now to say that Van Gogh was one of the sanest artists who ever lived, as it is to claim the late paintings as proof of this sanity. In these wheat fields, roses and cerulean skies, we are, moreover, supposed to discover serenity. There may be joy, perhaps, and exultation, but surely not the stasis that serenity implies. Van Gogh looks at the world and forges forward, improvising new notations, bringing back the experiences more immediately than any other artist before or since.
In one of the late letters, he rounds on abstraction. There is the whole of life, after all, just waiting to be disentangled. And one of the thrills of this show – there is no other word – is watching this happen, from the hunched peasants made when he was teaching himself to draw with manuals to the intricate glory of his Landscape Near Montmajour, all in a mere few years. It is one of the shortest careers in art yet, like the world it represents, its transformations appear inexhaustible. Van Gogh is not the patron saint of martyrs, or madmen, or misunderstood visionaries, but of continuous revolution – of trying too hard to make the world new every time and, thereby, succeeding.
Five breathtaking moments: masterpieces to look out for in the show
Landscape Near Montmajour With a Train (1888) Monumental, teeming, yet perfectly controlled, this is one of the greatest landscapes in all art, made with nothing but a reed pen and ink.
Roses (1890) One of the last pictures Van Gogh painted in the asylum at Saint Remy, a cascade of brilliant blossoms over a pale green backdrop irradiated by waves of white light.
Reaper (1885) One of six black chalk portraits of labourers on the land, heroic in scale, homages to Dutch miners and peasants.
Wheat Fields After the Rain (1890, pictured top) Wheat fields, poppies, poplars streaming towards curlicued clouds, "so healthy and fortifying," wrote Van Gogh; a few days later he shot himself.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/jan/24/real-van-gogh-letters-royal-academy#
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