What struck me first, after all the postcards, fridge magnets, coffee mugs and art textbooks one sees of van Gogh`s work in a lifetime, was the cartoonish quality of his portraits. It had never jumped out at me from the reproductions but standing before The Potato Eaters (1885) I saw distorted, buggedy-eyed characters that in their unauthenticity, seemed to make them even grimier and veritably human.

Though it was always there, benignly waiting to be noted as I scribbled notes in art class, it was only when I stood before his Bedroom in Arles (1888) at the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam that the warp and wave of the lines and the improbable colours occur to me. Finally, then, when his Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette (1885) appears, it‘s clear. Vincent was having a laugh.

His output of works during just ten years is prolific, 864 paintings and almost 1,200 drawings and prints have survived, most found in the Van Gogh Museum today. But his flighty nature secured his infamy amongst the general public. ‘Wasn‘t he the one who cut off his ear?’ A woman whispered waiting in line for museum tickets. Yes, that‘s him.

Vincent van Gogh, one of The Netherlands finest artists and most famous self-harmer, was born in 1822. Tragic genius hovers around his name because, you know, he was the one who shot himself in a field after a final flurry of creativity in which he produced a painting a day for 70 days.

Perhaps all true but like his whorling porthole bedroom in southern France, all a little bent out of shape.

 

Turning Japanese.

Inspired by the flamboyant époque in a city sympathetic to artists and his interaction with various key figures of the art world at the time, van Gogh’s Paris period transformed him as an artist. His brush was energised with light, spacial perspective and colour as his paintings systematically begin to glow
He viewed the eighth Impressionist exhibit and was struck by the Symbolist work of Gauguin and Seurat’s neo-Impressionism (Pointillism) a style he began to adopt immediately. Japonisme was stirring in the French artistic scene, captivating van Gogh.

In May 1886, a woodblock print by Keisai Eisen depicting a high-ranking courtesan was reproduced on the cover of Paris Illustré, in a special edition entitled “Le Japon” and van Gogh traced the image, transferring it to canvas. The Courtesan (1887) today hangs in Amsterdam and knocked the air out of me.

Her broad, demonic face is almost bawdy and wearing a spray of traditional head wear reminiscent of Medusa she retains the fantastic power to shock. Van Gogh`s palette had been extended by various influences over the years and he did not hold back with Courtesan. Bold yellow backgrounds and lacquer-black detailing on her kimono which curves around the focal centre of the painting like an angular cobra arching to strike.

“I envy the Japanese for the enormous clarity that pervades their work. It is never dull and never seems to have been made in haste. Their work is as simple as breathing and they draw a figure with a few well chosen lines with the same ease, as effortless as buttoning up one’s waistcoat….”
- Vincent van Gogh Letters 24 September, 1888

 

Night Magic in Arles

” I am rather often uneasy in my mind, because I think that my life has not been calm enough; all those bitter disappointments, adversities, changes keep me from developing fully and naturally in my artistic career.”
- Vincent van Gogh Letters16 June 1889

Van Gogh journeyed south for sun but in Arles it is night magic that seizes his work. The Museum Of Modern Art in New York exhibited a show last year titled van Gogh and the Colours of the Night which demonstrated the new relationship the artist established in Provence with evenlights. New York Times critic, Roberta Smith, suggests “van Gogh accepted the night as a distorting condition…Unable to see clearly, he painted what he saw, ultimately pitting his colours against one another as if they were antagonists in a visual drama.”

Before the fireworks and witchery of that very special painting, came another brilliant image, Le Café de nuit or The Night Cafe (1888.)

“In my picture of the Night Café I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad or commit a crime. So I have tried to express, as it were, the powers of darkness in a low public house, by soft Louis XV green and malachite, contrasting with yellow-green and harsh blue-greens, and all this in an atmosphere like a devil’s furnace, of pale sulphur.”
- Vincent van Gogh Letters September 9, 1888

That September he finished The Café Terrace on the Place du Forum where orbs of light dotted the velvet blue sky that bites down from the top of the painting and Starry Night over the Rhone in which the canvas is transformed into something of a globe, with starlight complimenting streetlight that radiates out in reflections on the bay.

This marriage of butter yellow and iris is not exclusive to the night sky. In muted tones, the same contrast-play exists in van Gogh’s haystacks and wheat field depictions, the wonky, wonderful Bedroom in Arles and even his sunflowers work.

Before Starry Night, came the infamous three month episode with his idol and flatmate in Arles, Gauguin, which culminated in the slicing off of art history’s most controversial ear. But enough has been said about all that.

What does make for a comical bookend to that wickedly funny Skeleton of his earlier career is his Self Portrait with a Bandaged Ear and Pipe (1889). Van Gogh`s head is wrapped and turned all the better for us to see what he has done. Critics argue that he is baring his shame to us here but I am not convinced. While the piercing eyes that follow the viewer in his other self-portraits are more distant in this mirror image, to me they might as well be winking. Just as the Skeleton is his sarcastic representation of his self-destructiveness, so too is this a darkly laughing advertisement of his own troubled soul.

Websites
Artelino
MoMa
National Gallery of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Vincent van Gogh Gallery
Van Gogh`s Letters
Van Gogh Museum, Netherlands

 

Article by Estelle Pigott

Tags: Le Japon, Self Portrait with a Bandaged Ear, Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette, Smoke & Mirrors, Starry Night, The Café Terrace, The Night Cafe, The Potato Eaters, vincent van gogh