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Van Gogh Museum Journal 2002 (2002)

Van Gogh Museum Journal 2002

(2002)– [tijdschrift] Van Gogh Museum Journal–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

Vorige Volgende


illustratie
Vincent van Gogh, The Yellow House in Arles
(F 464 JH 1589), 1888, Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)


The Van Gogh literature from 1990 to the present: a selective review
Ann Dumas

The aim of this article is to provide a review of the Van Gogh literature over the last dozen years. Given the vast body of writings produced since 1990, however, it is by necessity highly selective. I have only attempted to cover what one may call the ‘standard’ literature, although a variety of art-historical methodologies are represented. I have sought to trace in broad lines what I see as the major trends in Van Gogh scholarship - in the past decade, but also for the near future. My approach to the books, catalogues and articles examined is not so much critical as descriptive, providing the reader with a general introduction to the authors and their ideas. Although works on Van Gogh have been published in many languages, I have also chosen to concentrate almost exclusively on the literature in English.

 

It is a notorious irony of Van Gogh's career that the commercial and critical neglect he suffered in life was dispelled almost immediately after his death. The first appreciative article on his work, ‘Les isolés: Vincent van Gogh,’ by the young symbolist writer and critic Albert Aurier, had in fact appeared a few months before the artist's death.1 From that point onward the artist's popularity, and the concomitant creation of a Van Gogh myth based on his unrivalled status as the archetypal artiste maudit, gathered momentum at an unrelenting pace.2 Aurier's text proclaimed the independent value of the paintings themselves and rejected both a biographical approach to Van Gogh's art and a contextual one, which would have the works viewed as products of a given period and milieu. However, the inescapable drama of Van Gogh's brief and turbulent life, ending with his suicide in July 1890, and the vast self-revelatory testament he left behind in the form of his letters, ensured that the biographical approach predominated in much of the early literature. Writing in 1980, Griselda Pollock noted: ‘The largest section of VG [Van Gogh] publications are those monographic studies simply entitled Van Gogh, with a portrait or self-portrait on the cover.’3 The German critic Julius Meier-Graefe extended his critical appraisal of Van Gogh to writing a novel based on the artist's life, Vincent: Der Roman eines Gottsuchers (1932), one of a number of German fictional accounts of the artist. The ultimate popular biography of Van Gogh was, of course, the American writer Irving Stone's Lust for life, published in 1935. With the making of Vincent Minelli's film based on Stone's book in 1953 Van Gogh arrived in Hollywood.

A number of psychoanalytical studies attempting to pinpoint the roots of Van Gogh's ‘madness’ arose from this biographical bias.4 As Pollock observed: ‘These [biographies], with the proliferating essays of psychologistic and psycho-symbolic interpretations, far outnumber the relatively scarce studies of aspects of an artistic practice.’5

The more recent literature has considerably redressed this balance. Time has provided a greater distance from the subject. Over the last decades scholars have brought more objective and systematic art-historical

methodology to bear on the different periods of Van Gogh's career, particular subjects, or aspects of his technique and style. Contrary to Aurier's prescription, a number of more recent studies have broadened the debate beyond the works themselves, rescuing Van Gogh from the role of isolated, tormented genius and exploring his art and his writing in relation to late 19th-century social, cultural and philosophical issues.

Overviews

A number of recent museum catalogues and other publications (including the many articles that have appeared in the Van Gogh Museum Journal) have given us a more extensive and secure body of facts on Van Gogh's work than existed before, with regard to dating, style, technique and, in some cases, attribution. A methodical, empirical approach characterises the two catalogues that accompanied the major exhibition held in 1990 to mark the centenary of Van Gogh's death, at the beginning of the period here under review. This exhibition was mounted at the Van Gogh Museum and the Kröller-Müller Museum, the two institutions having the largest holdings of Van Gogh's work.6 Divided into two parts (the paintings were displayed in Amsterdam and the drawings in Otterlo) the shows brought together a spectacular selection, comprising 133 paintings and 248 drawings from all periods of Van Gogh's career. The two-volume catalogue draws on new and thorough research, focusing attention on the works themselves. In the paintings catalogue, Louis van Tilborgh gives a succinct overview in his introductory essay, and the substantial and informative catalogue entries by Van Tilborgh, Evert van Uitert and Sjraar van Heugten provide a wealth of material on the making of the works and their chronological ordering.

The particular achievement of the exhibition's curators was, however, to give full weight to the drawings and their relationship to the paintings. Until the 1980s, the drawings had received scant attention.7 Johannes van der Wolk's essay, ‘Van Gogh the draughtsman at his best,’ explores the complex and shifting patterns of creation between the paintings and drawings. Van Gogh's letters often contain detailed discussions not only of individual drawings but also of the groups and series to which they belonged. The exhibition reflected these groupings - of anatomical studies, figures as types, figures at rest, figures in action, the topography and life of the town. Looking at the post-Paris period, Ronald Pickvance systematically analyses the relationship between paintings and the drawings and establishes four categories: drawings that are independent of paintings, shared motifs, paintings made from drawings and a category special to Van Gogh, drawing made after paintings. E.B.F. Pey, taking a poetic title from Van Gogh's letters, ‘Chalk the colour of ploughed-up land on a summer evening,’ examines the artist's drawing materials, a subject hitherto virtually ignored by scholars. Attributing this lacuna to the fact that drawing materials are often difficult to identify with the naked eye, Pey analyses 40 drawings in the exhibition, concluding that Van Gogh first mastered conventional techniques such as chalk and charcoal, but then experimented with more unusual media such as Italian chalk.

In 1996 a revised edition of Jan Hulsker's 1977 catalogue appeared.8 Hulsker acknowledges and builds on the immense pioneering work of J.-B. de la Faille, who brought out the first catalogue raisonné of Van Gogh's work in 1928. De la Faille divided the oeuvre into two parts, paintings and drawings, but Hulsker reintegrates it in order to arrive at a more complete understanding of the chronology and Van Gogh's practice. The advantage of Hulsker's method is that it allows him to group works that clearly belong together and that were made at the same time, drawings with paintings, as well as the variants and sketches in the letters. Inevitably, references in the letters provide an essential aid to chronology and dating. Hulsker's achievement of placing more than 2,100 illustrations of works in a tentative chronological order has provided an invaluable basis for subsequent catalogues and chronologies of the work.

Despite these obvious merits, however, Hulsker's book is not without its problems. It is far from being the long hoped-for catalogue raisonné, as he mentions no sources, provides the reader with only the most summary information about technique (particularly with regard to the drawings) and makes no mention of provenances. There are also numerous errors in the locations of the works. Perhaps most damaging, and confusing, however, is his ambiguous use of question marks, whereby it remains unclear whether the author is questioning his own assumptions about dating or the work's very authenticity.

As a first step in the compilation of a true catalogue raisonné, the Van Gogh Museum has recently embarked on a major scholarly initiative with a series of new and splendidly produced catalogues of the paintings and drawings in their collection. To date, the first of the four paintings catalogues and three of the four catalogues devoted to the drawings have appeared.9 Although these exemplary compilations deal only with the collections of the Van Gogh Museum, their methodology and wealth of documentation provide a context and an invaluable tool that can be applied to Van Gogh's oeuvre in general.

More than 200 paintings survive from Van Gogh's Dutch period. Vincent Van Gogh: paintings. Vol. I: Dutch period, 1881-1885, written by Louis van Tilborgh and Marije Vellekoop, documents the 44 paintings from this period in the Van Gogh Museum's collection.10 The catalogue makes available new and valuable information on Van Gogh's early period, which has traditionally been overshadowed by his more dazzling later production. The catalogue is a model of its kind, with all relevant aspects of each work meticulously and intelligently documented. Extensive physical and technical examination of the pictures, both with the naked eye and under the microscope, are discussed. This, together with a study of the letters, reveals important facts about Van Gogh's working methods at the time. What emerges most clearly from this volume is how, from the first painted studies in Drenthe to the masterpieces of the Dutch period, Van Gogh evolved from being ‘an untutored beginner to a genuine and original master.’11

The Van Gogh Museum holds the most extensive collection of the artist's works on paper in the world: 460 drawings, more than 200 letter sketches and most of Van Gogh's surviving sketchbooks. The three catalogues cover the periods 1880-88.12 These books are as meticulous in their presentation as the paintings catalogue, with illustrations in colour to do justice to the nuances of sepia or ink and wash. The first volume covers the period in which Van Gogh developed from a novice into a draughtsman. In his introduction, devoted mainly to the technical aspects of Van Gogh's early artistic development, Van Heugten discusses the myriad and diverse sources from which Van Gogh trained himself as a draughtsman. The second volume covers the period 1883-85, when Van Gogh lived in The Hague, Brabant and Nuenen. The 21 months Van Gogh spent in The Hague saw the rapid evolution of his drawing style. The catalogue follows a different structure from volume one, grouping the numerous studies of hands, heads and figures of weavers Van Gogh made in Nuenen in order to demonstrate their ‘essentially autodidactic qualities’13 and Van Gogh's quest for an archetypal peasant type. The third volume examines the 116 drawings the artist executed in Antwerp and Paris. In both cities, Van Gogh attended academic art classes, as demonstrated by his dozens of figural studies. These rarely seen, often awkward works provide new insight into Van Gogh's development and his understanding of the human figure.

The letters

Van Gogh occupies a special position as an artist/writer. No other painter in recent history has written so extensively, so personally or so directly about his art, his feelings, his reading, his religious and philosophical views as Van Gogh. The letters are thus a crucial part of the primary source material on the artist. In addition to the cataloguing of their paintings and drawings, the Van Gogh

Museum, together with the Constantijn Huygens Institute for Text Editions and Intellectual History, The Hague, has embarked on a major research project on the letters. Currently, the standard edition of the letters is the four-volume set in the original languages, compiled by V.W. Van Gogh and published in the early 1950s, which was translated into English in 1958 and French in 1960, and recently reprinted in English.14 An updated, entirely Dutch edition, including new letters and previously omitted passages, appeared in 1990.15 This was followed in 1996 by a selection in English edited by Ronald de Leeuw.16 The ‘evidence’ in the letters is, of course, neither objective nor transparent, but Leo Jansen and Hans Luijten of the Van Gogh Museum are now engaged in an exhaustive re-examination of all aspects of the correspondence, which will shed new light on a great many complex matters and questions.17 A recent exhibition presented some of their findings to the public for the first time.18

Van Gogh's literary and artistic heroes

Van Gogh steeped himself in literature and in art. His letters reveal the broad spectrum of his reading and his love of the artists who inspired him. Since 1990 a number of studies have appeared that have considerably deepened our knowledge of Van Gogh and his artistic and literary heroes.

The first comprehensive study was that of Judy Sund, published in 1992.19 Although Van Gogh's reading material has been discussed frequently in the subsequent literature, Sund's book remains the most intelligent and extensive investigation of the subject. Sund explains how Van Gogh became caught up in the vogue for contemporary French literature that was prevalent in artistic and intellectual circles during his time in The Hague. His favourite author was without a doubt Emile Zola. As Sund's title infers, Van Gogh shared Zola's fundamental belief in individual temperament as a creative force, and she explains the exaggerated form and colour in his paintings in terms of a need to express the ‘emotion of an ardent temperament.’20 Van Gogh, Sund argues, was drawn to writers who addressed social issues partly because he rejected the organised religion of his upbringing, finding greater solace in the more general humanism expounded by certain 19th-century novelists and philosophers. Literature also filled an emotional gap in Van Gogh's personal life: ‘Chronic difficulties in achieving and maintaining intimate relations of all sort seem to have encouraged his reliance on books for advice, solace and surrogate companionship,’ Sund explains.21 She goes on to suggest that reading ‘enriched the imaginative life of this solitary man with a deep, inner reservoir of feeling and associations that fed the heightened, poetic quality that distinguishes his paintings.’22 She is particularly effective in demonstrating how literature acted as a touchstone for the artist, one to which he constantly referred to interpret and shape his life - whether in his relationship with the prostitute Sien, or in his fantasy constructions of Provence.

The exhibition Van Gogh in England: portrait of the artist as a young man, held at the Barbican Art Gallery in 1992, provided comprehensive insight into the three-and-a-half years Van Gogh spent in London (1873-76) and introduced us to Van Gogh's literary and artistic heroes during this important formative period.23 In his introductory essay, Martin Bailey outlines the familiar facts of Van Gogh's chequered career as art dealer, teacher and lay preacher in England and recounts the tale of his unrequited love for his landlady's daughter. What is most rewarding and interesting about Bailey's study, however, is its revelation of the extent of Van Gogh's exposure to British art during his stay and the lasting impact it would have on his own work. Bailey emphasises the interesting fact that it was only after Van Gogh left England and was living in The Hague that he began to fully absorb the art he had seen there, through the back and white illustrations in The Graphic and The Illustrated London News.

It was also during his stay in London that Van Gogh enriched his knowledge of English literature. One book that touched him deeply and that would remain an inspiration was George Eliot's Felix Holt - the radical, the story of an idealistic young man with whom Van Gogh readily identified. Van Gogh also read Thomas Carlyle, Daniel Defoe and Charlote Brontë, but his preferred English author was undoubtedly Charles Dickens, whose human dramas were brought to life by the many excellent illustrations in his novels by the English graphic artists Van Gogh admired. Bailey makes the compelling suggestion that Van Gogh's two surrogate ‘portraits’ of empty chairs (his and Gauguin's), painted in Arles in November 1888, were at least partly inspired by Luke Fildes's engraving of Dickens's empty chair on the day of his death, The empty chair, Gad's Hill, ninth of June 1870.

An essay by Debora Silverman in the same catalogue examines the relevance of John Bunyan's Pigrim's progress to Van Gogh's spiritual predicament of 1875-76. Van Gogh found in Bunyan's book, first published in 1678, an affirmation of his own ‘religious mentality of work and popular evangelism.’24 Silverman goes on to demonstrate the legacy of this treatise in Van Gogh's art. In a complex analogy, she connects Bunyan's ‘visual piety,’ or ‘eyes riveted to a single focus,’ with the pilgrim's steadfast purpose. This she equates with Van Gogh's use of the perspective frame, explaining: ‘When Van Gogh turned from religion to art, he converted the theology of optical singularity into a visual practice, facilitated by a craft tool bearing a striking affinity to the perspective glass relied on by Bunyan's pilgrims - his perspective frame.’25 Silverman sees a relationship between the intentional awkwardness of Van Gogh's The potato eaters (F 82 JH 764) and Bunyan's ‘clumsy’ writing, demonstrating their shared belief in the redemptive qualities of humble subjects and the divine agency of awkward language.

The copy turns original: Vincent van Gogh and a new approach to traditional art practice, written by Cornelia Homburg and published in 1996, was the first extensive study of Van Gogh's copies of other artists' work. Homburg surveys the range of Van Gogh's copies, but what interests her most is the painter's struggle to ‘incorporate an old-fashioned principle like the copy into his attempts to be productive and acceptable as a modern artist.’26 She suggests that Van Gogh adopted a particularly post-impressionist approach to his copies, creating free and personal interpretations of the original works instead of exact replicas. Homburg analyses the different artists Van Gogh was drawn to and the reasons for their appeal to him. He was fascinated, for example, by Rembrandt's ability to transform a straightforward real-life image into an expression of eternal and elevated truth, which Van Gogh described as the ‘je ne sais quoi’ of true genius. True genius was a quality also often associated with Delacroix, who was frequently linked to Rembrandt by 19th-century critics. Van Gogh was drawn to Delacroix's expressive colour and, in fact, began his Saint-Rémy campaign of copying by making a painting after a lithograph of Delacroix's Pietà.

However, the artist at the summit of Van Gogh's private pantheon was Millet, whom he regarded as the great painter of humanity. In the autumn of 1889 Van Gogh painted 20 canvas versions of images from two Millet series based on the cycles of country life, The labours of the fields and The four times of the day. Homburg points out that despite his great admiration for Millet, Van Gogh felt the need to ‘heighten’ the older artist's sombre muted palette with a more glowing and expressive range of colours, which would make subjects more mystical, less earthbound. Homburg's discussion ends with an examination of the several copies Van Gogh made after Gauguin's L'Arlésienne, a poignant meditation, perhaps, on the lessons he had so recently learnt from his collaboration with his friend.

In 1998 Van Gogh/Millet, an exhibition devoted exclusively to Van Gogh and his hero, was held at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.27 In her catalogue essay, Marie-Pierre Salé sets the context for Van Gogh's fervent admiration of the older painter. Although exceptional, she explains, it did conform to a widespread enthusiasm for the artist in the late 19th century. Salé reiterates Homburg's assertion that the popular image of Millet the peasant-painter was largely the result of Sensier's hagiographic biography. This book had a profound influence on Van Gogh. It was Sensier's Millet that Van Gogh idolised and in whom he found confirmation of his own ideal of the simple, hard-working life. Louis van Tilborgh traces Van Gogh's responses to his mentor throughout his career, from the peasant subjects he tackled in Nuenen to his copies after the Seasons and Hours series made in Saint-Rémy. Van Tilborgh believes Van Gogh emulated Millet because he found in him an affirmation of his ideals - a new idea of religions based on nature, a humanity appropriate for modern times and, above all, a model for his ambition to endow images of ordinary people with a sense of the sacred and eternal.

Van Gogh in context

Much of the writing on Van Gogh since 1990 has broadened the debate beyond biography and art historical sources to embrace wider historical, social and philosophical contexts in order to elucidate the meanings of his art. An important step forward in the study of Van Gogh's symbolism was made by Tsukasa Kōdera in 1996 in Vincent Van Gogh: Christianity versus nature.28 Certainly, Van Gogh and symbolism had been linked from the start. Kōdera takes up the notion of persistent idées fixes beneath the naturalistic appearance of Van Gogh's works expressed by Albert Aurier in his 1890 article, stating his aim ‘to show the significance of Van Gogh's principal themes and motifs in the thematic structure of his entire oeuvre.’29 To this end he compiles a chronological list of the artist's principal motifs, showing their frequency in each period of Van Gogh's career, as well as a summary of descriptions of these motifs in the letters, which he uses to support his analyses. Having marshalled this impressive body of facts, Kōdera builds a number of elaborate, sometimes convoluted, analogies around the artist's themes, with a particular focus on the two aspects that form the subtitle: Christianity and its substitution by a religion of nature and the expression of this new religion in Van Gogh's art. The most original and cogent section of Kōdera's book is the chapter entitled ‘Japan as primitivistic utopia: Van Gogh's japoniste portraits.’30 Most studies of Van Gogh's japonisme, Kōdera claims, have concentrated on his stylistic and iconographic borrowings from Japanese prints, but have failed to reveal the multi-layered significance of his infatuation with the country and its culture. Japan, Kōdera argues, was linked in Van Gogh's mind, among other things, with an ideal community of artists living and working harmoniously like a religious brotherhood. However, Van Gogh actually knew very little about the historical realities of Japan, and could thus use it as a blank screen on which to project his utopian dream: ‘Detached from their original cultural context, Japanese motifs were relatively neutral motifs open to free interpretations by Western artists, [...] totally free of biblical allusions or traditional Christian symbolic meanings. That is why Van Gogh could crystallize his artistic, communal and religious ideals around the nucleus of Japan.’31

One of the most trenchant voices to propose a new approach to Van Gogh in recent years has been that of Griselda Pollock. Writing in 1980, she rejected notions of genius and individuality and announced her Marxist stance in a polemical style. Sweeping aside dominant ‘expressionist,’ ‘symbolic’ or ‘sentimentalist’ interpretations based on narrative and biographical modes of interpretative criticism, she proposed different ways of conducting art historical work on Van Gogh. Rather than offering the paintings to

be consumed as articulations of a personality, they were to be viewed as ‘practices’ within historically determined and therefore class-constituted positions.32

These ideas have been refined and developed in Pollock's more recent writings. Her essay ‘On not seeing Provence’33 views the artist within a variety of themes that can be said to characterise the late 19th century, such as the paradigmatic condition of tourism tied to the search for unsullied nature in an industrialising world, and the challenge of making a valid form of religious art in a secular era.34 Pollock's text is devoted to Van Gogh's withdrawal from the city in search of what he called ‘a purer nature of the countryside,’ an idealised terrain, untainted by modern civilisation. She locates his quest within the phenomenon of tourism and the 19th-century vogue for artists' colonies, but views Van Gogh's choices as ‘off-beam.’ In 1883 the impulse to escape led him to a remote spot in Drenthe, not the occasional artists' colony at Zweeloo, only a few miles away; and in 1888 he chose Arles, a historic, agricultural, but also industrialising town, instead of a more conventional Eden. Pollock demonstrates how little interest Van Gogh took in the present day realities of Arles, falling back on the tourist clichés that had grown up around the place. Van Gogh was, she argues, a tourist with a difference: ‘He was a conservative Dutchman abroad as an artist, ideologically adrift in the challenging conditions of capitalist modernity.’35 Addressing the frequently covered subject of Van Gogh's utopian dream of the south, Pollock traces its familiar roots (Monticelli, Daudet, Japan, etc.) but brings new layers of meaning to this familiar theme. One of the most original aspects of her discussion focuses on the way Van Gogh folded his northern heritage, particularly Dutch 17th-century art (mediated by writers like Thoré, Blanc and Fromentin), into the fiction he crafted of Provence.

For Pollock, Van Gogh's work is born of an effort to combat the disappointments of modernity with a recuperative bourgeois nostalgia, and this also informed his desire to create modern religious paintings. His concept of religious art based in landscape (a reaction to the more overtly Christian works of Gauguin and Bernard) had its roots in the romantic ‘pathetic fallacy.’ Van Gogh's manifesto surrogate religious landscape, Pollock writes, was the Starry night of 1889 (F 612 JH 1731), which she describes as a ‘tableau,’ an invented composition destined to signify or, in academic terminology, to express consolation in the face of anxiety and heartbreak - the loss of certainty and the securely remembered - created by modernity.’36

In 1997 an original, wide-ranging and penetrating study by Carol M. Zemel appeared.37 Something of the scope of Zemel's work is immediately apparent from her title: Van Gogh's progress: utopia, modernity, and late 19th-century art. She explains the two concepts behind its genesis. The first, more straightforward one, refers to John Bunyan's famous moral tale The pilgrim's progress, one of Van Gogh's favourite books in his youth. The other, a darker, more complex and cynical notion, springs from a reference by Walter Benjamin to Paul Klee as the angel of history. Benjamin notes that the angel faces the past and is blown back on to the pile of debris we call progress. This double-edged concept reflects a duality in Van Gogh's nature, on the one hand a naive idealism and, on the other, a dark sense of tragic destiny.

Zemel, like Pollock, rejects art history's traditional emphasis on biography and genius. Her Van Gogh is constructed in terms of a number of late 19th-century cultural and philosophical concepts, with a particular emphasis on the utopian elements in the artist's work. She acknowledges her two principal predecessors in this context, Kōdera and Pollock, but explains her own broader-based approach as an attempt to examine ‘Van Gogh's career not as evidence of a singular vision, but as the sign of a utopian impulse that is critical of many aspects of modernity

and committed to improvement, progress and change.’38 Some of Zemel's most interesting revisionist arguments, to be found in the last two chapters, serve to illustrate her aim. By puncturing the hagiography that has traditionally surrounded Van Gogh, Zemel opens the way for some fresh interpretations. She points out, for example, that the artist was well attuned to the appeal that rustic subjects such as the Nuenen weavers and peasants could hold for an urban clientele. Contrary to the received idea that Van Gogh was an isolated genius, indifferent to worldly concerns, Zemel locates him within the vigorous, capitalist art market of late 19th-century Paris, and explores his strategies for personal recognition and success. She shows how his utopian vision led him to pursue idealist notions of career management in the context of a burgeoning capitalist art market, for example through the schemes he devised for group exhibition in Montmartre or for an artists' commune in Arles.

Particularly compelling is her reading of the 13 panoramic landscapes painted in Auvers in the weeks leading up to Van Gogh's death. Here, she deviates completely from the traditional interpretation of these works as the final epic expressions of a soul in torment. For her the pictures should not be viewed as ‘forecasts of [a] personal tragedy or as culminating statements of a stormy career but as quite the opposite, an optimistic project fully in step with avant-garde art and republican programs to imagine and construct a utopian countryside.’39 Their horizontal format leads Zemel to link them to the contemporary interest in decoration, as exemplified by the work of Puvis de Chavannes, Monet, Denis and others, claiming that Van Gogh ‘could put the principles of decoration to the service of utopian fantasy.’40

In 1999 the Van Gogh Museum mounted Theo Van Gogh, 1857-1891: art dealer, collector and brother of Vincent.41 This important exhibition and its accompanying catalogue provided a wealth of information on an area hitherto neglected in Van Gogh studies. Vincent's long-suffering brother Theo, who during his short life patiently filled the role not only of financial supporter but also of counsellor and confidant, has now been rounded out. Since the letters from Vincent to Theo far outnumber Theo's surviving replies, the latter has remained a shadowy and often silent figure in relation to his brother. Chris Stolwijk's essay gives a detailed account of Theo's brief and difficult life, which, he concludes, was ‘an ephemeral flower surrounded by thorns.’42 Richard Thomson's discussion of the structure and functioning of the Paris art market in the 1880s and the ways Theo negotiated these provides a valuable context for the art to which Van Gogh was exposed and the commercial strategies he devised. Thomson concludes that although Theo was hard-working, good at drumming up trade and brought major impressionists to the gallery, he did little to support the young avant-garde, apart from his brother, Gauguin and, to a limited extent, Toulouse-Lautrec. But as Thomson points out, the 1880s was an awkward junction between impressionism as an established modern art and the emergence of a new and fragmentary avant-garde, trying to establish itself on the margins of the art world. It was only in the years after Theo's death that new galleries committed to the avant-garde would emerge.

Van Gogh's interaction with the artistic avant-garde during his two-year stay in Paris from March 1886 to February 1888 is the subject of Vincent van Gogh and the painters of the petit boulevard, the catalogue of an exhibition held in St Louis and Frankfurt in 2001.43 The term ‘petit boulevard,’ as the distinguished Van Gogh scholar Cornelia Homburg explains, was coined by Vincent himself in order to make a distinction between the younger generation of disparate avant-garde artists and the older established impressionists of the grand boulevard. In addition to Van Gogh, the exhibition embraced the work of nine other petit boulevard artists - Charles Angrand, Louis Anquetin, Emile Bernard, Paul Gauguin, Camille and Lucien Pissarro, Geroges Seurat, Paul Signac and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

Although Van Gogh was unaware of this avant-garde and was hardly familiar even with impressionism when he arrived in Paris, he learned fast. The contacts he made shaped his identity as a modern artist, crystallised his approaches to style and subject matter and to strategies for marketing his work. Richard Thomson demonstrates how Van Gogh's petit boulevard refers to a specific

geographical area as well as describing a particular cluster of artists, who shared ‘an instinct towards simply drawn forms, a willingness to exaggerate chromatic and textural effects in their paintings, a desire to put their work before the public and, f possible, sell it.’44 Montmartre and the roads climbing up towards it to the north of the fashionable Grandes Boulevards was the terrain of the these artists, and its louche world of cabarets and nightclubs provided them with subjects attuned to the spirit of fin-de-siècle decadence. Elizabeth C. Childs explores Gauguin's and Van Gogh's escape from the urban in search of natural and artistic utopias, but concludes by showing the ultimate incompatibility of the ideals of artistic community and collaboration and ‘an art world that was actually more responsive to the pervasive of mythic individualism.’45 John House invites us to join him as time-travellers to Paris in June 1889, the year of the Exposition Universelle. Our itinerary encompasses the broad spectrum of venues where contemporary art could be viewed - from the exhibition's official Décennale to a display of the petit boulevard artists at the Café Volpini, from upmarket galleries such as Durand-Ruel, Petit, and Boussod, Valadon to such fringe premises as the shop of the colour merchant Père Tanguy. His essay concentrates on landscape and the ways in which Van Gogh and his colleagues reacted against impressionism, enriching direct observation with new layers of poetic and metaphorical meaning. The lessons Van Gogh learned from his Parisian experience proved fundamental to the remaining two-and-a-half years of his life and career.

Van Gogh and Gauguin

Much of the most recent scholarship on Van Gogh has addressed his relationship with Paul Gauguin, undoubtedly one of the epic collaborations in the history of art. Although the brief, climactic period of about ten weeks when the artists lived and worked together in Arles in the autumn of 1888 is the focus of these studies, this has proved a particularly effective viewpoint from which to consider their careers as a whole, each artist providing a revealing context for the other.

Debora Silverman has contributed a rigorously researched and penetrating book entitled Van Gogh and Gauguin: the search for sacred art, published in 2000.46 Silverman states that her aim is ‘to present a different view of Van Gogh and Gauguin, linking both men to the destiny and historical specificity of the 19th-century world in which they were embedded, rather than by claiming them retrospectively as initiators of a 20th-century modernism of expressionism and abstraction.’47 As her title suggests, Silverman approaches Van Gogh and Gauguin from the perspective of a particular challenge they both faced, which she defines as: ‘how to discover a new and modern form of sacred art to fill the void left by the religious systems that they were struggling to abandon but had nevertheless left indelible imprints in their consciousness.’48 The crux of her argument is that the roots of the tensions and affinities that emerged in the artists' association are to be found in their divergent religious legacies and educational formations: Gauguin's at an Orléans seminary, where he was taught to distrust reality, and Van Gogh's in a Protestant theological tradition that sanctified the everyday stuff of the real world. In one of the most original sections of the book, Silverman supports these opposing philosophical positions with reference to the actual facture of the paintings. Gauguin, she explains, seeks to dematerialise the surface of the painting, to reduce its physical immediacy, thereby encouraging imaginary or dream states. Van Gogh, on the other hand, was deeply involved with craft. Labelling him a ‘weaver-painter,’ Silverman creates a striking analogy between Van Gogh's practice and that of the weavers whose labour he had so admired when he was living among them in Nuenen.

A biographical, and particularly a psychobiographical approach to Van Gogh has, as we have seen, been discredited by several art historians, who consider that it

oversimplifies the subject and ignores the relevant historical material. In Van Gogh and Gauguin: electric arguments and utopian dreams, Bradley Collins presents us with a very different type of psychobiography, one in which historical context is used to create a far more convincing, complex and nuanced construction of the artist/hero than anything written in this vein before.49 By making both Gauguin and Van Gogh the subject of his work, Collins automatically creates a wider, yet at the same time focused context for looking at Van Gogh. Inevitably, the heart of his story is the intense, highly creative period of a little more than two months in Arles. He leads up to this climactic episode with a thorough and thoughtful analysis of the childhood and youth of both artists, interpreting the significant emotional occurrences of their early lives from a psychoanalytic, largely Freudian perspective. Collins pursues a number of visual comparisons to support his psychoanalytic approach. Particularly original is his radical investigation of several of the canvases Van Gogh and Gauguin painted while working together in Arles. Through these he comes to broader and more complex explanations for the collapse of the artists' relationship, ranging from repressed homosexuality to Gauguin as ‘father, mother, first Vincent, revered Master, abbot of the studio of the south,’ the object of Vincent's many transferred emotions. With this rich and subtle reading of the collaboration as a whole, Collins achieves his aim of unlocking ‘Vincent and Gauguin from their timeless coupling as the Angel and Devil of post-impressionism’ - which will, as he hopes, ‘encourage a wider and more accurate view of a relationship that was not always turbulent and conflicted.’50

In a recent exhibition devoted to the same theme, Van Gogh and Gauguin: the studio of the south, held at The Art Institute of Chicago and the Van Gogh Museum in 2001-02,51 Douglas W. Druick and Peter Kort Zegers presented us with a thoughtful selection of the works of the two artists, tracing their evolutions before their first encounter in 1887, the complex patterns of artistic interaction that took place in Arles, and the lingering impact in the art of both after the demise of their friendship. The wealth of detailed information brought together in their extensive text is brilliantly used to bring the artists' characters to life with a vividness and depth never before achieved.

Druick and Zegers provide us with a compelling account of the artists' early histories. While Van Gogh's youth was rooted in tradition, country values and religious Puritanism, Gauguin's was exotic, itinerant, worldly and Catholic. In recounting the artists' young lives, the authors establish the ‘inheritance’ each would eventually bring to their collaboration and the ways each would work to create his own legend. Particularly fascinating is the examination of the two artists' religious formation. Echoing Debora Silverman's theories (although her book had not yet appeared when Druick and Zegers were writing), they explore the fundamental divide between Van Gogh's Dutch Protestantism and the idiosyncratic, Catholic tutelage Gauguin received under Dupanloup.

In the section entitled ‘The meeting’ the narrative reaches its climax. Despite the artists' widely divergent lives up until this point, we are told of the areas of common ground on which the two men were able to build a friendship: their nostalgia for a mythic, pre-industrial past, their belief in the consoling power of art and their passion for the writer Pierre Loti, who had enriched Gauguin's experience of Brittany and who would shape Van Gogh's anticipation of the Midi. Once the artists are established in Arles, Druick and Zegers give us a particularly vivid account of the ‘studio of the south.’ Their description of life in the Yellow House and of the roles the two artists assumed is an example of the brilliant historical reconstruction and psychological insight that characterise this study as a whole. It brings home with alarming veracity the day-to-day tensions these two egocentric and volatile personalities endured, cohabiting in a claustrophobic, disorderly space.

The authors also take us on a detailed, day-to-day itinerary of Van Gogh's and Gauguin's painting campaigns in and around Arles. They explore the differences in the two artists approach through a series of revealing comparisons of which one of the most notable is the two views of the ancient cemetery Les Alyscamps that they painted simultaneously on or around 23 October. The conceptual, topographical and stylistic differences of the finished works immediately mark out the fundamental divergence between the two artists. Apart from the familiar and much written-about conflict that arose from Gauguin working from memory and Van Gogh from nature, the authors ex-

plore much richer ‘personal frameworks through which the two artists interpreted the south.’52

Much of Druick and Zeger's most revelatory discussion addresses the aftermath of the Yellow House adventure. Back in Paris, Gauguin found that in his ‘interaction with Symbolist circles, Vincent acted as a kind of silent partner, just as Gauguin occupied Vincent's thoughts in Provence; both men referred to the recent past in their art and continued to derive energy from the dialogue that played out directly in correspondence and indirectly through Theo.’53 Vincent continued to resonate in Gauguin's own project for a ‘studio of the tropics.’ In the 13 years after Van Gogh's death, Gauguin found himself still in competition with his old friend's growing posthumous reputation. Despite his ‘efforts to write Vincent out of his history,’ he found that ‘in death [he] became more of a force to be reckoned with than in life, as the period 1890-1903 witnessed the construction of an enduring, heroic image of genius around the Dutch artist, a narrative in which Gauguin, like it or not, was implicated.’54

The Van Gogh that Druick and Zegers construct is a product of picture making, biography, psychological insight and a wide range of artistic and intellectual influences. In contrast to the fragmentary views of the artist that have emerged from the various particularised studies written over the last decade, they have given us back Van Gogh whole.

 

Van Gogh's critical profile has varied considerably over the years. In the period immediately following his death and for much of the 20th century, it was Van Gogh the heroic artiste maudit, the mad genius, the great expressionist painter that predominated. Since 1990, more methodical art historical approaches have provided us with detailed knowledge of Van Gogh's techniques and the dating of his works. Ongoing research promises a far more subtle understanding of the letters than has been available before. Contextual studies placing the painter in the context of late 19th-century society and politics gave us Van Gogh the modern artist-tourist in search of an unspoiled Eden, or the (albeit idealistic) operator in the burgeoning capitalist art market. More recent studies had revived the biographic and psychoanalytic approach, restoring the notion of individuality that was sidelined in these more politically-oriented studies. The most recent account of Van Gogh, Vincent in Brixton, a play by Nicholas Wright currently performing on the London stage, once again resurrects the artist-hero. In the end, it seems, Van Gogh the creative genius and misunderstood artist is irrepressible.


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