Patrick Bade
Post Impressionism
Patrick Bade - Post Impressionism
- Term post-impressionism was not used during the lifetime of the four great post-impressionists. It was invented a generation later by a British art historian critic called Roger Fry. And in 1910, he organised an exhibition to somewhat belatedly introduce the British public to the great innovations in French art of the 1880s, so already 30 years previously. I think I’ve mentioned before that the Brits were quite behind. They were behind the Americans, behind the Germans in appreciating all these wonderful new developments in modern art that have come out of Paris in the late 19th century. So what we see here is a painting by British artists responding to the French post-impressionists. This is Spencer Gore, and he’s showing the Grafton Gallery, where this exhibition took place. And he’s showing people looking at paintings by Gauguin, who was, of the four post-impressionists, the one who actually most appealed to the British in 1910. So here are the four great post-impressionists whose art came to full fruition in the 1880s. That’s the decade that followed the great impressionist decade of the 1870s. And they’re very disparate characters. Some of you’ve probably heard me say before that if you had the four of these round your dinner table, it would undoubtedly be the dinner party from hell. ‘Cause Gauguin, top left, well, you’d have to lock up your 11-year-old granddaughters to protect them from him. There’s the moody and aggressive Cezanne.
I think you can see that in his photograph, top middle there. There’s van Gogh, who’d get tired and emotional, would probably cry. And there’s the very buttoned up and suspicious Seurat, who you see bottom right. And they didn’t really particularly like one another, although Gauguin admired the work of Cezanne. That was certainly, that admiration was absolutely not reciprocated. So the first thing to say about post-impressionism is that it’s actually not a style in the way that, say, baroque is a style, rococo is a style. Even impressionism is a style in the 1870s in that there are certain matters of technique that the impressionists had in common. But as we’ve got here, Gauguin, top left, van Gogh, top right, Cezanne, bottom left, Seurat, bottom right, there’s very little common denominator stylistically between these four artists. What you can say is that each of them was, in a sense, liberated by the impressionist revolution. The impressionists, they’d been liberated from academic ways of seeing and academic techniques, so they could try out different things. But all four of these artists are actually diametrically reacting against the central philosophy of impressionism. And we can define that, once again, by looking at this picture, which gave its name to impressionism as a movement, “Impression, Sunrise” of Monet. So this is Monet’s attempt to make a direct transcription of the sensations received by his eye. It’s a very direct way of just putting down what the eye sees. And for all four post-impressionists, this was actually not enough.
They wanted art to do something else. Now, I’ve taken on maybe more than I can chew tonight, trying to talk about all four of these artists in one hour. Well, I decided not to try and rush it, so I’ll take it at a normal pace and see how far I get. And I’m starting with Gauguin, who was born in the year of revolutions, 1848. And so Gauguin, I think, contributed in a very big way, as van Gogh did, too, to the myth of the Artist with a capital A. Some of you may have read Somerset Maugham’s novel “The Moon and Sixpence,” which is based on the life of Gauguin. Gauguin is the idea of the artist as rebel, martyr, outsider, which, in some ways, I suppose, goes back to the romantic era. But Gauguin is really the most extreme example. So I said it’s a myth. And he was himself, I would say, a self-mythologizer through his letters, through his publications in writing diaries, accounts of his career, and also through his self-portraits. In these self-portraits, he’s rejecting a particular image of himself as rebel, outsider, saint and devil. So in these two self-portraits, you see behind him on one side is an image of Christ on the cross. On the other is a pot which he’d made, which is also, in a way, a self-portrait, which shows the diabolic side of his character that he was certainly very well aware of. And again, in the caricatural portrait on the right-hand side, you see he’s given himself a halo, suggesting holiness. But you’ve got the apples, biblical symbol of sin and temptation.
You’ve got a snake. And this, he sees himself as a prophet, as a martyr, and almost blasphemously, I would say, in these three images as a Christ figure. So he’s shown himself on the left as Christ in the garden of Gethsemane, deserted by his followers. Top right is a jug, a kind of Toby Jug, where he’s, again, shown himself as Jesus with blood. He’s rather overdone, I think, the red glaze with the blood dripping down his face. And bottom right is a picture he painted towards the end of his life where, again, he’s shown himself as a Christ figure. And he inscribed this Golgotha. Golgotha, of course, is the place where Christ was crucified. Here again is a portrait where he’s rejecting a particular image. He painted this as a present for Vincent van Gogh. You can see it’s inscribed at the bottom “Les Miserables.” So actually showing himself as the martyred anti-hero of the novel “Les Miserables,” And he’s dedicated it to his friend Vincent van Gogh. So as I said, he became very, very famous soon after he died. Actually, he was quite famous already in the 1890s while he was still alive. He was, as I said, a sort of mythological figure. And the relief sculpture he made in wood, it’s got the ironic title “Soyez amoureuses vous serez heureuses” be loving or even make love, and you’ll be happy. And it shows him, again, you can recognise him by his distinctive nose as a demonic figure, top right-hand side, who’s threatening an anxious woman who puts up her hand to protect herself. On the right-hand side is an illustration from the German satirical magazine “Simplicissimus” of 1910. I like it because it shows you how this image of the artist, rebel and martyr is already well-ensconced by 1910. And it’s an artist who is living in poverty in an attic, surrounded by domesticity, his wife hanging up the washing, his children playing with toys. And he’s obviously bemoaning his lot, that he’s never going to be considered a genius.
And he says, “Actually, it would be so much better to be French, dead or perverted, or better still to be French, dead and perverted.” A part of the myth of Gauguin was that he was completely untutored and uninfluenced by anybody. And that this amazingly original art of the late 1880s and the 1890s just sprung out of him completely spontaneously. Well, this is completely, completely untrue. He started off his life conventionally enough. Well, in fact, he started off as a merchant seaman, and then became a stockbroker. How much more conventional can you be than that? And he did very well for himself initially. And he married an attractive young Danish woman, Mette. You see him with his wife there on the left-hand side. And he developed a taste for art. He had lots of money at this time, so he was actually buying paintings, and he liked the paintings of the Barbizon School and the impressionists. So this is an early painting by Gauguin on the right-hand side. Very much, really, an impressionist picture. I think that’s a picture that has, it’s a little bit more highly worked, I think, than an impressionist picture would be in the 1870s. But it’s got a very spontaneous quality and it looks like it’s directly observed, that he’s set up his easel in an orchard and he’s painted what he could see. And he was taken under the wing of Pissarro.
The other impressionists, Monet and Renoir, always were deeply suspicious of him. They didn’t like him at all. But Pissarro, a very remarkable figure quite apart from his accomplishments as an artist. He turned out to be a kind of father figure and mentor to all four of the artists that I’m talking about tonight. And actually, Gauguin never lost his respect and devotion to Pissarro, despite the fact that Gauguin, like Degas and Renoir, could, on occasion, in letters say very nasty anti-Semitic things. He, never less, loved and respected Pissarro, and said that he was something like an Old Testament prophet. And this little piece of paper is testament to the mutual respect and admiration of these two artists. Although later, later on, Pissarro actually also became rather sceptical of Gauguin and thought that he was a bit of a conman. But on this drawing, you’ve got Gauguin drawn by Pissarro on the left-hand side, and Pissarro drawn by Gauguin on the right-hand side. And so by the early 1880s, Pissarro even managed to persuade the other impressionists to let Gauguin exhibit with them in a couple of the impressionist shows. We can see that his work is very, very close to that of Pissarro. So before I tell you, you can test yourself again. Which one of these is by Pissarro and which one is Gauguin? Well, of course it, well, not necessarily, of course, 'cause they’re really quite similar, it’s Pissarro, bottom left, and Gauguin, bottom right. Here’s details of these two paintings. This is the 1880s, where Pissarro has moved on from the freedom of his work in the 1870s. It’s still an impressionist technique with a weave of broken brush work, but more considered, more careful.
And you can see that Gauguin, on the right-hand side, is really imitating quite closely the technique of Pissarro, on the left. Two more pictures by Gauguin from the early 1880s that you would never attribute to him if you didn’t know, if they weren’t signed. They look nothing like his later work. Got a snow scene. Certainly, he never went back to snow after this. So beloved of Monet and Pissarro and Sisley, snowy weather, and a rather brutally realist portrait of his wife’s maid with no clothes on. Given what we know about Gauguin, I’m sure it was a good excuse for him to get the clothes off his wife’s maid. I wonder if she actually knew about it or not. It’s a toilette, and I think you can see here, it’s not so impressionist. There’s more emphasis on draughtsmanship, on contour. And, of course, it’s a toilette. It’s meant to be rather like the Degas toilette through the keyhole, spying on a woman without her clothes on, without her knowing that she’s being observed. He certainly admired Degas very much, and rather bizarrely, he quotes Degas on this carved jewellery case that he made for his wife in the winter of 1884. Now, part of the myth of Gauguin is that he was this very successful stockbroker who threw it all over to live the life of an impoverished artist. Well, that wasn’t quite how it happened.
There was a stock market crash in 1883, and he lost his job. It wasn’t that he voluntarily gave it up. And it was at that point he thought, yes, I think maybe I would like to try and make a serious career as an artist. But he couldn’t support himself. And for the winter of 1884 to five, he went to Copenhagen with his wife and his young children to stay in the house of his in-laws. I think he must definitely have been the house guest from hell. But it was an important time for him. He was not happy in Copenhagen. He disliked the rather correct bourgeois life led by his wife’s Danish relatives. But it was a time for rethinking, rethinking what art was for, what it was about. And he wrote a letter to his friend Schuffenecker in Paris, which is a fascinating document of his thinking at this time. And he says he, in it, he criticises the impressionists for just painting the surface of reality and saying, “No, no, that’s not enough. We need to think more about what lies behind the surface of reality.” And he speculates in a very interesting way about why certain colours have an emotional effect. Certain lines have an emotional effect. That some colours we perceive as warm and happy, and other colours we see as cold and sad. He says, “Why is it that certain lines seem to be joyous lines, and that droopy, descending lines, like a weeping willow, seem to be sad? So this shows him really thinking about what art can do. So that’s 1884, winter of 1884 to five. It’s actually four years of experimenting, dead ends, before he finds a way to put these ideas into action in his art. This is a very strange picture dating from 1886.
Again, I think you’d be very unlikely to attribute it to Gauguin if you didn’t know it was by him. You can see that at this point, he is at least flirting with the pointillist technique of Seurat. But it’s a strange combination of objects in this still. It’s called "Still Life with Horse’s Head” and it’s painted in 1886. But he’d returned to France. And we know that in 1886, he was, for some time, in Dieppe, and that so was the American artist James McNeill Whistler. And that James McNeill Whistler in Dieppe delivered his famous “Ten O'Clock” lecture, in which he puts forward his ideas about art. That art should not tell stories, it should not moralise. Art should be its own justification. He was preaching art for art’s sake. And in that lecture, which was later published, the final line is, “The story of art is complete. It is hewn in the marbles of the Parthenon and embroidered on the fan of Hokusai.” So this juxtaposition of a Japanese fan and a piece of Greek sculpture, it’s a plaster cast of a marble head of a horse from the Parthenon marbles, that’s not a coincidence. This is very, I think, a very, very clear reference to the ideas of Whistler. But as I said, at this point, he still doesn’t know really how to put these ideas into practise. Another important factor in his development in the mid-1880s is an interest in decorative arts, and particularly pottery. And this is a vase he made, on the right-hand side, decorated with images of Breton women in their traditional costumes. So it’s around about this time that Gauguin develops a hatred, in a way, of modern urban civilization. And in this sense, of course, he’s diametrically opposed and reacting to Baudelaire, the painter of modern life, who had such a big influence on Degas, Manet and the impressionists, telling them, you know, to paint what you see around you, to embrace modern life. He’s rejecting modern life, he’s rejecting big cities, and he wants to go back to something more earthy, more primitive, more instinctive. And his first attempt, really, to escape from modern urban civilization is to go to Brittany, which was one of the most rural and underdeveloped parts of France.
And he loved the fact that people were still wearing traditional peasant costumes, that they followed traditional customs and religious practises. But, so my point about the decorative arts is that we can see in this picture on the left-hand side that forms are presented in a more decorative way, that he’s flattening forms and giving them heavy contours. He, as I said, he’s an artist who is influenced by all sorts of things. Actually, he’s like picking from a box of chocolates. He’s picking from here, there and everywhere. And one of his enthusiasms at this time was for English-illustrated children’s books. And he had a copy of a children’s book illustrated by Randolph Caldecott, John Gilpin, the writer John Gilpin, which he was wildly enthusiastic about. And he showed it to all his friends. He said, “Look at the way those geese are drawn. So simple, almost abstracted.” And the geese, I think, in the detail on the right-hand side are clearly based on the way that Caldecott has drawn the geese on the left. But soon enough, Brittany did not satisfy him. He wanted to travel further afield. And so he’d spent his early childhood in South America, in Peru. His father was a left-wing political figure. And when Louis-Napoleon was elected president of France, there was a big lurch to the right in 1849. And his father decided that it would be safer for him to leave France and go and live with his wife’s relatives in Peru. Gauguin, part of the myth, used to say that “I’m a wolf without a collar. I’m a savage from Peru.” Well, it’s true that his mother had Peruvian relatives that they went to stay with, but these were not native Peruvians. They were Spanish and quite aristocratic and quite well off. But he spent his early childhood in Peru, living with a wealthy family.
And he had very happy memories of his childhood and often harked back to it. And, oh, a long time ago, it must be in the 1960s, there was an American historian called Wayne Andersen. And he wrote a book called “Gauguin’s Lost Paradise.” And he put forward the theory, which I think is very believable, that, in a way, the rest of Gauguin’s career was an attempt to recapture the lost paradise of his early childhood. So in 1887, he decides to set off for South America. And Gauguin was always somebody who saw himself as a kind of leader, a leader of a group, as a sort of prophet or messiah figure. He always liked to be surrounded by acolytes. And so he didn’t set off on his own. He took with him an artist who was under his influence, called Laval. And the two of them got as far as Central America, and they completely ran out of money. So Gauguin volunteers for a short time to work as a navvy on the abortive French attempt to construct a Panama canal, but that ended in terrible, terrible financial disaster. And I’m sure that Trudy’s told you that it was Jewish bankers who got blamed for that. And that contributed a lot to the anti-Semitism of the period. One of the reasons that this attempt to make a Suez canal failed was that, terrible attrition rate from malaria, yellow fever, all sorts of diseases. The reason that the Americans succeeded a generation later was that they had insecticides and they were able to control the insects that carried these diseases. Anyway, Gauguin becomes very, very sick, nearly dies, and he goes to the French Caribbean island of Martinique to recover. And spends several months there and paints some very, very beautiful pictures of Martinique. And this tendency towards flatness, towards decorativeness is, again, strongly in evidence in these pictures. Just a word of warning.
If you ever are offered a Gauguin of Martinique, be very, very careful because Laval was with him, and Laval was painting in a manner completely under Gauguin’s influence. He was very good at that. He’d control these acolyte artists and make them paint the way that he wanted them to paint. And Laval was no, you know, he wasn’t untalented, and he painted pictures that are really identical to Degas’, and they’ve all, all Laval’s Martinique paintings have disappeared. And the supposition is that unscrupulous dealers have turned them all into Gauguins. Here is another picture painted by Gauguin on the left in Martinique. And this shows you another aspect of his artistic personality, a slightly sneaky one, that when he went on his travels, he took photographs of favourite works of art. And my guess is that he had a photograph with him of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes’ “Doux Pays,” which had been exhibited at the salon in 1882 that you see on the right-hand side here. Gauguin was a huge, huge admirer of Pierre de Chavannes. And on a number of occasions for the rest of his career, would actually pretty well plagiarise compositions of Puvis de Chavannes. In fact, in one letter later in Arles, he says that he wants to paint coloured de Chavannes. He didn’t like the rather insipid colours of Puvis de Chavannes. But I think you can see here that what he very often does, when he steals a composition from another artist, he will reverse it so that it’s not immediately apparent what he’s done. Now, this is the great breakthrough picture. It’s 1888. That’s the key date, really, for van Gogh and for Gauguin, where they both painted their most important and innovative pictures. This, he’s back in France, 1888.
He’s in Brittany for the summer and he paints this picture, which has two titles. It’s either “Jacob Wrestling with the Angel” or “Vision after the Sermon.” And it’s a painting that celebrates these, simple, traditional religious faith of the Breton women. So we have the Breton women, they’ve just come out of church. The priest, bottom right-hand side. Again, you can see it’s a self-portrait of Gauguin as a priest, with his characteristic hook nose. And in his sermon, he’s talked about this biblical episode of Jacob wrestling with the angel. And as the women come out of the church, they have a vision of what they’ve been told about in the sermon. So this is one of the most radical and influential pictures in the early history of modern art. This is, now Gauguin is absolutely decisively breaking with the naturalism of the impressionists. That the grass is painted a flat red. There is no attempt whatsoever to create a sense of space or perspective. I don’t wish to diminish in any way the incredible originality and importance of this picture because nothing comes from nothing, and there are many influences that go into this new style. And perhaps the most important is that of Japanese woodcut prints. And he clearly, with this tree trunk going diagonally across the picture in the foreground. And even, I think, the red ground of the sky. He’s clearly thinking of Hiroshika on the left-hand side. Now, this incredible breakthrough in Western art, this key, key picture is controversial for a number of reasons. Gauguin, in the year, he was 44 years old, so an advanced age to have painted your first great characteristic picture. And he was with another of his friends or acolytes, a much younger artist.
Oh, my God, what’s his name? Oh. God, senior moment. No, I don’t think I have it in my. Oh, how awful, but the name’s slipped me. But anyway, he’s 22 years old. He’s half the age of Gauguin. Somebody will put, I probably, I can see there’s only three things in the question and answer. Somebody’s going to put the name of this artist in to help me out. He was 22, he’s half the age of Gauguin. And he painted this picture “Breton Women in a Meadow,” which has many of the same characteristics, the heavy contours, the flattening form, the eradication of spatial recession. And he claimed that he got there before Gauguin. And it was Gauguin who, he invented this new style, which they call synthetism. And Gauguin stopped. I can see this. It’s gone up from three to five. So two people have put the name in, and it will probably come to me before the end of the lecture. And he’s probably right, he may have done, he actually may have done, but the fact is Gauguin was a much greater artist and he was able to run with this new style and make something much more of it. The other, actually, the most radical picture to be painted in Brittany in the summer of 1888 was not by either Gauguin or… Oh, God, it’s so awful. The name is on the tip of my tongue.
Anyway, this is by a young art student called Paul Serusier, and it’s called “The Talisman.” And it’s probably the only picture by this artist, which you’re likely to come across in art books. And it’s a very, very famous picture. He was a student at the Academie Julian in Paris who happened to bump into Gauguin. Gauguin was this very charismatic, very powerful personality. And at this point, Serusier was painting in a naturalistic way. And Gauguin said, “No, no, no, that’s a waste of time. Come with me. I’ll give you a painting lesson.” And they went out into the countryside and they sat by a pool with trees round it. And this, again, there’s a lot of mythology about all of this. When I was a student, I was taught that this was painted on a cigar box lid. And it is the size of a cigar box lid. But recent research in a laboratory examining it shows that, no, it was not a cigar box lid. It was actually a panel of wood that was bought from an art supplies shop. Anyway, Gauguin said to Serusier, “Don’t try and put down what the eye sees. Find an equivalent. Paint in patches of colour, and don’t try and copy the colour. Exaggerate the colour for expressive effect.” And the result was this little picture. Emile Bernard. So probably there are four more people who’ve written Emile Bernard in the comments. That’s the name, has suddenly come back to me. It’s Emile Bernard, as I said, who may have made a major contribution to Gauguin’s development. But this is Serusier. Serusier took this picture back to Paris with him and he showed it to his fellow students at the Academie Julian.
They were all amazed by it. And as a result, they formed the group known as the Nabi, who also could all be called post-impressionists. So 1888, van Gogh is in the south of France in Arles. He’s painting his greatest masterpieces in the kind of frenzy of creation. And he’s writing letters to Gauguin and to other artists, saying, “Come and live with me. We’ll form an artist commune in Arles in the south of France.” Gauguin takes him up on the offer, I think quite cynically, because he knew that Vincent van Gogh had a successful art dealer brother. And also, of course, he could live rent free, and he was always short of money. So he went down to spend late summer months with Vincent in Arles. More about that later when I talk about Vincent. He painted this portrait of Vincent painting sunflowers. But that ended very disastrously. I hope to have time to tell you more about that later. So he comes back. There’s this awful incident, of course, where van Gogh attacks him with a cutthroat razor and then cuts off his own ear and so on. And Gauguin flees. He actually steals two sunflower paintings and he flees from Arles and never sees van Gogh again, but he comes back to Paris. 1889 is the year of the Eiffel Tower and the Paris World Exhibition. Well, the Eiffel Tower stood for everything that Gauguin hated. It stood for modernity, progress and all that kind of thing. You can see, obviously, it appeared. He certainly never made an attempt to paint it. Seurat did. You can see that little picture, top right, of the Eiffel Tower still under construction.
But the exhibition was very important for Gauguin in a number of ways. First of all, it was his first opportunity to show the new style, synthetism, as he called it, that he had created, of these flat, abstracted forms with heavy contours. And so he, as usual, he managed to recruit acolytes and imitators. So there’s Emile Bernard, Charles Laval, Emile Schuffenecker and so on, all painting in this style. And they got the opportunity to, of course, they were never going to be accepted by the official jury of the exhibition. That was clear. But it was a cafe called the Cafe Volpini. And the cafe owner had ordered plate glass mirrors, and the plate glass mirrors had failed to turn up. So he agreed to show these new paintings by Gauguin. Not that actually they had all that much impact and the critics didn’t take much notice of it, but with hindsight, it seems an important event. In addition, of course, the World Exhibition brought, it was a celebration of the French Empire, and all sorts of exotic exhibits were included, and particularly a Javanese dance group and Japanese musicians, which made a huge impact on Gauguin. Also on Debussy. Debussy, who was absolutely ravished by the gamelan gongs to which the dancers performed. Anyway, so after the, later in summer 1889, Gauguin goes back again to Brittany. I think I’m going to move on quickly because I’m going to leave no time for anybody else. He built up a big art collection and he had to sell it picture by picture. The very, very last picture he sold, because he loved it so much, was this still life by Cezanne.
This is a portrait he made of a woman called Marie Derrien, who he seduced, as usual, in the summer of 1889. And you can see Cezanne’s still life in the background. Gauguin was fascinated by Cezanne, and he wrote a letter to Pissarro, saying, “Can you please slip Cezanne one of your homoeopathic remedies so that he will talk in his sleep and we’ll find out the magic secrets of his art?” Well, Cezanne was not amused. He actually took that seriously as a threat. And he certainly didn’t reciprocate. He didn’t like Gauguin’s world. He described them as Chinese paintings because of their flatness. But now a little test for you, again, which is Cezanne and which is Gauguin? And I do hope that you can recognise that it’s Cezanne on the left and Gauguin on the right. The Gauguin, flatter, yes, less concerned with the forms of the apples than Cezanne is. So finally, he makes good on his desire to escape from Western civilization. And he goes off initially to Tahiti. Long voyage via Australia. Absolutely horrified when the ship docks in Melbourne. And he takes a look around Melbourne and he says, “Oh, I’ve travelled to the end of the world and all I’ve done is come to a place which looks just like London.” So he arrives in Tahiti. Tahiti is also really a disappointment. It wasn’t the magic place of free love and beauty that it had been in the 18th century when Captain Cook went there and Captain Bligh. It had been a French colony for a long time. Christian missionaries had forced the women to cover up. The pagan idols, like the one you see on the left-hand side, that didn’t exist. They’d all been destroyed by the Christian missionaries. So it was a pretty dingy, down-at-hill French colony riddled with Western diseases, particularly venereal diseases, and alcohol having a terrible effect, also, upon the natives.
I’m going to move on because I’m really going to run out of time for any of the others. So I think we’ve probably done enough on Gauguin. Here, again, you can see him plagiarising Pierre de Chavannes. And I’m going to move on to Vincent. And I will attempt to pronounce his name correctly once and once only, van Gogh. That is too much effort to say that constantly, so I’m going to revert to the usual English pronunciation of van Gogh. We call it van Gogh. Americans call him van Gogh. Also somebody who, in a way, self-mythologizes through his self-portraits, of which there are a great many. There are well over 30. The one on the left, where he’s orientalized his face and he’s showing himself really as a kind of oriental priest or bonds figure. The only photograph that we have of van Gogh is this one, as a very young man, on the left-hand side. Otherwise, we only know what he looks like either from his self-portraits or portraits that other people made of him. Photograph on the right is his younger brother Theo, whose very, very much part of the story. We would not have van Gogh’s work if it were not for Theo, who persuaded van Gogh to take up painting, who supported him, encouraged him, made sure that the works were preserved. And the saintly figure, really, a saintly figure. We don’t have many of Theo’s letters. What we do have, because van Gogh didn’t preserve them, but Theo preserved all Vincent’s letters. So he has a very short career, really less than a decade. And the really great pictures are all painted in the last 2 ½ years.
And so a short career in which there was an astonishing 800 oil paintings and also about 800 letters. The oil paintings have transformed Western art, enriched humanity. What can I say? I haven’t got enough praise, really, for the achievement of van Gogh in this tiny, short time. The letters, too. He must have been actually, in many ways, a total pain in the ass. A very difficult, difficult person to deal with, but, and also a wonderful, generous, loving human being. And the letters are one of the greatest documents, I would say, in the history of Western Art. If you haven’t read them, do read them. They’re absolutely extraordinary. And particularly when he was in the south of France, he’s writing to his brother almost every day. And including little sketches of what he’s seen and the pictures he’s working on and telling us what he’s trying to do in these pictures. They do, the letters, I said, make an absolutely fascinating document. Of course, he’s not French, he’s Dutch, from a Calvinist background, very strict religious background. He, I think, resented that or reacted against it. This is a very telling picture, an early picture, great big, heavy bible, a rather oppressive-looking thing in this picture. And next to it is a yellow-backed French novel with the telling title “La Joie de Vivre,” “The Joy of Living.” So I think that there’s a contrast between this crushing, oppressive Protestant religiosity of the Bible and the joy of living of the French novel.
He was what President Trump would certainly call a loser. He was a failure at everything in life. I think, unfortunately, at the end, I think he came to think that himself and it was part of the reason for his suicide. This man who has so enriched every one of our lives. Everybody listening to this lecture has had a life enriched by Vincent van Gogh. But he felt that he had been a total failure. And so he started off working for a firm of picture dealers. That didn’t work out. He became a teacher. He was a terrible teacher in England. You know how schoolchildren, they sense weakness in a teacher? Of course, they’re like sharks who taste blood. So that was a disaster. Then he became very religious and he was a missionary, wanted to take the faith to miners in Belgium. That failed. And so aged about 30, he was a total loser, failure and in a desperate state. And it was Theo who persuaded him to take up painting. And his early paintings, actually, I think right from the start, they’re terrific. I really like these early paintings which are painted in very earthy colours. Traditional scenes that are rather like Dutch paintings of the 17th century of peasants. This is the great masterpiece, his first great masterpiece, it’s the masterpiece of his early phase. Big, big, monumental picture. It’s called “The Potato Eaters.” And it has a religious solemnity, a sort of sacramental quality.
The eating is very simple meal of boiled potatoes. The whole thing, as I said, has a sort of ceremonial quality. And he said that the way it’s painted, very coarsely painted with thickly impasted paint, he said, “I want this to look as though it’s painted with the soil in which these potatoes have grown.” This is the letter where he says that and gives a little illustration of the picture. At the beginning of 1886, he moves to Paris and he lives with his brother Theo, in two apartments at the foot of Montmartre, right behind where I live in Paris. It was an area which was then, and now, I suppose, a slightly sleazy area, but a fascinating area, full of artist studios and cafes, brothels and cabarets. So he responded to that tremendous excitement of Parisian life. And also, ‘cause he’s responding to what’s happening in French art, to impressionism. So you can see his palette totally changes, goes into pure colours on a white or light ground. In this picture, I think very clearly, the influence of Seurat. And painting the kind of subject matter that the impressionists painted. So modern life subjects, and very often suburban rather than urban subjects. So this is van Gogh, left, Monet, top right. And the other great seminal influence on him, as for Gauguin, is Japanese woodcut prints. These could be bought for next to nothing. They were often used as wrapping paper for tea or porcelain or whatever. And he actually, even though he’s not selling any paintings and he has no income, apart from what his brother gives him, he’s able to form a small collection of Japanese woodcut prints.
This is the picture dealer who sold him his pigments, a man called Pere Tanguy. Unfortunately, 'cause they were very cheap, and a lot of colours of van Gogh are not what they originally were because of the inferior pigments he was using. But he organised an exhibition of Japanese prints in Pere Tanguy’s shop, and he made many copies, which make very interesting comparisons with the original 'cause he’s certainly learning from the composition, he’s learning from the simplification of form, the exaggeration of colour. But what is very, very different in his copies, of course, is the animated and richly textured paint surface. Beginning of 1888, he, well, he had this fantasy that he wanted to go to Japan. He was obsessed by Japan. But that was not really possible in those days. So, and I think also living, can you imagine having van Gogh as, sharing a small apartment with you for two years? Even I think the saintly Theo was, you know, tried to the limit by this. And in the end, it was decided to send van Gogh to the south of France. That was his substitute, Japan. He arrives there in February 1888 as the blossom trees come into bloom. And he’s totally thrilled. He thinks he’s in Japan because blossom trees, of course, a popular subject of Japanese art. And he moves into his little yellow house where he, in this little house, between 1888. Well, yes, really in the year 1888. From February to the end of the year, he produces some of the greatest images in Western art.
This is his room in the yellow house. And I used to have fun, ask, well, I always like this view and I talk about van Gogh 'cause I can’t do it with you 'cause I can’t get an immediate answer, but I like to ask people’s reactions to the pictures, and then I tell them what he said he was trying to express in the picture. So what is your reaction to this picture? Usually people say, “Oh, I find it claustrophobic.” The perspective of fore worries them 'cause it’s like you’re dropping away beneath your feet. No, what he said, in this picture, he says he wants to create a sense of calm and a sense of security and that you’re in a safe place. That’s what he wants to express in this picture. Not many people actually, if they know about his life, they might say it if they don’t know anything about him. But if you know about van Gogh, I suppose people’s perceptions are coloured. Now, the other thing he said in the letter about this picture, which is very interesting, he said, “Impressionism is leaving me.” He’s very consciously now moving on from impressionism. Many images like these, again, of bridges or boats that recall Japanese art. Now, this picture, there’s a letter about this picture, which is called “The Night Cafe.” Now, I think there’s no doubt that this is a pretty scary image. It’s an alarming image. And he said in his letter, “I want people to look at this picture and feel that this is a place where a terrible crime could happen.” And he also says another very interesting thing. “I’m using the colours green and red to express the terrible passions of mankind.”
So this is interesting. He’s not trying to render colours naturalistic. He’s using colours expressively. And in another letter, he says, “I exaggerate my colours to express my feelings forcibly.” Now, that really could be pretty well a definition of expressionism, exaggeration for expressive effect. And these wonderful sunflower pictures, of which there were originally nine. One was destroyed in Japan in the Second World War. And again, it’s interest, how do you respond to these? They’re meant to be expressions of joy. Yellow, for him, was a very joyful colour. But it’s, again, if you ask people, people say, “Oh, they look tortured, they look anxiety-ridden.” Are they? I’m not giving you an answer to this. I’d be quite interested to know your reactions. Do you find these joyous pictures or do you find them tormented? This, I think I’ll skip that. This is, oh, yes, of course, Gauguin goes down to share the little yellow house. And straightaway, there are huge tensions between them, with Gauguin trying to impose his view of what an artist should do on Vincent. Vincent is too strong a personality artistically to submit to this. Although he does, I’ll go back to this one. Gauguin is saying, “No, don’t paint from reality, paint from memory or imagination.” So Vincent paints this picture, which I must say I don’t find very successful, which is, it’s a memory of his mother and his sister in the garden at Etten in Holland. And, of course, Gauguin then shows him how to do it, on the right-hand side. Here again, they’re actually painting the same road, the same, but how different it is. And both of them, of course, are exaggerating the colour for expressive effect. But again, very, very different way. All ends terribly badly with the incident with the ear. Vincent hated the portrait that Gauguin made of him. He said, “You’ve painted me as a madman.”
And he wanted to paint Gauguin’s portrait, but he just found him too intimidating. And after Gauguin departs, he paints a symbolic portrait of Gauguin by painting his chair which he had sat in, with attributes that he associates with Gauguin. And at the same time, the picture on the left with his attributes, his pipe and his tobacco. You can see it’s very interesting, the idea of chairs being used to put, in a way, express the personality of the person that usually sits in them. So this is the famous portrait with a bandaged ear. Then he goes off to, he voluntarily goes into an asylum. His neighbours, obviously, were uncomfortable about having this foreign lunatic with a bandaged ear. And they protested. They wanted him taken away. He goes into the asylum. He stays there for a year, from 1889 to 1890, behind bars, as you can see. And his art changed. The colour becomes probably less important in 1889. But the expressive brushwork, this turbulent, curvilinear brushwork, it becomes very much the fore in his work. I always remember talking about this picture in the National Gallery in a lecture with a group of American junior year aboard students. And this picture came up on the screen, and a young girl burst into floods of tears and fled from the lecture theatre.
And the next time I saw her, I said, “Are you okay?” And she said, “Yes, I can’t bear to be in the same room with that painting. It’s so tormented. It really agitates me.” So I do think, hmm, one rather disturbed person talking to another with 100 years interval. Again, what do you find about? I mean, this is a painting with the most incredible energy. You know, every stroke of the brush is expressing energy. Is that ecstasy? Is it agony? What is it? Then, of course, right at the end of his life, he goes back to Paris, can no longer live with his brother, who has a wife and a young child. So he’s farmed out to a kindly doctor, Dr. Gachet, who you see on the right-hand side, in Auvers, outside of Paris. And these last pictures, which create such a sense of agitation, instability. You know, here’s a Gothic church, after all, which should be, I don’t know, a symbol of comfort, of stability, whatever, but it certainly isn’t in this picture. And the picture, which was always said to be his last picture, but may not be, the crows over the wheat field. Again, a picture of quite extraordinary agitation. And the suicide, this is his suicide letter stained with his blood. I haven’t got time to read it to you tonight, but you can easily find that on the internet. And it’s a very, very, it’s a heartbreakingly moving letter to his brother, a letter of farewell. And so he shoots himself, takes a couple of days in agony to die. His brother is with him when he dies. And his brother, who’d been his rock all the way through his life, he becomes ill, loses his reason and dies shortly afterwards. And the two brothers, of course, are buried side by side in the churchyard of Auvers. Well, I’ve used up all my time and more, so maybe, I’ll have to ask Trudy if I can do a whole separate lecture. This did happen once before. I’m sorry, I just get carried away. I should have realised it’s impossible to talk about all four of the post-impressionists in one lecture. So maybe I’ll find a chance to squeeze in a lecture on the other two shortly in the new year. So let’s see what we’ve got here.
Q&A and Comments:
Thank you, Saul.
Q: “Where did Gauguin study?”
A: He’s self-taught. Yes, he didn’t study formally at all.
Thank you, Marilyn. Emile Bernard, Yes, thank you. You got there before I did.
Colour palette of Gauguin. Yes, he’s a wonderful, wonderful colorist. That is certainly true.
This is Ron, who’s just been to Brittany, recommending the Pont-Aven Museum. One of the Manets, I wasn’t intending to, because I’ve done a whole lecture on Manet not that long ago, so I wasn’t intend to do a Manet lecture in this series. And, of course, he’s not a post-impressionist. He’s not strictly an impressionist, either.
There is this theory that van Gogh didn’t commit suicide. I’m not sure how much currency that theory has. I don’t think you can say that so firmly. I know that theory came out and it has been also quite widely disputed and dismissed.
Q: I think “The Potato Eaters,” isn’t it in the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam?
A: It’s a long time since I’ve seen it.
Q: “Why did Theo van Gogh move to Paris?”
A: 'Cause he worked for a firm of art dealers that was based in Paris and, of course, Paris was the centre of all the art trade at the time.
Yes, Somerset Maugham based “The Moon and Sixpence” on Gauguin. Irving Stone brought van Gogh to millions in “Lust for Life.” I’m sure many of you have seen the film. “Sunday in the Park with George” is about Seurat, of course, yes.
Q: Do I know what happened to?
A: You know, it’s a very strange thing. The print that, I presume that most of the collection is actually in the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. But when van Gogh’s daughter-in-law sold the self-portrait with a bandaged ear to the Courtauld collection, she gave the print that’s in the background to the Courtauld collection, and that was stolen. It’s missing. Nobody knows where that is at the moment. Thank you, Rita.
Q: “What is the difference between van Gogh and the later movement called expressionism?”
A: Certainly, most of the expressionists, particularly the German expressionists, and, of course, the French folk painters were very, very influenced by van Gogh. And I think, as I said, you could call him, in a way, an expressionist before the term was invented.
This is Thelma. I don’t which picture you’re talking about, though, which you were entranced by. The sunflower pictures, Francine loves them, so I presume you don’t find them too tormented.
And this is an interesting idea from Rita, that tormented can equal joyous. Yes, I’ll think about that. That’s quite interesting. Whereas Nanette sees the pictures as agony and sad. Song by Don McLean about van Gogh.
This is Helen. She loves van Gogh agitation, any colour, any form. Yes. Yes, beautiful handwriting, isn’t it? Although his handwriting changes a lot, actually. And, of course, he writes, well, initially, it would’ve been in Dutch, but most of those letters to his brother, and you think they would be in Dutch, but they’re not. They’re in French.
This is Ron. “Cezanne et Moi” is a recent film about the relationship between Cezanne and Zola, which he says is not great. I’m reading a fascinating book about Zola. I do recommend it. It’s just out and it’s sitting beside me. It’s called “The Disappearance of Emile Zola” by Michael Rosen. Very well-written and completely riveting. I’m absolutely loving it. It’s about his exile in London during the Dreyfus affair.
Yes, I do agree with you, Robin. You’re absolutely right to point that out. That Theo’s widow was another, she is a truly amazing woman. Obviously, a very generous, very perceptive woman. And without her, we also wouldn’t have the heritage of van Gogh.
There are endless diagnoses of van Gogh’s illnesses. There are all sorts of different theories.
Yes, you’re right. Jack also pointing out that Theo’s wife was very important, had a very important role.
I’ve not been to Tahiti, and I’m not surprised it’s disappointing. I suppose it’s rather touristic.
And I wish all of you also a very happy, festive season. I’m going to have a working Christmas with lots of other refugees from Christmas. 'Cause I have to admit, in a awful kind of Dickensian way, I really don’t like Christmas. And so, but I will be with a group of MRT clients in a very comfortable hotel in Paris over Christmas, and I’m looking forward to that very much. And I will see you all again, or at least speak to you all again, in the new year.
Thank you all very, very much.