Post by bingbong on Sept 28, 2007 23:01:42 GMT 12
Friendship in Letters and Paint
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By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: September 28, 2007
"My God, if only I had known this country at 25, instead of coming here at 35." That was Vincent van Gogh, freshly arrived in southern France, with its aromatic fields and star-spilling skies, in 1888. He was writing to his artist-friend Émile Bernard, 15 years his junior.
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National Gallery of Scotland
Vincent van Gogh's "Olive Trees."
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Painted With WordsSlide Show
Painted With Words
And he kept writing. On the train through Provence from Paris, his eyes glued to the window, he saw countryside "as beautiful as Japan for the limpidity of the atmosphere and the gay color effects." Settled in the town of Arles, he stood all day in wheat fields painting "in the full heat of the sun, without any shade whatever, and there you are, I revel in it like a cicada."
After a year in ashen Paris, he was in a chromatic delirium. He couldn't stop cataloging the colors he was seeing and using. A painting of an orchard has a "white tree, a small green tree, a lilac field, an orange roof, a big blue sky." His description of his painting of a sower in a field reads like Gertrude Stein:
"The chrome yellow 1 sky almost as bright as the sun itself, which is chrome yellow 1 with a little white, while the rest of the sky is chrome yellow 1 and 2 mixed, very yellow, then. ... There are many repetitions of yellow in the earth, neutral tones, resulting from the mixing of violet with yellow."
If verbal accounts seemed inadequate, he drew ink sketches of paintings — of the sower in the field, of the orchard — right in the body of a letter, with the names of colors added. And when the descriptive circuits are overloaded, there are detonations. Frustrated at how to convey the reality that even transparent elements — water and air — have complex color ranges, he ends up shouting on paper: "No blue without yellow and orange."
All these words, ideas, sensations and images are packed into "Painted With Words: Vincent van Gogh's Letters to Émile Bernard" at the Morgan Library & Museum, a display of manuscripts that is also something more. Although 20 handwritten letters, given to the Morgan by Eugene and Clare Thaw, are at its center, they are surrounded by nearly two dozen paintings and drawings, half of them by van Gogh, including a splendid self-portrait.
It was done before he moved south. With his red hair and beard, taciturn lips and untrusting eyes, you already know him on sight. And you will come to know him in some depth in a show that is itself a self-portrait in many parts.
You will encounter Bernard, too, though far less directly. A minor French painter, prolific writer, tireless networker and van Gogh advocate, he's present in a few early paintings and prints and a book, but primarily in van Gogh's salutation, which opens nearly all the letters: "My dear old Bernard."
The two men met in studio classes in Paris. Van Gogh, a 30-something Dutch ex-art dealer and ex-preacher, was trying to figure out a place for himself in contemporary art. Bernard, a precocious Paris teenager, was trying to do the same. Despite their age difference, they became friends.
Paris, with its buzzy, rivalrous art scene, was hard on van Gogh. At once stimulating and brutalizing, it fired his ambition but left his body and spirits in ruins. When he decided to leave, it was partly from exhaustion, but also from wounded idealism. Shouldn't a community of artists be based on collaboration rather that competition?
Yes, it should, and he would establish such a community elsewhere with the help of like-minded colleagues, Bernard being one, Paul Gauguin another. He would be the pioneer, paving the way for the others. So he headed south alone, keeping in touch with Bernard by mail.
In fact, he kept in touch with several people, but the letters to Bernard, written in French between 1887 and 1889, are unlike many others. With his brother Theo, van Gogh observed a certain decorum; this was, after all, family. But Bernard offered a different sort of audience, a different relationship, one without a history, ready to be built from scratch.
This didn't mean the relationship was clear or easy. You can sense van Gogh feeling his way into it, trying on different roles in the letters. At first he is older-brotherly, advising Bernard to eat better, to ease off on visits to brothels. This is guy talk, and there's a fair amount of it. Then he is a mentor; he urges Bernard to study certain painters; he promotes his career. Gradually, as differences arise, he becomes an antagonist, and the correspondence ends.
It's when van Gogh addresses Bernard as an equal, artist to artist, that he is at his most eloquent. When he speaks from love — of art, of an exalted ideal of the artist, of an art fellowship — wonderful things are said, and, as the Morgan show demonstrates, wonderful art was made.
In June 1888, van Gogh traveled to the coastal village of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer and caught his first glimpse of the Mediterranean. The sight was a pure thrill for him, and he wanted to share it with someone who he thought would be equally thrilled. So he wrote Bernard a vivid account of the trip, and sent it with a set of vivacious, color-annotated sketches of ships and cottages, which he turned into large-scale drawings — three are in the show — and into oil paintings.
Much of what van Gogh writes — some of it probably in response to Bernard's letters, which are lost — is a kind of glorified shop talk, about paint, color theory, how-to: "I follow no system of brushwork at all, I hit the canvas with irregular strokes, which I leave as they are, impastos, uncovered spots of canvas, reworkings, roughness. I'm inclined to think that the result is sufficiently worrying and annoying not to please people with preconceived ideas about technique."
But, as always with this artist, even the prosaic topic can hold existential implications. When he debates with Bernard about the proper subjects for art, he is not being pedantic. He is laying his psyche on the line.
Under Gauguin's influence, Bernard was increasingly seeking his sources in religion and myth, fantasy and imagination, what van Gogh called "abstraction." At first the older artist was puzzled, then defensive, then dismayed. He writes, as if about a disability, that he can make art only from real models, things in the world:
"I'm not saying I don't flatly turn my back on reality to turn a study into a painting — by arranging the color, by enlarging, by simplifying — but I have such a fear of separating myself from what's possible."
And as an example of how reality can be a conduit to something else, some larger consciousness, in art, he writes, as a stream-of-consciousness soliloquy, about one of his favorite painters:
"Rembrandt makes a portrait of himself as an old man, toothless, wrinkled, wearing a cotton cap — first, painting from life in a mirror — he dreams, dreams, and his brush begins his own portrait again, but from memory, and its expression becomes sadder and more saddening; he dreams, dreams on, and why or how I do not know, but just as Socrates and Mohammed had a familiar genie, Rembrandt, behind this old man who bears a resemblance to himself, paints a supernatural angel with a da Vinci smile."
And yet, he concludes, "Rembrandt invented nothing, and that angel and that strange Christ — he knew them, felt them there."
Bernard wasn't convinced. Van Gogh suspected that he wasn't even really listening; that he was, in fact, distancing himself, as other people had done in the past when they began to perceive van Gogh's eccentricity as an unacceptable strangeness.
Life in the south was darkening. Van Gogh fretted that Gauguin wasn't making his promised visit, the one that would transform a one-artist outpost into a community of kindred souls. Already he was feeling depressed and fearful. He wrote to Gauguin: "I still have in my memory the feelings that the journey from Paris to Arles gave me this past winter. How I watched out to see 'if it was like Japan yet'! Childish, isn't it?"
The visit was, as we well know, catastrophic. Gauguin fled. Van Gogh ended up in an asylum. His last letter to Bernard was written there a year later, and in it he separates himself aesthetically — which meant spiritually — from his colleague.
"At present am working in the olive trees, seeking different effects of a gray sky against yellow earth, with dark green note of the foliage; another time the earth and foliage all purplish against yellow sky, then red ochre earth and pink and green sky. See, that interests me more than the so-called abstractions. ... My ambition is truly limited to a few clods of earth, some sprouting wheat. An olive grove. A cypress."
Then, in a devastating passage, he brings color and reality together:
"You'll understand that this combination of red ochre, of green saddened with gray, of black lines that define the outlines, this gives rise a little to the feeling of anxiety from which some of my companions in misfortune often suffer, and which is called 'seeing red.' "
Although the correspondence ended here, the relationship continued, if in absentia. After van Gogh's suicide in 1890, Bernard shouldered the task of keeping the memory of his friend, and the image of him as artist-genius, alive, primarily through publishing the letters seen in the show, which has been organized by Jennifer Tonkovich, curator of drawings and prints at the Morgan.
What van Gogh would have thought of having the letters exhibited as relics and art we can only guess. He probably would have been fine with it. "I adore the true, the possible," he wrote in one. Both are here.
"Painted With Words: Vincent van Gogh's Letters to Émile Bernard" remains through Jan. 6 at the Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street; (212) 685-0008, morganlibrary.org.
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By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: September 28, 2007
"My God, if only I had known this country at 25, instead of coming here at 35." That was Vincent van Gogh, freshly arrived in southern France, with its aromatic fields and star-spilling skies, in 1888. He was writing to his artist-friend Émile Bernard, 15 years his junior.
Skip to next paragraph
Enlarge This Image
National Gallery of Scotland
Vincent van Gogh's "Olive Trees."
Multimedia
Painted With WordsSlide Show
Painted With Words
And he kept writing. On the train through Provence from Paris, his eyes glued to the window, he saw countryside "as beautiful as Japan for the limpidity of the atmosphere and the gay color effects." Settled in the town of Arles, he stood all day in wheat fields painting "in the full heat of the sun, without any shade whatever, and there you are, I revel in it like a cicada."
After a year in ashen Paris, he was in a chromatic delirium. He couldn't stop cataloging the colors he was seeing and using. A painting of an orchard has a "white tree, a small green tree, a lilac field, an orange roof, a big blue sky." His description of his painting of a sower in a field reads like Gertrude Stein:
"The chrome yellow 1 sky almost as bright as the sun itself, which is chrome yellow 1 with a little white, while the rest of the sky is chrome yellow 1 and 2 mixed, very yellow, then. ... There are many repetitions of yellow in the earth, neutral tones, resulting from the mixing of violet with yellow."
If verbal accounts seemed inadequate, he drew ink sketches of paintings — of the sower in the field, of the orchard — right in the body of a letter, with the names of colors added. And when the descriptive circuits are overloaded, there are detonations. Frustrated at how to convey the reality that even transparent elements — water and air — have complex color ranges, he ends up shouting on paper: "No blue without yellow and orange."
All these words, ideas, sensations and images are packed into "Painted With Words: Vincent van Gogh's Letters to Émile Bernard" at the Morgan Library & Museum, a display of manuscripts that is also something more. Although 20 handwritten letters, given to the Morgan by Eugene and Clare Thaw, are at its center, they are surrounded by nearly two dozen paintings and drawings, half of them by van Gogh, including a splendid self-portrait.
It was done before he moved south. With his red hair and beard, taciturn lips and untrusting eyes, you already know him on sight. And you will come to know him in some depth in a show that is itself a self-portrait in many parts.
You will encounter Bernard, too, though far less directly. A minor French painter, prolific writer, tireless networker and van Gogh advocate, he's present in a few early paintings and prints and a book, but primarily in van Gogh's salutation, which opens nearly all the letters: "My dear old Bernard."
The two men met in studio classes in Paris. Van Gogh, a 30-something Dutch ex-art dealer and ex-preacher, was trying to figure out a place for himself in contemporary art. Bernard, a precocious Paris teenager, was trying to do the same. Despite their age difference, they became friends.
Paris, with its buzzy, rivalrous art scene, was hard on van Gogh. At once stimulating and brutalizing, it fired his ambition but left his body and spirits in ruins. When he decided to leave, it was partly from exhaustion, but also from wounded idealism. Shouldn't a community of artists be based on collaboration rather that competition?
Yes, it should, and he would establish such a community elsewhere with the help of like-minded colleagues, Bernard being one, Paul Gauguin another. He would be the pioneer, paving the way for the others. So he headed south alone, keeping in touch with Bernard by mail.
In fact, he kept in touch with several people, but the letters to Bernard, written in French between 1887 and 1889, are unlike many others. With his brother Theo, van Gogh observed a certain decorum; this was, after all, family. But Bernard offered a different sort of audience, a different relationship, one without a history, ready to be built from scratch.
This didn't mean the relationship was clear or easy. You can sense van Gogh feeling his way into it, trying on different roles in the letters. At first he is older-brotherly, advising Bernard to eat better, to ease off on visits to brothels. This is guy talk, and there's a fair amount of it. Then he is a mentor; he urges Bernard to study certain painters; he promotes his career. Gradually, as differences arise, he becomes an antagonist, and the correspondence ends.
It's when van Gogh addresses Bernard as an equal, artist to artist, that he is at his most eloquent. When he speaks from love — of art, of an exalted ideal of the artist, of an art fellowship — wonderful things are said, and, as the Morgan show demonstrates, wonderful art was made.
In June 1888, van Gogh traveled to the coastal village of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer and caught his first glimpse of the Mediterranean. The sight was a pure thrill for him, and he wanted to share it with someone who he thought would be equally thrilled. So he wrote Bernard a vivid account of the trip, and sent it with a set of vivacious, color-annotated sketches of ships and cottages, which he turned into large-scale drawings — three are in the show — and into oil paintings.
Much of what van Gogh writes — some of it probably in response to Bernard's letters, which are lost — is a kind of glorified shop talk, about paint, color theory, how-to: "I follow no system of brushwork at all, I hit the canvas with irregular strokes, which I leave as they are, impastos, uncovered spots of canvas, reworkings, roughness. I'm inclined to think that the result is sufficiently worrying and annoying not to please people with preconceived ideas about technique."
But, as always with this artist, even the prosaic topic can hold existential implications. When he debates with Bernard about the proper subjects for art, he is not being pedantic. He is laying his psyche on the line.
Under Gauguin's influence, Bernard was increasingly seeking his sources in religion and myth, fantasy and imagination, what van Gogh called "abstraction." At first the older artist was puzzled, then defensive, then dismayed. He writes, as if about a disability, that he can make art only from real models, things in the world:
"I'm not saying I don't flatly turn my back on reality to turn a study into a painting — by arranging the color, by enlarging, by simplifying — but I have such a fear of separating myself from what's possible."
And as an example of how reality can be a conduit to something else, some larger consciousness, in art, he writes, as a stream-of-consciousness soliloquy, about one of his favorite painters:
"Rembrandt makes a portrait of himself as an old man, toothless, wrinkled, wearing a cotton cap — first, painting from life in a mirror — he dreams, dreams, and his brush begins his own portrait again, but from memory, and its expression becomes sadder and more saddening; he dreams, dreams on, and why or how I do not know, but just as Socrates and Mohammed had a familiar genie, Rembrandt, behind this old man who bears a resemblance to himself, paints a supernatural angel with a da Vinci smile."
And yet, he concludes, "Rembrandt invented nothing, and that angel and that strange Christ — he knew them, felt them there."
Bernard wasn't convinced. Van Gogh suspected that he wasn't even really listening; that he was, in fact, distancing himself, as other people had done in the past when they began to perceive van Gogh's eccentricity as an unacceptable strangeness.
Life in the south was darkening. Van Gogh fretted that Gauguin wasn't making his promised visit, the one that would transform a one-artist outpost into a community of kindred souls. Already he was feeling depressed and fearful. He wrote to Gauguin: "I still have in my memory the feelings that the journey from Paris to Arles gave me this past winter. How I watched out to see 'if it was like Japan yet'! Childish, isn't it?"
The visit was, as we well know, catastrophic. Gauguin fled. Van Gogh ended up in an asylum. His last letter to Bernard was written there a year later, and in it he separates himself aesthetically — which meant spiritually — from his colleague.
"At present am working in the olive trees, seeking different effects of a gray sky against yellow earth, with dark green note of the foliage; another time the earth and foliage all purplish against yellow sky, then red ochre earth and pink and green sky. See, that interests me more than the so-called abstractions. ... My ambition is truly limited to a few clods of earth, some sprouting wheat. An olive grove. A cypress."
Then, in a devastating passage, he brings color and reality together:
"You'll understand that this combination of red ochre, of green saddened with gray, of black lines that define the outlines, this gives rise a little to the feeling of anxiety from which some of my companions in misfortune often suffer, and which is called 'seeing red.' "
Although the correspondence ended here, the relationship continued, if in absentia. After van Gogh's suicide in 1890, Bernard shouldered the task of keeping the memory of his friend, and the image of him as artist-genius, alive, primarily through publishing the letters seen in the show, which has been organized by Jennifer Tonkovich, curator of drawings and prints at the Morgan.
What van Gogh would have thought of having the letters exhibited as relics and art we can only guess. He probably would have been fine with it. "I adore the true, the possible," he wrote in one. Both are here.
"Painted With Words: Vincent van Gogh's Letters to Émile Bernard" remains through Jan. 6 at the Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street; (212) 685-0008, morganlibrary.org.
