THIS (post-Impressionist) LIFE

Submitted to The Australian, 9.1.2010

The Australian was correct - the books were damn heavy.

When I opened the Review early on Saturday, 21st of November, I saw a dream manifest before my eyes. The article - Into that good night by Sabastian Smee - told of the ambitious project by the Van Gogh Museum and Van Gogh scholars to publish all of Vincent’s 900 letters, complete with thorough annotations and every piece of art referred to by the great post-Impressionist, represented beside his text. The result was Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters: The Complete Illustrated and Annotated Edition (2009).

I’ve been waiting my whole life for these books. Van Gogh has always been my absolute favourite painter from as early as I can remember. His life and art have has had an extraordinary affect me since when I was a young child. When I finally got to stand in front of his light blue self portrait some fifteen years ago, I wept. A bewildered security guard at the Queensland Art Gallery had to help me to a seat. And like many other wannabe artists, I have always felt a kindred spirit; struggles with art, self-confidence and emotions to a certain extent being similar.

Of course I’ve read versions of some of his letters before: mainly heavily edited letters to Theo and Gauguin. They give some insight into the paintyer and his life, but always left me wondering if I had a true vision the man or one coloured by the need to package and sell a marketable product. Then along came the complete, illustrated and annotated edition and, by God, the thing really did weigh a ton.

I thought I knew Vincent pretty well, but in beginning to read his letters, now complete with explanations for what I once only knew as vague references, I realise that I’m starting a new relationship with this extraordinary person. I’ve never met this 19-year-old, positively cheery young man who is full of praise for his job and in complete wonderment of his surroundings. I’ve never seen the fashionable paintings he sold during his time at Goupil’s, or the obscure paintings he would passionately discuss with his brother. I’ve never had the chance to read the poetry he liked, or his letters to distant but much beloved relatives.

Over the 117 years since the very first publication, editors of his letters have focussed on the dramatic elements of Van Gogh’s life because it sells books. His tortured genius; his religious conviction; his fight with Gauguin; his self-mutilation have all been offered up as fodder for the interested reader. Yes, this new 2,240 page edition has editors - teams and teams, in fact - but the irony is that they’ve let Vincent speak for himself for the first time since his death in 1889.

I plan to make my way through all 2,240 pages (six mammoth volumes) of his letters. It’s a little like watching the movie Titanic, I guess: you know it’s not going to end well but that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the story along the way. Most of all, I appreciate being given the opportunity to get to know the real Van Gogh; to understand his motivations behind his actions and his work within the context of the world he knew.

STARRY NIGHT NEWS #7: Do you know Van Gogh?

YOU THINK YOU KNOW VAN GOGH?

Prepare to think again when you visit the Royal Academy’s terrific new show of letters and pictures.

By Mark Hudson

When Vincent van Gogh had his last major showing in this country (UK) – at the Hayward Gallery in 1968 – he was merely one of the greatest artists the world had ever known. His influence on 20th-century art was widely understood, his tragic story universally known. The film Lust for Life, with its eye-rolling, paint-chomping performance from Kirk Douglas, had been consigned to history, while having had a decisive effect on the way we view the artist. Yet van Gogh was just one huge artistic figure among many.

Since then, he has become something no other artist has ever quite been, “the world’s favourite artist”. Van Gogh, even more than the Impressionists, is seen as the artist who blew open the studio door, blasting away centuries of fusty academic painting, to let in the light of real experience.

Vincent’s eye-popping colour combinations – so bizarre to his contemporaries – have come to be seen as more expressive of reality than reality itself. Vincent ran through blazing Provençal cornfields shouting about the power of the sun (or so we tend to think) and we feel he was doing it on our behalf. He’s become the artist par excellence of the Mediterranean – never mind that he was Dutch and that many of his paintings are of flat, dark, rain-drenched Netherlandish fields. Such is the power of the package – life-enhancing pictures plus tragic history – that his paintings are no longer simply works of art but relics of one of the great transcendent human stories.

Yet our sense of van Gogh as a kind of martyr, who died not only for his art but to open the eyes of the rest of the world, can, paradoxically, blind us to the real qualities of his work. While most of us can see past the cliché of the colour-crazed madman, there is the sense that he applied his singular vision in an almost indiscriminate way. Old boots, corners of uninteresting gardens, copies of Old Masters, van Gogh seems to turn everything into yet more van Gogh imagery in paintings it’s difficult to comment on, except to say that they are obviously by van Gogh. Beyond the fact that van Gogh’s early works, painted in Holland, tend to be on the dark side, how many of us could put a pile of van Gogh paintings into any sort of chronological order?

Bringing together 60 works from all over the world, the Royal Academy’s The Real van Gogh: the Artist and his Letters will throw the artist into a new light. By looking at the paintings alongside the letters that reveal the thought processes behind them, we will see his images not just as illustrations to a legend or spontaneous expressions of genius but as points in a line of creative development that continually confounds our expectations. While we think of van Gogh as the master of swirling forms, there are drawings here, done directly on to the letters, that are composed entirely of straight lines. There are paintings you would never think were by him. Indeed, while he had probably the most powerful personal style of any artist ever – he was doing drawings with angular, “Japanese” lines long before he saw Japanese art – he reacts to other artists in a way that can feel almost chameleon-like.

Here he is writing to his brother Theo in a letter of July 31 1882, discussing a watercolour of which he has done a superbly vivid pen and ink sketch on the opposite page, describing “the gloomy landscape – that dead tree near a stagnant pool covered with reeds. Dingy, black buildings”. And of a lone figure walking away in the middle distance: “I wanted to make it the way the signalman must see and feel it when he thinks 'It’s gloomy weather today’.”

While Vincent was painfully isolated for much of his life, and was to a large degree self-absorbed, what emerges from the letters is his desire to empathise with and reach out to others, not only through his art but on a simple human level. Describing his dark masterpiece The Potato Eaters, he writes of wanting to convey “that these people, eating their potatoes in the lamplight, have dug the earth with those very hands they put in the dish, of how they have honestly earned their food.”

Vincent wants us to feel the life of these people whose peat hovels he has shared, but from the perspective of “us civilised people”, as he makes clear in the next paragraph. He wants to be a peasant painter, making art for “labourers, peasants, fishermen and prostitutes”, while enjoying the finest subtleties of the great masters. He wants to take on the techniques and ideas of all the artists he writes about so compellingly – from geniuses to utter hacks. He wants to get everything he’s gleaned from his impassioned, omnivorous reading into the frame. The pathos of van Gogh is that he wants to do everything at once. His triumph is that to a large extent he succeeded.

Van Gogh’s career as an artist lasted only 10 years. And while we tend of think of his dark, Dutch phase with its lowering skies and severe perspectives as a mere blip before he discovered colour, it took up the greater part of that vital decade, and is represented at the RA in a magnificent array of early drawings. Even when he arrived in Paris in the autumn of 1886, his palette was still dominated by thick, dark browns. When he finally saw the works of the Impressionists, he was bitterly disappointed. “Their work is careless, ugly, badly painted, badly drawn, bad in colour – everything that’s miserable.”

But having seen the light – literally – he hoovered up the influences of the major Parisian painters in quick succession: Monet, Pissarro, Seurat and Toulouse-Lautrec, whom he met while studying in the studio of Fernand Cormon. While I’ve always assumed that Lautrec must have been influenced by van Gogh, it was the other way round. Vincent’s portrait of Agostina Segatori is in all essentials a Lautrec painting. When van Gogh writes to Emile Bernard, an artist he met through Gauguin, his drawing in the letter takes on the tremulous quality of Bernard’s own lines. While van Gogh, a Protestant pastor’s son, had become disillusioned with conventional religion by the time he became an artist, this desire to accommodate the other artist almost to the point of becoming them is rooted in a deeply ingrained idea of Christian humility.

In Gaugin he felt he’d found his artistic soulmate, into whose personality he wanted to sublimate his own – with the disastrous consequences that are so well known.
There was a history of insanity in van Gogh’s family. By this point he was drinking heavily, sleeping little, and bouts of derangement experienced earlier in his life were beginning to recur. Yet far from appearing confused, his drawings and paintings are startlingly lucid. A drawing in a letter to Theo, indicating the composition of the famous Bedroom in Arles, is at once fantastically economical and imbued with an almost Art Nouveau decorativeness, while the accompanying notes – “fresh butter yellow, very bright lemon green: coloured in flat plain tints like a Japanese print” – make it a kind of cribsheet on how to do a van Gogh.

As his attacks of insanity became more frequent, Vincent, now in the sanatorium at Saint-Remy, near Arles, created visionary works such as Starry Night and Landscape with Cypress Trees, that have come to be seen as the ultimate of the van Gogh ideal. Yet he also created a much less well-known group of paintings, which are in their way at least as powerful: wintery views of the grounds of the institution with leaves falling on its grey pathways and shattered tree-trunks, all painted in a similar and unusual colour palette.

“You will realise,” van Gogh wrote to Emile Bernard, “that this combination of red-ochre, of green gloomed over by grey, the black streaks surrounding the contours, produce something of the sensation of anguish called 'rouge-noir’, from which certain of my companions in misfortunes suffer.” With their quiet mixture of desperation and exaltation, these paintings that seem simultaneously inside and outside the condition of derangement looks forward to so much of what art has since been about, from Expressionism to Pollock’s gestural abstraction.

Indeed, for all that van Gogh has gone from being dangerous and edgy to the most widely accepted of all artists, has the rest of the world quite caught up with everything he achieved in that terrible final year? He kept on painting – “even when my illness was at its height”, as he wrote in April 1890 – convinced he had failed utterly, yet providing us with a moment-by-moment account of what he saw and felt as he moved from Saint-Remy to Auvers-sur-Oise in northern France, putting himself under the care of a Dr Gachet, before shooting himself at the age of 37. Yet far from dragging us to the brink of derangement, what he gives us are the moments of clarity and hope. What we have here is not the abjectness he felt at so many moments, but the determination to continue as a creative being, right up to the last moment.

It might seem ridiculous to talk of feeling “grateful” to an artist, who is after all doing nothing more than expressing himself. But for what it tells us about the possibilities of the human spirit that is how this exhibition leaves you feeling.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-features/6947746/You-think-you-know-van-Gogh.html

A VERY VAN GOGH CHRISTMAS

MIA’S ORNAMENTS… SUITABLE FOR FRAMING

Mia's artist inspired designs are certainly that. These ball and molded ornaments have become the hallmark of her collection. Since 1995 no other studio has dedicated itself to honoring the fine arts to the extent that Mia has both in her regular collection and through her commission design ornaments. Mia divides her time between her business and shipping headquarters in New York City and her design studio and retail store in Krakow, Poland.

http://collectibles.about.com/library/weekly/aa072302a.htm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3oP0iVKgLw





CARSON COLLECTIBLES CERAMIC ORNAMENTS

Made of good quality ceramic, each ornament features Starry Night on one side only. Looks good from a distance, but the detail isn’t as sharp as it should be close up.

http://www.amazon.com/s/qid=1261185779/ref=sr_nr_seeall_7?ie=UTF8&rs=&keywords=starry%20night%20ornament&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Astarry%20night%20ornament%2Ci%3Aapparel




THE UBIQUITOUS STARBUCK’S MUG

This truly horrific version of Starry Night was one of Starbuck’s most popular designs. The original has been flipped and altered by making the cypress a pine tree with decorations. It pops up from time to time on eBay. For lightweights only. A sacrilege for the serious collector.


TALARIA ENTERPRISES

Yikes.

http://www.talariaenterprises.com/product_lists/teapots.html




NYC HANDMADE GLASS ORNAMENT

Double yikes!

http://www.nycwebstore.com/detail.aspx?PRODUCT_ID=PPR-VGSNO

THE ULTIMATE PRESENT...

VINCENT VAN GOGH - THE LETTERS: COMPLETE EDITION

Since 1994 the Van Gogh Museum and the Huygens Institute (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences) have been working on the new edition of the letters of Vincent van Gogh. The complete illustrated edition is published in 6 volumes and contains 819 letters written by Van Gogh and 83 written to Van Gogh by Paul Gauguin, Theo van Gogh, Paul Signac and others.


A wonderful read, these letters reveal that Vincent van Gogh was not only a great artist but also a gifted writer. As surely and skilfully as he wielded his brush and draughtman's pen, so he found the words to say what most deeply concerned him as a human being and an artist. All the works to which Van Gogh alludes in his letters will be shown for the first time: not only the paintings and drawings on which he himself was working, but also the works of art by others that he wrote about, over 4.300 illustrations in total.


The international reputation of Van Gogh's correspondence is based upon its immense value as a document humain and on the enormous wealth of biographical and art historical information it contains. The letters constitute the story of Van Gogh's search for his destiny: of the close bond with his brother Theo, who supported him unconditionally, of his sometimes troubled friendships, his need for recognition and, above all, of his passion for art and literature. The letters are reproduced exactly as Van Gogh wrote them, without textual refinements, re-translations, amendments or excised passages. Supplementary texts add information about his life, the context in which the letters were written, a list of materials discussed in the letters, a chronology of his life and a full index.


Data Edited by Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten and Nienke Bakker. Six hardback volumes, slipcased, 2,180 pages, over 4,300 illustrations. Van Gogh Museum/Huygens Institute/Mercatorfonds, 2009Co-editions: English (Thames & Hudson), French (Actes Sud) and Dutch (Amsterdam University Press)ISBN: 978 90 6153 853 0 Price € 395, till 4 January 2010: € 325.


http://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/vgm/index.jsp?page=200942&lang=en