What are You Looking at?

[Cockney Sparrow]

A word that could combine Vincent Van Gogh’s Provençal style and mental state is ‘vibration’, encapsulating the dynamic, ecstatic quality of the paintings that channel and depict his heightened perturbation. The images shimmer and shake. To mark its 200th birthday, the National Gallery has put on its first show of his works ‘Van Gogh Poets and Lovers’ that covers that two year period up to his suicide that were made during his time in Provence. And what a show it is.

First, to give huge credit to its curating, and the superb catalogue, with its learned essays. There is no tongue-clicking, finger-wagging censoriousness, so fashionable at the ‘other place’, that reproves Van Gogh’s use of prostitutes, or his early days as Protestant lay preacher (with all those nasty links with slavery); rather, the information gives the painting’s title, the year of its making and its owner, we are left to make up our own minds as to what the picture is about. How refreshing, how adult.

But the thing is the works themselves, which seem to erupt from their frames in a riot of vibrant colour. Those colours have undoubtedly changed over the years - have you ever seen oranges and lemons that colour - would you be tempted to eat them? What is noticeable nevertheless is how ‘unrealistic’ the use of colour is, and here the influence of Gauguin is evident (who’s radical stature among artists was established, although not among the art-buying public), even prior to his disastrous stay in Arles. The ‘Portrait of a Peasant’ (one Patience Escalier) has a scrubby white beard flecked with green and a grizzled ruddy face and rheumy red eyes; and yet the complementary use of green and red gives a harmony and vitality to the image. ‘Wheatfield, with Cypresses’ captures and synthesises movement on multiple scales, from the tactile undulations of wheat in a gentle breeze, through the twisting cypresses, the undulations of the distant cumulus-like mountains to the violent contortions of the clouds above them; it’s a glorious painting.

So the show is filled with the colours of summer to gladden the eye in dreary, dark November. On until January.

Just returned from the cinema showing of the "Exhibition on Screen". It has exposition by two of the curators, an art critic and Lachlan Goudie, artist, writer, broadcaster. I could see the pictures without heads or mobile phones, and decent steady showing of the paintings, then close ups sometimes, and yes, exposition. I'd already been advised to forgo the audio guide by a friend who found it not much use, and relied on the exhibition booklet which had some more detail than others have had when I saw the exhibition in person. I mightily enjoyed both experiences. I'm not sure I can spare the time to see the exhibition again - although I would dearly like to. I will certainly buy the DVD when it appears in a while (as did for the Vermeer):

https://seventh-art.com/product/van-gogh-poets-lovers/