Van Gogh and Britain review: Unfolding narrative depicts story of the self-taught artist

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Matthew Collings26 March 2019

Van Gogh and Britain might sound an odd title for a show, since he never painted anything here. And yet if this is not a Van Gogh blockbuster — and visitors will not see wall-to-wall Van Gogh but rather 50 Van Goghs mixed with an equal amount of works by other people — so much the better if it provokes thoughtful reflection on what it is that makes up the Van Gogh experience: the kinds of notions we have when we see his work.

In an unfolding narrative we absorb the story of his development as a self-taught artist, we see the influence on him in his early twenties of British artistic and literary culture, as well as political and social ideas. (He lived in Lambeth, Ramsgate and Isleworth, and worked as assistant to an art dealer and later a schoolteacher.) We later see his own influence on British artists who came after him. And we see the myth of him as a visionary madman and lonely outsider genius that took off in the early 20th century and hasn’t waned since.

Landscape paintings he saw in London’s museums by Constable and others (including the Dutch painter Meindert Hobbema’s famous scene of a tree-lined avenue, offering a looming perspective view) make you think — it is a deliberate triggering by the curators — of Van Gogh walking to work with his painting equipment out to the fields towards the end of his life.

This image of solitary creativity is provoked subtly near the beginning of the show by beautiful paintings of trees which impressed Van Gogh, and is then given an explosive return right at the end in the form of works by Francis Bacon from the Fifties depicting Van Gogh rather literally, even illustratively, walking in the fields. Black trees flash by, as if in frames of a movie. In this way the show carries off the impossible, successfully merging Kirk Douglas’s sensationalist portrayal, in the daft 1956 movie Lust for Life, with the genuinely important reality of Van Gogh’s artistic practice and ideals.

The Bacons are everything Van Gogh is not: flamboyant, egotistical, grandstanding. They are influenced by the psychological power of movies and photos: as if Bacon pulls together all that could possibly be considered exciting and relevant, as it seemed to him, in the Fifties, to make a painting. Just as Van Gogh did in the 1880s. His opposite vision, though, was of art serving society, not advertising the self. His mindset was profoundly influenced by the social commentary he encountered in Victorian Britain. We see copies of the books he owned by Charles Dickens, Mrs Craik, Thackeray, among others. He repeatedly read Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a searing novel of injustice he first encountered in London. We get the message that for him art had a remedial purpose, the beauty of it was to help people.

Van Gogh had a 10-year career as an artist, beginning when he was 27. At 35, at the end of 1888, he started having psychotic episodes. For most of the year he had been living in Arles in the South of France. After that he was hospitalised for long periods and finally committed suicide on July 27 1890. He shot himself while in a field, walked to a hospital, and died two days later.

During his career he produced about 860 oil paintings, the majority of which were done in these last two years. He did not work when he was truly ill, but in periods of recovery he painted at a furious pace. The strangeness of his paintings is not due to madness. It comes from a highly unusual artistic joining, where he unifies social meaning of great believable intensity with a lovely decorative impact.

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

The Van Gogh “mad” look, then, is really his look of experimental colour, picturing the world with colour organisation that has its own logic. If the world as ordinary stuff we can all agree on recedes, what takes over, philo-sophically speaking? We have to think first that with Van Gogh, heightened colour is also driven by a great rushing design impulse. A rhythmic organisation evolves fast on the canvas, so anything pictured is also patterned. And the patterning produces angular and flowing distortions, departures from depiction. Within the look, though, is Van Gogh’s human sympathy.

He combines the simple beauty of design, drawn from Japanese prints which had only just begun to be imported to France, with the spontaneous manipulation of thick paint that characterises post-impressionist artworks by painters he met in Paris. He thinks about English paintings of landscapes and idealised landscapes by historic figures. But he also gives just as much importance to English engravings and news illustrations showing street events and everyday life: criminals, dustmen, political meetings, people’s backyards.

Out of all that comes his pictures of suffering humanity, sorrow, the dignity of everyday life, the richness of human experience seen in poor people’s faces and poses, and the beauty of nature and the countryside.

We get a strong impression from the show of trees in art, both as life’s ordinary background and also as symbolic objects. Van Gogh painted an old yew trunk in 1888, close-to, very large, so it becomes an amazing colour arrangement, with firmly bounded areas, and within each of them deftly placed accents that cause the area to seem to have substance and depth, while the whole thing retains its almost opposite character of a flat patchwork pattern.

He makes the question of how a line of vivid dark green can work visually in this otherwise entirely pale painting —lilac and light yellow seem just as urgent as the question of how a very abstracted beauty can be so much a scene of human emotion. How a tree can be an icon of solitary survival.
Harold Gilman, Matthew Smith and Ben Nicolson feature in the show with sensitive, strong paintings of landscapes, café scenes, self-portraits and flowers, like Van Gogh. We see him continued in them, but more gently.

With Bacon it’s a harsh take, wildly engaging, and nothing really to do with Van Gogh, in the sense that those other painters really are followers but disappear a bit in his shadow. Bacon holds his own because he’s different to them. He is directly tuned-in to an art public’s neurotic hunger for never-ending displays of artistic freak-out, which first took hold with the rise of the Van Gogh myth.

Van Gogh and Britain is at Tate Britain, SW1 (tate.org.uk), from March 27 until Aug 11

Vincent van Gogh's most iconic paintings

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