Van Gogh and Britain at the Tate Britain
VAN
GOGH AND BRITAIN
At
the Tate Britain, July 28th, 2019
Today at Mill Bank. A
washout meant that I could cover Van Gogh and Britain, a far-fetched
poetic fantasy about the artist’s early youth. Tons of collaborators admitted
to knowing him after he was made into an icon. It is difficult to learn from
Van Gogh's inimitable style and fatal to imitate it but terms like ‘asylum’, ‘fallen
woman’ and ‘lunatic’ mean that the narrative fashioned about his life is
undeniably entertaining.
Van Gogh and Britain
follows a brief chronology before unfolding into a discourse on the artist’s
imitators and those he influenced. The
implied message is that Van Gogh (1853-1890) is actually very close to us. For instance, he lived for three years in
London, between 1873 and 1875, initially working for an art dealer called
Goupil before subsiding into depression, unrequited love and eventual
unemployment as he was dismissed from his post.
Afterwards he left for the Borinage in Belgium to begin a career as a
lay preacher. This was to be yet another
disastrous move and false start for Vincent as his artistic nature conflicted
with the philistine hypocrisy of the church.
He lived in places
familiar to us today as inner London, Stockwell and the Oval, but in Van Gogh’s
day these were villages only recently absorbed into the nascent spread of the
capital. Van Gogh was not yet an artist,
but he had begun to be influenced by British art, works like John Everett
Millais’s, Chill October (1870, oil on canvas). Chill October has no subject to
enliven the landscape and people therefore speculated that it must be about the
transience of life. Moreover, it showed
Millais gravitating away from the Pre-Raphaelite style of his earlier years
towards brooding, melancholic landscapes rendered by the techniques of
photographic realism. Van Gogh enthuses
about the work in yet another letter to Theo.
We learn that he had an affinity with Scotland through the artist
Archibald Hartrick (1864-1950) who wrote a book about the artist perhaps to
cash in on Van Gogh’s posthumous reputation.
However, his portrait of Van Gogh on the fly leaf of his eponymous book
is original and compelling just as Van Gogh’s own self-portraits are. Hartrick also worked at Pont-Aven in Brittany
with Paul Gaugin in 1886 before Gaugin’s departure to Arles. He knew Toulouse-Lautrec (an artist who
scrupulously avoided Van Gogh) and exhibited a work in the Paris salon
in 1887. Another Scot, Alexander Reid
(1854-1928), an art dealer, roomed with Van Gogh in Paris.
Van Gogh was enthusiastic
about British culture too, spoke and read English. He particularly enjoyed the works of
Shakespeare, Christina Rossetti and Charles Dickens. His interest went beyond literature, he
collected 2,000 engravings from British magazines and newspapers. His sole aim was to visualise the works of
Dickens: “My whole life is aimed at making the things that Dickens describes
and these artists draw.” Although the
exhibition is stuffed full of things that disappear off in multitudinous
directions, the sheer enthusiasm for its subject is infectious and
inspiring. The exhibition traces Van
Gogh’s influence on British culture through an exploration of early London
exhibitions of his paintings from which the implied legend of Van Gogh’s
insanity and genius began to arise.
After WW2 the Tate’s exhibition of Van Gogh’s works began to inspire the
public again, the Arts Council, founded in 1946 put on an exhibition of Van
Gogh’s paintings and 5,000 visited every day.
This became known as ‘the Miracle on Mill Bank’ and the exhibition was
again popular when it went on tour to Birmingham and Glasgow. Perhaps the struggle and belated popularity
of the artists appealed to a generation who had been mired in war, but the
artist found a new audience when his life became the subject of Hollywood
biopics. These new cinematic renderings
such as Vincente Minelli’s 1956 film Lust for Life which depicted the
relationship between Van Gogh and Gaugin, depicted Van Gogh as a new kind of
man, almost a unique addition to evolution.
The banal conclusion, that Van Gogh and Gaugin were more than friends,
was still heart-rending for people of that time. John Wayne was moved to declare to Kirk
Douglas, after viewing the film’s wrap “…Kirk, how can you play a part like
that? There’s so…few of us left. We got to play strong, tough characters. Not those weak queers.”
An example of Van Gogh's influence
on British art is a book reproduction of his work The Painter on the road to
Tarascon (1888) in which Van Gogh depicts himself as a lone, eccentric yet
intrinsically heroic figure subsumed by his own shadow cast on the road. (The original was destroyed by Allied bombing
in the war. Another work by Van Gogh was destroyed in the bombing of Hiroshima underscoring
the interest that the Axis showed in Van Gogh's art.) In Francis Bacon's interpretation of the
original, Study for ‘Portrait of Van Gogh IV’ (1957) the subject is not
art but the shadow the artist casts. Van Gogh's reputation is far more powerful
than his work and the evidence of this was the crowds at Mill Bank. Bacon said of Van Gogh: ‘Van Gogh is one of
my great heroes…[He] speaks of the need to make changes in reality…This is the
only possible way the painter can bring back the intensity of the reality.’ Featured side by side with Bacon’s
depictions of Van Gogh is one of the last self-portraits completed by the
artist, Self-Portrait, Saint-Remy, autumn 1889 (oil paint on
canvas). Although the artist seems emaciated
(Van Gogh was in the Saint-Paul hospital after a further bout of depression in
the summer of 1889 and wrote about the experience that he ‘began the first day
I got up, I was thin, pale as a devil.’).
The artist grasps a palette as if his life depended on it, a possible
message to his brother that he was once again quite bright and active.
As unfocussed and
rambling as it is Van Gogh and Britain may prove to be another ‘Miracle on Mill
Bank’.
Paul Murphy, Tate
Britain, July 2019
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