Van Gogh in America

Vincent Van Gogh (1853-90) belongs with the brilliant and tormented geniuses: Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche and Kafka.  The story of this self-taught artist’s life, his poverty and troubled friendship with Paul Gauguin, lack of recognition and exiguous sales, self-mutilation, confinement in an insane asylum and suicide, as well as the raw emotions in his letters, have attracted the modern audience to his art.

The catalogue for a new show in Detroit (Van Gogh in America, ed. Jill Shaw et al, Detroit Institute of Arts) concerns his posthumous exhibitions and collectors.  His reputation was greatly enhanced by Irving Stone’s popular fictionalised biography Lust for Life (1934) and by the 1956 movie based on the novel with Kirk Douglas as a bearded and straw-hatted lookalike.  (In the same way, the 1962 Lawrence of Arabia film popularised the military exploits and enhanced the reputation of T. E. Lawrence.)

The editor states that the “essays in this catalogue illuminate how Van Gogh’s path to success in the United States was a circuitous one that included a combination of forward-thinking individuals, courage and determination, and involved a series of false starts, sensational tales in print and film, the circulation of forgeries and missed opportunities.”  Van Gogh’s works appeared in the pioneering New York Armory show in 1913 and in his first retrospective with the New York Montrose Gallery in 1920.  The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) was the first to acquire his pictures in 1936.  Neither of the two leading modern Dutch artists, Kees van Dongen and Piet Mondrian, followed Van Gogh’s Expressionist art.

Vincent’s younger brother Theo, an art dealer in Paris, supported him and received all his work.  Theo’s son inherited and sold his vast collection to the Dutch government, which opened the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in 1972.  The other great collection, bought by Helene Kröller-Müller, had opened in Otterlo, 50 miles southeast of Amsterdam, in 1938.  Albert Barnes, the leading American collector, boldly bought seven Van Goghs between 1912 and 1933, and the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia has the greatest number of his paintings in America.

There’s no description of this book nor any information about the eight American and Dutch contributors on the strangely blank inside flaps of the dust jacket.  But the excellent reproductions clearly reveal Van Gogh’s rough brush strokes and thick paint.  The authors say almost nothing about the content of his paintings or the tremendous change from the muddy brown of Potato Eaters (1885, Amsterdam) to the splash of brilliant colours in Provence a few years later.  So it’s worth taking a closer look at the major pictures in this exhibition, which runs in Detroit from October 2022 to January 2023.

The most interesting but weakest chapter in this book is “Van Gogh in Hollywood.”  Edward G. Robinson owned Père Tanguy (1888, Niarchos Collection) and The Old Willows, while Elizabeth Taylor owned View of the Asylum and the Chapel at Saint-Rémy (1889, Private Collection).  It’s not clear why her important painting, confined to an endnote, “falls outside the purview of this essay.”  It was sold at auction following Taylor’s death for $16 million.

Vincent van Gogh – View of the Asylum and Chapel of Saint-Rémy, 1889

Errol Flynn and a friend opened an art gallery on Sunset Boulevard in 1944, and he owned Gauguin’s major painting, the idyllic Tahitian Scene (1902).  It’s intolerably snobbish and quite mistaken to claim that Flynn and other actors “sometimes made purchases that to our eyes may seem questionable.  The Van Gogh pictures in Hollywood collections frequently (sic) have a whiff of scandal about them. . . . Owning a piece of him bestowed a form of status that was closely bound up with the personalities of the collectors themselves.”  But all collectors have occasionally been tainted by scandal, made questionable purchases, and bought art to enhance their personal prestige and elevate their social status.  None of these actors was born in America.

This book does not describe the painting that Errol Flynn owned, nor explain that it was Van Gogh’s copy of Woman with a Child Sitting by a Hearth by Virginie Demont-Breton (1859-1935).  It portrays a heavy-set, full-breasted peasant mother wearing a voluminous blue dress that touches the ground.  Her thick hair, large head and dark face rest on the wall, while she holds a white-swaddled infant, with one drooping arm, who lies in her lap.  Their heads are tilted in opposite directions as they sleep before a high roaring red and yellow fire whose colours are reflected on the floor.  In the background the simple dishes on a shelf, two cloths on the wall, rough broom in the corner and high stool holding three candles emphasise the bleakness of the kitchen.  Van Gogh invented the sentimental title, The Man Is at Sea, to suggest the woman’s solitude and the baby her husband has never seen.

The subjects of Van Gogh’s portraits spring to life.  Postman Joseph Roulin (1888, Boston) portrays him seated against a sky-blue background, in an open-backed wooden chair, with his left hand dropping from the corner of a green table.  He has thick raised eyebrows, wide-open blue eyes with red lids, ruddy cheeks, broad nose, full red lips and a huge wiry forked beard that drops below his shoulders.  A small triangle of white shirt shows between his beard and his handsome navy-blue, double-breasted uniform, which has two rows of four brass buttons and curvy gold designs on the sleeves.  He wears a peaked cap with his profession “POSTES” displayed in gold letters on a band above his brow.  Roulin’s bony fingers are tensely splayed, his pose virile and expression uneasy when he was persuaded to pose.

Vincent van Gogh – Portrait of the Postman Joseph Roulin (early August 1888)

L’Arlésienne (1889, Metropolitan Museum, NY) shows her body sharply outlined against a mustard-yellow background.  Seated in a wooden chair in three-quarter view, she rests her left elbow on a round green table and her left hand on her cheek.  She wears a head scarf that flows down to the back of her chair, and has curly black hair parted in the middle, raised eyebrows, half-closed eyes with red lids, long straight nose and pursed lips.  A greenish-white blouse and cuff appear beneath her dark blue jacket.  Three wavy books, one open, lie on the table, and she pauses for a moment to think about what she’s been reading.  There’s no reason for the author to add, “the books she may or may not read.”

In Portrait of Père Tanguy the paint grinder and art dealer, one of the first to offer Van Gogh’s works for sale, is solidly seated in front of seven closely confined Japanese prints of landscapes and courtesans, which became fashionable among the Impressionists.  He wears a high-crowned straw hat set low on his forehead, white collar and black tie, woollen sweater, heavy double breasted coat and brownish-orange trousers.  Tanguy has a trimmed beard, clasps his large hands on his lap and looks directly at the viewer.  He seems comfortable and confident among his saleable works of oriental art.

Vincent van Gogh: Portrait of Père Tanguy (1887)

Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait (1887, Hartford) is bust-length with his three-quarter face looking to the right and set against a bluish-black background.  Vincent has a red moustache and beard, and frizzy hair surrounded by a faint halo of white light.  He has a large pale forehead, deep-set blue eyes, high-bridged nose, firm lips, and wears a blue coat streaked with yellow over a patch of white shirt.  Vincent’s expression is intense, severe and angry.  He seems to stare at his face as if it were missing some essential human quality.

Van Gogh’s houses and rooms, seascapes and skyscapes are famously vivid and dramatic.  The Yellow House (1888, Amsterdam) portrays the residence in Arles that Van Gogh shared miserably with Gauguin in 1888.  It’s placed between a heavy blue sky and two wide streets, with a few trees and tiny pedestrians, and has a railway bridge with a train trailing smoke in the background.  The house has two stories, green shutters and a high oval glass-panelled front door.  Its apparently tranquil appearance hides his turbulent life inside.

Vincent van Gogh: The Yellow House (1888)

The claustrophobic Bedroom in Arles (1889, Chicago) has a green-and-rose tiled and tiled floor, with five paintings angled off the pale blue walls.  There’s a tawny-coloured bed, high at both ends, with two crumpled white pillows and a puffed red duvet.  The room is austerely furnished with a clothes rack supporting jackets and hat, two low straw-bottomed chairs, a small square table loaded with pitcher, basin and bottles, a long hanging grey towel, a green-framed half-open window showing a blurry green and yellow scene outside, and a mirror that reflected a face Vincent disliked.  Two firmly closed blue doors on either side prepared him for the still more straitened circumstances of the grave.  This painting was influenced by Edgar Degas’ menacing Interior: The Rape (1869, Philadelphia).

Vincent van Gogh – Bedroom in Arles (first version, 1888).

The first Starry Night (1888, d’Orsay, Paris) is theatrical and spectacular.  Two small figures, a man and a woman with a shawl, stand near a moored sail-less black boat, facing the viewer and unaware of the scene behind them.  Suddenly, as if a curtain were lifted, an amazing lit-up stage appears.  The azure sky is filled with two dozen exploding comets.  On the far shore a long curve of houses flash long yellow streaks of light (bright shoots of everlastingness, as in many pictures by Monet) across the wide and wavy water.  In this day-for-night scene, the illumination overwhelms the darkness and brings out the stars.

The second, Expressionist Starry Night (1889, MOMA, NY), one of Van Gogh’s greatest paintings, reveals his increasing emotional chaos and grim view of life.  The tiny blue town, with a high church spire and yellow lights in the windows, is enclosed between rolling blue mountains and a towering green pointed cypress tree that touches the top of the canvas.  In the middle of the picture an oppressive threatening sky has twelve swirling comets with burning yellow cores that seem about to crash like destructive meteors.  In the centre of the sky a monstrous cataclysmic mass, like a twisted tsunami with a raging claw, seems ready to complete the destruction of the tranquil town.

Vincent Van Gogh – Starry Night (1889)

Van Gogh wrote, “The café is a place where you can ruin yourself, go mad or commit a crime.”  The vertiginous Night Café (1888,Yale), painted with jagged brush strokes, thick impasto and clashing colours, seems charged with electric current.  The sea-green ceiling, blood-red walls and bilious-yellow floor convey a morbid aura.  Three drunk and drowsing men (one near the stove) and a courting couple—the woman in a red shawl, the man in a straw hat—huddle separately near the edge of the frame.  The time is ten minutes past midnight, but no one seems inclined to depart.  The bored and idle waiter, dressed in white and with one hand in his pocket, has not cleared the  bottles and glasses on three empty tables.  With a blurred face and cut off at the knees, he seems strangely suspended between the billiards and the adjacent table.  The departed clients have left the wooden chairs with cane seats standing at odd angles.  The coffin-shaped opening through the rear wall behind the bar, which has a bright bouquet of flowers bisecting a crowded row of dark bottles, leads to emptiness.  The sharply slanted yellow floor planks, which seem to rise up against the back wall, resemble the deck of a pitching ship and threaten to slide furniture and bottles down toward the viewer.  This well-lighted place has four huge eye-like gas lamps that hang from the oppressively low ceiling.  Surrounded by swirling yellow halos, they spray out shattered shards of light that illuminate the drinkers’ misery.  The billiard table, casting an ominous shadow, looks like a surgical bench or mortuary slab with pockets draining the blood.  Vincent had to suffer in order to create.  In a surge of genius he painted 60 works during the last two months of his tragic life.

Vincent Van Gogh – The Night Café (September 1888).

Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, has published Painting and the Novel, Impressionist Quartet, biographies of Wyndham Lewis and Modigliani, and a book on the realist painter Alex Colville.

A Message from TheArticle

We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout these hard economic times. So please, make a donation.