This show was always going to be a crowd-puller. It stars Vincent van Gogh, the painter with the art-historical X factor. People will queue round the Royal Academy courtyard to see his canvases as surely as they will line up for a book signing with Leona Lewis. They want to see their idol in real life. And Van Gogh, no doubt, would have been absolutely delighted. He despised the “studio chic” of the elite fine artist. “It has always been so much my desire to paint for those who don’t know the artistic side of the painting,” he wrote.
But Van Gogh is as famous for his life as his artistic legacy. His dramatic story has assumed the lineaments of myth. He was the son of a Dutch preacher who, unsuited to pursuing his first religious vocation, determined at 27 to become a painter and embarked on a brief but ebullient career, the climax of which was to be played out in the South of France, where he cut off his ear and spent several months in an asylum before, finally, in May 1890, going into the fields and shooting himself. Even in his lifetime the legend was beginning. Now, well over a century later, and not helped by a ranting Kirk Douglas in the 1956 Hollywood biopic Lust for Life, Van Gogh is commonly celebrated as the very embodiment of the artist maudit: impassioned, impoverished and, above all, unbalanced. His paintings are commonly considered the reckless outpourings of a tortured genius.
This, emphatically, is not the focus of The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters. This Royal Academy exhibition, the first major Van Gogh show to come to this country for 40 years, shows us a man who cannot match up to his hyped public image — and is even more impressive as a painter for that.
The Real Van Gogh looks at the artist through the lens of his letters, a magisterial six-volume edition of which has just been published by Thames & Hudson. For those whose bookshelves or bank balances cannot bear the burden of this vast publication it can be consulted online at www.vangoghletters.org.
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Van Gogh wrote as he painted: with exhilarating energy and compelling force. Words are “an awful way to explain things to each other,” he said, but in his thousand or so missives, the overwhelming majority sent to his brother Theo, an art dealer on whose devotion and generosity he was to depend all his life, he pens descriptions that burn almost as brightly as his pictures.
Here he is describing anything from the elusive light shimmering over the Mediterranean — its waters “like a mackerel ... always changing — you don’t always know if it’s green or purple — you don’t always know if it’s blue — because a second later its changing reflection has taken on a pink or grey hue” — to an urban roofscape that he watches “as the fires are lit in the court to make coffee and the first worker ambles into the yard. Over the red tiled roofs comes a flock of white pigeons flying between the black smoking chimneys. But beyond this is an infinity of delicate, gentle green, miles and miles of flat meadow, and a grey sky.”
These letters fling open a window on to the developing artist’s mind. Here is Van Gogh in all his many manifestations: sometimes sorrowful or despairing, bewildered, hungover or broke but more often hopeful, excited, determined, bursting with fresh ideas or the latest gossip. “It seems to me almost impossible to be able to work in Paris,” he confided to his brother in 1888, shortly after he had fled the capital to the sleepier southern town of Arles, “unless you have a refuge in which to recover and regain your peace of mind and self-composure. Without that, you’d be bound to get utterly numbed.”
He also used his letters not just as a means of communication but as a way of developing his plans, working out his frustrations and clarifying his thoughts. If on one level he is keeping account of mundane vicissitudes and artistic problems, on another he is recording an eloquent interior monologue, building up a multifaceted self-portrait that bears only the most cursory resemblance to the paint-flinging caricature of myth.
A small but representative selection of some 40 of these letters will now go on show. They are extremely delicate, and when the exhibition closes will disappear back into vaults. Make the most of the opportunity to see them. They are riveting as objects in their own right. Everything, from the quality of the paper (sometimes so thin that the ink seeps through and blots) to the handwriting (varying from neat to blotted and full of crossings out), can reflect their writer’s circumstances or state of mind. But the letters selected for this show are those that cast light specifically on his artistic development. Most include drawings: the sketches — croquis (scratches) he called them — by which he explored or explained his progress. Hung alongside the pictures to which they refer, they become integral to the art.
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This exhibition, leading the visitor on a journey through Van Gogh’s ten-year career, follows a broadly chronological trajectory. But more fundamentally it has been hung thematically. The spectator is encouraged to focus on Van Gogh’s development. Here he is found learning to draw, struggling with the perspective that to him feels like “downright witchcraft”; attempting to master the figure; and looking at Japanese prints that were then so much in fashion and whose bold contours and flat tones were to influence him strongly for the rest of his life.
There, with the sudden giddy brightness of a rush of blood to the head is the abrupt bursting of colour on to the painter’s palette. Van Gogh discovers the possibilities of the spectrum. “Here’s a sketch of the latest canvas I’m working on,” he informs his brother. “Immense yellow disc for the sun. Green-yellow sky with pink clouds.” He may be copying from Impressionists, producing unimpressive but developmentally significant pictures, but as he slowly masters Delacroix’s theories of colour, the dazzling canvases painted in the South of France flourish.
There are several edifying pairings of letter and image — as when Van Gogh draws the perspective frame he is using, for instance, or discusses complementary colour pairings, or even sketches the brushes that he most likes to use — as well as several remarkable assemblages of works. Among the more quietly notable of these is a collection of drawings of peasants in the fields. Van Gogh tries to evoke the ungainly reality of their earth-bound life with, as is clearly illustrated and explained, a graphic literalness learnt from the drawings in English illustrated magazines.
These drawings can be seen as preparatory sketches for his first (and last) large figure painting The Potato Eaters. The actual canvas is not included — only an etching. But in an exhibition as fascinated by thought processes as finished pieces, the spectator focuses instead on Van Gogh’s intentions: on how he was seeking to convey that “these people, eating their potatoes in the lamplight, have dug the earth with those very hands that they put in the dish”, that he is trying to capture the colour of “a good dusty potato, unpeeled of course”. Extended picture labels offer translated extracts from the letters. But they are still fairly minimal and there is unlikely to be sufficient space at the computer stations installed at the end of the show for everyone who wants to investigate farther.
Visitors hoping to reach a radiant climax with the works from the South of France might also be disappointed. This show is determinedly understated. The most celebrated classics — the starry darkness rolling over the night, the fat bunches of sunflowers, the brooding cornfields and their crows, the self-portrait with a bandaged ear — are not here.
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This does not mean that there aren’t many spectacular canvases. Here are masterpieces from museums and private collections the world over. They range from the dramatically colourful Tarascon Diligence, through a wonderful array of portraits, including those of himself and Paul Gauguin that come in the symbolic form of their two unoccupied chairs. There is an iconic sower with a huge sun for a halo, a tall squirming cyprus tree and the remarkable still life that, new research by the author Martin Bailey suggests, may bear the reason for Van Gogh’s suicide. Microscopic analysis of the frank mark on the envelope reveals a number that associates it with the post office that Theo used. The date is New Year’s Day. Bailey argues that the letter in the painting contained news of Theo’s engagement and perhaps led to Vincent’s panic that his allowance would no longer be forthcoming.
It’s one theory. But more importantly, the relative unfamiliarity of such canvases works in the favour of an exhibition that sets out to force us to look afresh. Crowds will undoubtedly flock around that most infamous missive — the letter found in Van Gogh’s pocket on the day that he went into the fields with a revolver and shot himself so clumsily that it took him two days to die. “I risk my life for my own work and my reason has half foundered in it,” he writes. And is that paint or blood on the paper? Many will gather to peer.
But even as the curators accommodate such morbid curiosity, sensationalism is constantly downplayed. The pictures around this letter are not the fevered landscapes of lunacy. The spectator wanders through blossoming orchards — “I’m in a fury of work,” he tells Theo, “for the trees are in blossom and I wanted to do a Provençal orchard of tremendous gaity”, or spending the day amid cornfields, “revelling like a cicada” in the shimmer of the sun. “What else can one do, thinking of all the things whose reason one doesn’t understand, but gaze upon the wheatfields,” he wonders. “Their story is ours, for we live on bread.”
Van Gogh suffered great mental anguish and bouts of terrible madness. But he neither wrote nor painted at these moments. His works are not the overspill of insanity. They are, his letters suggest, carefully premeditated and profoundly reflective, as are his writings — “I think I’ve done well to come here,” he told Theo from the asylum at Saint-R?my. “In seeing the reality of the life of the diverse mad or cracked people in this menagerie, I’m losing the vague dread, the fear of the thing. And little by little I can come to consider madness as being an illness like any other.”
The artist who above all things wanted to speak to the people, communicates with them all the more fervently and more deeply for that.
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The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters is at the Royal Academy of Arts, London W1 (royalacademy.org.uk;
0844 2091919), from Sat to April 18