Was Vincent van Gogh a genius or just a hard worker?
The National Gallery’s first exhibition of the artist questions the long-held stereotype.
Vincent Van Gogh, Self-Portrait, 1889, Oil on canvas, 57.8 × 44.5 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. John Hay Whitney, 1998.74.5, Image Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
The stars have aligned, creating something magical in the National Gallery’s van Gogh exhibition Poets & Lovers. Starry Night? You got it. Sunflowers? Twice. There are portraits and landscapes and even works on paper. There are textbook chef-d’oeuvres and rarely seen works from private and public collections around the world.
Focusing on just two years of the artist’s life, the exhibition is a masterclass of less is more. Every work fits the narrative, which is never overbearing. It’s as if the curators wanted us to rediscover van Gogh. Yes, a large chunk of those years – 1888-1890 – he spent in a mental asylum in the South of France. But in this exhibition, he is not a mental patient making random marks on canvases. He is a meticulous artist, aiming to find a new way to make art. He is shown to think through details, to combine what he saw with imagination – but not to make reality into fantasy. He was searching for a perfect arrangement and visual balance. And if that meant inventing a couple of trees here, or red sky there, so be it. We know that it worked. There aren’t many artists as famous as van Gogh. Now there are films about him and socks printed with his portraits. But did van Gogh know how good he was?
Vincent van Gogh, Olive Grove, 1889, Oil on canvas, 73 × 93 cm, Gothenburg Museum of Art, Sweden, © Photo: Gothenburg Museum of Art / Hossein Sehatlou
I think he did. He was aiming to make revolutionary art. Aware that he needed to create something unique, he called it “art for the future”. This exhibition insists that we see that his painting was independent from his feelings. A sombre landscape did not mean a sombre artist; the same goes for a colourful vase of flowers. It also shows that even though he exaggerated form and colour, he always relied on nature for his expression.
Some of the most fun a curator can have is to bring together works that are in some way linked. Here there’s a treat in every room. The biggest coup is putting together two paintings of Sunflowers and La Berceuse in an arrangement that was suggested by the artist himself. The two paintings of Sunflowers have never been exhibited together. Considering one is normally in London and another in Philadelphia, with La Berceuse in Boston, you won’t have a chance like this again anytime soon.
Vincent van Gogh, Sunflowers, 1888, Oil on canvas, 92.1 × 73 cm, © The National Gallery, London
Van Gogh often made works that were part of a series. One such series gave rise to the title of this show – Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers. In the very first room you are met with The Poet and The Lover, both works that depict at once a known individual and a type of a person. The third painting in that room The Poet’s Garden is a depiction of a Public Garden in Arles, but is also the amalgamation of real and idealised worlds of van Gogh’s imagination.
Amalgamation is the key to one of the works he himself considered among the most important from the period that this exhibition covers. The Sower takes the idea of a ‘type’ the furthest. Mixing visual references from Japan (the foreground tree) and Christianity (the sun as a halo), van Gogh creates his own heavily symbolic image of the farm labourer as saviour.
The Sower, 1888, Oil on canvas, 73 × 92 cm, Sammlung Emil Bührle, on long-term loan at Kunsthaus Zürich, Photo © Kunsthaus Zürich
The Sower is also a dramatic landscape with a tree cutting through its middle. However many times van Gogh painted trees, no two ever looked the same. You can spend great chunks of time observing just one painting. Each corner of it will provide you with a source of awe. Follow the heavy swirly brushstrokes, be surprised by colour combinations, admire the arrangements. Sometimes we get wide views of sweeping landscapes, at others we are looking down on grass, yet in another one we have a portion of a trunk up close, seemingly blocking part of the view.
The show brings together paintings depicting the same landscape several times. In the last room a painting and a drawing hang side by side. There are clear similarities. Traditionally drawings serve as studies for later paintings. But in this case the painting came first! Van Gogh, financially supported by his brother Theo, made this drawing for him. He wanted to show him both the painting he had already completed and the general direction he wanted to take his art. He was heading towards abstraction, a course his brother did not encourage, but which came to define the early twentieth century in art. He did not live to see it.
Vincent van Gogh, Starry Night over the Rhône, 1888, Oil on canvas, 72.5 × 92 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, Donation sous réserve d'usufruit de M. et Mme Robert Kahn-Sriber, en souvenir de M. et Mme Fernand Moch, 1975, Photo © Musée d'Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt
Nowadays van Gogh paintings sell for tens of millions of pounds and the National Gallery sees it fitting to celebrate its 200th anniversary by staging a show of his works. Coincidentally the Sunflowers and Van Gogh’s Chair both entered its collection exactly 100 years ago; they are usually on permanent display – which is famously free of charge, it being the gallery’s founding principle. The temporary exhibition requires a ticket, but it provides access to works that have come from collections around the world – including Amsterdam, Paris, New York, Ottawa and Tokyo to name but a few. There are also four paintings by the artist on free-access display during the exhibition.
This show successfully challenged my preconceptions about van Gogh. The stereotypical tortured artist, in and out of a mental asylum, who made pretty paintings – he deserves a closer look. Just as with other great artists, writers and composers, his works took planning and perseverance. And then we lazily call it ‘genius’, because that’s an easier pill to swallow.
Van Gogh: Poets at Lovers is at the National Gallery, London, 14 September 2024 – 19 January 2025.