Van Gogh in Arles I: Town, Fields, and Gardens

good afternoon it's great to be here today and to see another overflowing audience I'm Stefanie Wiles the Henry J Heinz the second director of the Yale art gallery and of course it's my great pleasure to welcome John Walsh back to the gallery this spring to deliver his third in a series of six lectures on Vincent venko and a quick reminder for everyone for those who might have missed John's first two lectures or just inspired to listen again please remember that you can link to these through the art gallery website or you can view them on our YouTube channel before we begin I'd like to also thank our donors and many of you are here today for your support of the gallery's educational programs this afternoon's talk is generously sponsored by the John Walsh lecture and education fund and the Martin a Ryerson lectureship fun so without further ado welcome John and thank you thank you Stephanie and welcome everybody many of you welcome again just a couple of things to add to what Stephanie said about the website the gallery website now has some more readings for you so check it they're easily gotten to so you have no excuses I've also put some links on to videos particularly on the conservation and changes in Van Gogh paintings videos are especially effective so look at those if you can and I've also put up a list of Van Gogh exhibitions here and abroad during this year and the next and there are a lot of them almost wherever you go you can find one and just in case you haven't been to the Museum of Modern Art recently and looked again at their van Gogh paintings you better make a plan to do it before the 15th of June because they're going to close for four months and also go to the net and the Guggenheim two and head for the van Gogh well when we left our Vincent van Gogh when we last saw him he was in Paris about to leave in this portrait he presents himself as a modern painter his palette is loaded with the bright colors that he'd been converted to during the past year and a half in Paris colors that he applied in dashes and patches when he looked at his own face in the picture he saw exhaustion he told his brother Theo it's something like say the face of death he'd had enough of winter of discouragement of poverty and dependency on his brothers money and hospitality and he knew that his drinking and smoking were ruining his health it was about to head for the South of France - oral in passe which was another turning point in his brief and highly-charged career a career that would end with his death just two and a half years later well after failing in school failing as an art dealer than failing as a lay minister of the gospel - poor mine workers in Belgium he had become an artist at the age of 27 and he converted from militant Christianity to a new vocation of illustrating the lives of rural labor laborers and poor people in the cities in all their dignity he got some instruction and drawing but not much he really taught himself at first he used scratchy lines like a like an edger and then worked with broader tools charcoal and chalk to make highly expressive figure drawings he got some instruction in oil painting and in a few years he was making oil sketches of heads with strength and confidence his mr. piece of this period is a simple peasant supper presented in a picture that is Ernest dark and intentionally crude he arrived in Paris equipped to continue working in more or less this way but Styles and France had changed and he was exposed to the Impressionists for the first time to the bright light and the vivid color and the broken brushstrokes and swift execution of this group all of which you see here and just as important he fell in with some of the younger contemporaries who were painting methodically with dots and very short strokes and juxtaposing complementary colors to produce a convivial shimmer within the year his work had taken the sharpest turn you could imagine you see it in the radically new way that he painted himself he drew energy and ideas from Japanese prints which he'd been collecting they were abundant and very cheap and they were big fad in Paris they had surprising compositions with flat forms and they were bright and full of joy as you see he even copied them in oil paint before he left Paris he made an astonishing portrait of the man who supplied him with paints and canvas it celebrates Vincent's enthusiasm for Japanese art and it gives a plain man the wisdom of a great sage well he set off for Provence believing that it would be a kind of French Japan where life was cheaper and warmer and more hospitable he'd read novels by Alphonse Daudet that are set in the countryside around ro where people preserved simpler ways and old-fashioned values to which you could take a train and you see it here a train that arrived in Arlen in February but there was a surprise waiting it was the coldest weather in years there was snow on the ground and more of it coming so he rented a room over a cafe and he trumped out into the countryside near auro and painted white fields that reflected light back up eliminating shadows and boosting the intensity of the colors in a couple of months the orchards and fields came to life again here's one of the dozen odd paintings that he made in a great burst of work in April I want to leave it on the screen for just a minute so you can look at it carefully well notice that in order to enclose all of this dizzy confusion of branches and Trunks in a believable space he's made a perspective box using those red lines in the photos to establish the strong receding diagonals and running across the back to contain the space for the trees he worked back to front first he painted the background branches and the trunks in gray and then on top of them the brown trunks and branches that are closest to us the first impression I think is helter-skelter with great long unpruned branches and leaves that are just pale touches the white flowers are blobs and stabs with the brush all in all he does something wonderful to see there aren't any cast shadows he first works methodically to build a structure and then brings it to life with a web of strokes and dabs that look improvised and I suspect those cast shadows that are not there might detract from the linear action in this picture which is what puts across his exuberant reaction to the scene that's in front of him well blooming orchards were a very familiar impressionist subject this is coming a bizarre-o 16 years before painting in a high key in bright light obviously a well-tended tree with thick white blossoms standing on a solidly painted believable field just two years before Van Gogh this is Monet creating something completely different a canopy of branches that seems partly dissolved by the pink and lavender light well Franco wrote to a mule burn are his sympathetic painter friend from Paris about this picture my brushstroke has no system at all I hit the canvas with irregular touches of the brush which I leave as they are patches of fifthly later on color spots of canvas left uncovered here are their portions that are left completely unfinished the result is so disquieting and irritating as to be a godsend to those people who have fixed preconceived ideas about technique he believes he's making a gift to people to shake up the unconventional he's sort of afflicting the comfortable so this is Vincent's anti-establishment side and we will see it again he's made drawings - you can sort of see his system the habits of his hand as he works for the branches there are those long thin strokes that changed directions abruptly in places at the far end of the field there are just dots for the shrubs and for the new grass on the ground there are many straight lines making clumps that are stiff and spiky and when he paints the scene like this he flips the viewpoint 180 degrees but he makes similar moves drawing the limbs with the brush outlining them with black and red lines the same with the grasses upward flicks that have energy kind of charge that seems a response to the vigorous new growth we'll see something like this later on when he draws the undulating foliage of cypress trees van Gogh went back day after day enthralled by the spectacle of these orchards coming back so brilliantly after a hard winter and I can't imagine that that was just a visual thing I think he felt regeneration in himself and not for the last time this would be one of the great themes of his work the Impressionists were not his only inspiration so were the Japanese in Japan going out in early spring to see flowering trees was practically a ritual event and a favorite subject for print makers who tricked up their compositions with odd viewpoints and cropping this little painting you know it was recently donated to the Yale gallery Fennell wrote about it here's a sketch the entrance to a Provencal orchard with its yellow fences its enclosure of black cypresses protecting against the Mistral its characteristic vegetables of varying greens yellow lettuces onions emerald leeks a month or so later the fields have grown up after edges irises are in bloom with their ungainly stems and floppy heads it's a plant that van Gogh becomes very fond of again the drawing matches the painting technique as well as the subject planted rose scattered willow trees the green outskirts of RL and the skyline with the Tower of its most famous landmark central theme I should add here that he's drawn to scene and scenes in Provence that look in their flatness and their openness Dutch this is new he'd found places in Paris a year earlier where he could paint long views with a Dutch flavor using an emphatic perspective structure and a kind of graphic painting technique here it's the agricultural than North Slope of the hill of Montmartre an hour's walk from town in the flat Delta of the Rhone there was a drawbridge actually designed by a Dutch engineer that appealed to Vincent for its quaint but ingenious technology and also for the women doing laundry the riverbanks the far-left he uses contrasts of color complimentary x' that we're gonna see more of at the right for example orange red grasses play off against the green to give extra dazzle and on the blue surface of the canal there are creamy stripes of yellow for reflections his way of painting now is exact without being finicky and everything but the color is there already in a drawing he made which is a terse efficient record of what he saw and he also drew the approach to the bridge I said that the inspiration for many of his pictures was Dutch and here's a bit of evidence for it he this is the famous itching by Rembrandt that Vincent certainly knew and it might have suggested the image sort of pedestrian eye view of a turn in the road leading to the bridge he found the city interesting too less for its landmarks and more for the labor that sustained it here he drew their own embankment just outside the north end of the city wall and one of the small barges that were towed or rode along the river moving coal and sand or rocks just as they had ever since roman antiquity the Sun sets in the west and Van Gogh draws it as a huge radiating disc dipping down towards the horizon here he looks down steeply on some sand barges and men at work choosing just that cropping out everything but the work and the barges and the massive bit of stone key on the left under our feet here he paints the key further downriver with coal barges being unloaded barges were primitive as a means of transport but they provided the humblest kind of work which was exactly the sort of human activity that attracted Vincent wherever he was he shows the scene in a thrilling moment of afterglow of a sunset that seems like a kind of benediction of the lives of these people and their work it's an amazing spectacle now using broad brushstrokes with hardly a dot or dash at all this painting led to another one that he described to a friend and this little sketch that he sent and he said it's a study of the Rhone and of the town under the gas under gas light and reflected in the Blue River with a starry sky above with pink and green sparkling on the cobalt blue field of the night sky while the light of the town and its harsh reflections are of a red gold and the green tinged with bronze it's a spectacle of the river by starlight and by Gaslight kind of meeting of celestial with industrial the way he's painted it takes us I think for the first time beyond depiction in this night sky we can say that van Gogh has an acting as subject not merely depicting it I mean in real life starlight doesn't compete with the glare of Gaslight in the painting it does the stars are bigger than life and they give off thick Ray's those conventional signs for brightness that he gives a kind of cartoonish naive enthusiasm to this detail also shows you how he gives substance to the sky by painting it with a basket weave of strokes and how he renders the wavering reflection of each bright yellow Gaslight with a pile up of yellow dashes we've seen him in the months before in the orchards using simple repeating and and brush gestures to enact the excited response he had to the new growth and convey it more directly and forcibly to us the visitors here the exaggeration is audacious and the effect is nothing short of mystical night skies are rare in painting three years earlier in the Netherlands van Gogh had painted a few Twilight's and sunsets like this one but I think the inspiration for his starry night over the Rhone goes back to a painting by Van Gogh's hero jean-francois me a it's here at Yale me a painted the Stars and the Comets with Orioles of light that bring something transcendent into a view of an ordinary farm field in a few puddles on the ground at the bottom you can see tiny bright reflections of an immense of immense and vastly remote stars the effect in both pictures mia's and Van Gogh is to bring the cosmos down to earth it's to remind us of the presence at all times of great forces possibly divine that we're apt to ignore as impossibly far removed from us and therefore unconnected to our lives here's another view in our a canal in the city not far from the where Vincent was living we're looking west toward the Sun that's setting behind a church past the smokestack and past the Red Roof of the city Gas Works which is what supplied the streetlights by the way and we're looking down to a group of washer women on stages that the city maintained for them another group of humble laborers like the dockworkers and in the most unglamorous setting he painted the picture quickly and he wrote to his brother I must warn you that everyone will think that I work too fast don't believe a word of it is it not emotion the sincerity of one's feeling for nature that draws us and if the emotions are sometimes so strong that one works without knowing one works when sometimes the strokes come with the continuity and coherence of words in a speech or a letter then must remember that it is not always so and that in time to come there will be again be hard days empty of inspiration so here it's not just the strokes that express his sincere feelings it's the entire design because the Sun radiates yellow dashes and their curving pattern is picked up in the bend of the bank and reflected in the water he regards the Sun and the town and the labor as part of some greater whole that he doesn't just feel doesn't just see but he feels and has to express in purely visual language as he says with the coherence of words so that we too might feel what he felt in the middle of June he set out again in the direction he had promised himself to follow ever since he reached a turning point in Holland that is to be a serious painter of figures in action particularly farmworkers he imagined that he could be successful and be a successor even to me a his his model and hero in celebrating old-fashioned manual labor as virtuous and in offering the public a lesson in strength and continuity with the past he pictured himself at the left burdened with his sketchbook and easel hiking out to the countryside to work he had only gotten as far as the eastern outskirts where he composed this view of the wheat fields with mowing and binding of the year's crop going on the idea here is that the ancient activities of the seasons are in balance with the life of the city and not just the picturesque skyline of medieval era but the gasworks and the factories and the railroad trains that are all here the message is not about modern times bringing change for the worse or pollution or the loss of innocence I think instead he was picturing something like an ideal sort of social equilibrium the old order coexisting with the new for Vincent the heroes of society or working people ever since he first started looking at works of art the personification of those heroes was this anonymous man at the left sowing seeds in a picture by me a of 1850 that was widely known through reproductions of every kind me--is image had been a challenge to Van Gogh ever since he began making copies and paraphrases of it five years before like this Dutch farmer on the right who lacks the Michelangelo like stance of me a but he performs the work were the kind of simple dignity Vincent wrote a oh and his friend Bernard from our oh I'm working on a sower the great field all violet the sky and Sun very yellow it is a hard subject to treat the sow sure dis blue and his trousers are white there are many hints of yellow in the soil neutral tones resulting from the mixing of violet with yellow but I've played hell somewhat with the truthfulness of the colors I would much rather make naive pictures like those Old Farmer's alpha almanacs in which hail and snow and rain and fair weather are depicted in the wholly primitive manner he had to struggle with this picture he repainted parts of it including the figure and to sharpen the contrast even further he added touches of green to the yellow sky and touches of orange to the violet field they still wasn't satisfied he wrote the idea of the sower continues to haunt me all the time and later in the year he tried again he tried with a startling rethinking of the subject he wrote I'm working on another sower an immense yellow Citroen disc for the Sun a green yellow sky with pink clouds the field is violet the sower and the tree are Prussian blue the pictures only 16 inches wide it's an oil sketch and certainly something new a close-up compressed composition of strong flat forms that certainly reflect his study of Japanese prints the painting wasn't just an aesthetic exercise everything in it signified something profound for Van Gogh he placed the Sun the sustainer of life like a halo behind the head of the man who sews the seeds and who thus regenerates life the tree isn't merely a decorative element either it's a recurring the symbol of hope and the promise of new life in fact it's a symbol that van Gogh had used in the Netherlands for years especially the Pollard willow which has grown for its strong branches that are harvested from the tree every year and used to make baskets every year the branches are cut back they grow back even after the tree becomes extremely old finger-painted the subject again in full size this time three feet wide making a lot of small adjustments he described his nostalgia for his earlier life in the countryside he wrote I was brought up there but I'm still charmed by the magic of the hosts of memories of the past of a loaning for the infinite of which the sower and the Harvester sheaf are symbols just as much as before a purple harvesting in June when he painted the first of these of the cellars he had another project going of painting from a view elevated spot on the broad plain near aural called la coal while the first wheat harvest was underway he's looking north so our Liz out of the picture on the left the feeling is obviously very different from the sower and the purpose - so let's just slow down again and look for a minute or so and take it in you well he made no secret of his Dutch inspiration for views like these pictures by Philips Koenig and Yaakov and rice tell 17th century painters that he especially admired for their breathtaking sweep and careful observation and observe he definitely did this is one of two detailed water colored studies that he made on the spot he wrote to Bernard I even work in the wheat fields at midday in a full heat of the Sun without any shade whatsoever and there you are i revel in it like a cicada there are many repetitions he writes of yellow and in the earth and neutral tones resulting from the mixing of violet with yellow but I could hardly give a damn about the veracity of the color well in the details you probably noticed strong outlines crude bits here and there naive looking flaws in the perspective and the scale here - he's glad to neglect what he calls veracity for something more important than literal accuracy which I believe was a general impression that's true - his experience of bright life on alternating gold and green fields some mixture of wonderment and joy this is one of his very few broad panoramas and he wasn't shy about how good he thought it was he wrote to his brother this canvas absolutely kills all the rest on the hills in the far distance you may have seen this the ruined medieval monastery of mole measurer he hiked up there in the following month with a friend to look at the flat plain of Loch Oh from a different view to advantage point his brothers sent him sheets of a very large English drawing paper two feet wide that he got to work on and the drawings that he may hear are just as spectacular as the painting he uses different pens these have been d quills and metal pen points as well as blunter reed pens to give each thing its particular shape and texture in the lower third there are swirling longer lines for the foliage for the fields that have been harvested short dashes and for plowed fields there's a rash of tiny dots he not only signed the drawing but he also gave it a title which is something he reserved for very few works in any medium works that he was especially fond of Vincent must have climbed up higher on the ruin to get more elevated view points than I was able to but the view today is essentially the same its century has passed of greater irrigation and extensive farming and they've created beer fields and remove the stony wastes that found also and of course the trees are growing up everywhere here at since the abbey tower is upstaged by an enormous boulder and the wild grasses all around it you may be surprised to see this post-impressionists who depends on broad strokes as a painter use such fine delicate marks to describe the particulars here the energy behind those brush strokes and pen marks and the patterns they make are the same while he was up on the heights he was also painting but this picture shows a bit of the Abbey on the left and a bit of luck Oh in the center but the real subject is the untidy mass of trees and shrubs and grasses which he's painted with rapid strokes that make all that plant life seemed to dance and dance to the same rhythms the pictures in sind and for that and other reasons the owners have thought that it might not be by him curators at the Museum when they saw it were not convinced either when it was first brought to them now they are and they've bought it not only did the pigments and the painting process match fend offs at the time but the picture appears and a list of his works done just after his death he describes it in the letter that's worth quoting just for the unexpected romantic twist that he gives it yesterday at sunset I was on a Stoney Heath where small twisted Oaks grow in the background a ruin on the hill and wheat fields in the valley it was romantic it couldn't be more so the Sun was pouring it's very yellow raised over the bushes and the ground absolutely a shower of gold the whole scene had a charming nobility you wouldn't have been all surprised to see Knights and ladies suddenly appear returning from hunting with hawks or to hear the voice of an old provençal troubadour that summer Vincent made a few paintings of classic impressionist subjects but in compositions that are something new you're the flower the flowers grow in rows of strong color and they advance on us like waves of the shore at the far right side from top to bottom there's a cascade coming down from the blue flowers at the top down to the sunflowers and down down all the way to that mass at the bottom of indescribable black marks that represents some flower or other that some of you could probably decipher but I can't he wrote under the blue sky the orange and yellow and red patches of flowers take on an amazing brilliance and in the limpid air there's something happier and more suggestive of love than in the north well compare any impressionist garden with this one this is a rose garden by Renoir which is correct in perspective and subtle an atmosphere mild and light perfectly calm you'll fool but I doubt that Vincent would have thought it's suggestive of love Vincent made some large drawings also using that same paper of these gardens that have a terrific variety from tiny dots for the sky and the gravel to long swoops at the left for the reeds and their leaves he traveled 25 miles south through the Camargue the Delta of the Rhone to the medieval town of Santa Maria de la Mer and made a sort of postcard ish composition of it with rows of lavender the pulley I to the compact cityscape beyond now I can't resist comparing this with an exactly contemporary view by season of view of garden also in the in Provence but what Cezanne rendered was a jumble of cubical forms that he saw no reason to treat realistically but instead painted as an interesting complex of planes whose geometrical relationships don't really seem consistent or complete and he doesn't even finish the picture in conventional terms but instead chooses to leave it partly incomplete five comparison fend off is conscientious to a fault he found other picturesque spots to pain in the town including the row of cottages that seemed sort of engulfed by the road next to them which he drew with great care and then painted later in jolting colors at the beach where fishermen land their boats if an NGO found a cluster of decorated vessels looking as anachronistic and amusing as the painted horse-drawn carriages that travelled the road in the region I'm going to show you one in a minute their quaint design and bright colors reminded him once again of Japanese prints a used watercolor in this version of the composition is if to emphasize this of Japanese character of the colors as well at the end of summer van Gogh moved into a little house that he had rented in May and had taken great pains to fix up ever since it's the one on the corner here with mm anyway the one in the corner with the green doors and shutters it was just outside the city walls on the way to the railroad station you can see the Train on the bridge at the right and the minutes walk from the river it faced a square that I'd like to tell you is still there it was there in 1933 on the right when Vincent's friend Polson Yaka made this watercolor and the house was serving as a cafe but in the Allied bombings of World War two the little houses were damaged and then demolished and the square was replaced by a traffic circle I've outlined the ghost of Van Gogh's house in white the railroad bridges however are still in service he described the house for his sister will my house is painted the yellow cover color of fresh butter on the outside with glaringly green shutters and it's completely whitewashed inside and the floor is made of red bricks and overhead there is the intensely blue sky in this I can live and breathe meditate and paint the horse-drawn carriages I mentioned the called delay jaws were parked in at an inn around the corner antiquated but still in service this one went 20 miles up the river to Tahoe scone which everybody knew was the hometown of Alphonse Daudet one of Vincent's favorite writers and one of today's bestsellers there's an elderly stagecoach that can talk pixar style and complains about being retired to algeria so if it's Vincent roadie who's delighted to find the stagecoach in real life he painted it very thickly in bright colors like a storybook illustration with perspective gone cockeyed he didn't limit himself to quaint subjects now and then he painted modern bits of the city like the canal with laundresses that we just saw or this the ugly but efficient iron bridge that had been built recently to connect the city of RL with a neighborhood on the far side of the room he was picking up a contemporary theme that he'd treated in Paris the year before which I'm by which I mean the uneasy coexistence of the civilized old city with its machine aged conveniences and improvements now and then Vincent turned to the city streets and again to the night sky this is a relatively posh square in the middle of town with an inviting couch cafe terrace an island of light raised above the cobblestones which he painted with his typical kind of graphic shorthand so first he sat at a distance and made a drawing and then he worked at his easel he put in a tree at the right edge to frame the composition he eliminated distracting detail in places like the awning and most of all he imported opened up the sky and he gave it those stars some of the stars are little blobs of yellow others are blobs with orioles of white they are nowhere near as extravagantly childlike as the stars over the Rhone that he painted is around the same time but they give the appearance of the whole scene which is after all an ordinary place public with no crowd no festive occasion the sky gives it a kind of surprising air of magic here's the night scene he painted around the same time again let's just take a minute to look at the picture and then I left the artist to help us understand what he wanted to do with well I think the night cafe must strike everybody as garish there is the trio of hanging oil lamps giving off bright yellow light that the artist treated with halos made of dashes what it might look like to somebody with a terrible hangover and if that weren't enough there's a newer model gas lamp it gives off rays all that light casts no shadows other than the huge one under the billiard table and then there's the splayed perspective both widening to embrace you and converging towards the back of the room drawing you in the proprietor in white is looking towards you as though he were expecting you at your service the paint textures are viscous and slick and the brush has made deep grooves for the floorboards and in the back room where the light is the brightest the floor is an unnatural clotted mass of yellow paint all these things are calculated to make you uneasy and I haven't even mentioned the main device for doing that which is the red walls that clash with the green above the tables below Van Gogh had received a drawing from his friend Emil Bernard of a cafe with some unsavory types which he evidently took us a challenge he had written to his brother today I'm probably going to begin on the interior of the cafe where I have a room by Gaslight in the evening it's what they call here a cafe de nuit they are fairly frequent here staying open all night nights prowlers can take refuge there when they have no money to pay for lodging or are too drunk to be taken in a month having spent three consecutive nights at work on the picture sleeping during the day he writes again I've tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green the room is blood red and dark yellow with a green billiard table in the middle there are four lemon-yellow lamps with a glow of orange and green everywhere there is a clash and contrast of the most alien reds and greens in the little figures of the sleeping hooligans in the empty dreary room in violet and blue the blood red and the yellow green of the billiard table for instance contrasts with the soft tender Loic as green of the counter on which there is a rose nosegay the white clothes of the landlord watchful in the corner of that furnace turned lemon yellow or pale luminous green and the next day he writes in my picture of the night cafe I've tried to express the idea that the cafe is a place where one can ruin oneself go mad or commit a crime so I've tried to express as it were the powers of darkness in a low public house by soft weak as greens and malachite contrasting with yellow green and harsh blue greens and all this in an atmosphere like the devil's furnace of pale sulfur in another place he said that an art dealer in the hague would look at the picture and think it's a full-blown case of delirium tremens he called it one of his two ugliest pictures the other being the potato eaters and he wrote about that with some pride he said exaggerated studies like the sower like the night cafe now usually seem to be atrociously ugly and bad but when I'm an impoverished epileptic then those words are the only ones that seem to me to have a more important meaning well here I imagine that the more important meaning for him is about the waste of human potential from people's own weaknesses compounded by social circumstances and bad luck and made worse by the Anna Dean's of Alcohol Tobacco and sex things that think I'll had plenty of experience with this whole process of degradation remember had been a theme in realist fiction most recently and notoriously in the novel by Emile Zola l'assommoir which came out 10 years earlier and became a best-seller nowadays we translate less so more maybe dive bar it traces the rise and fall of share vezh whom you see on the cover Gervais a respectable young woman who comes to Paris and becomes a laundress her drunken lover abandons her but she marries a responsible man as a child and goes into business for herself when her husband is disabled and starts drinking the downward spiral begins share Vaes struggles goes into debt and with no one to help her and no public safety net she begins drinking the rise and fall of Gervais became a kind of parable in depth temperance literature in France and in many other countries to the fan go drew the imagery of the night cafe from his personal experience he lived in a room upstairs and he knew the temptations downstairs all too well his picture of a living hell is not just description is not just social realism the image and the colors were intended to frighten and distr the consciences of the audience that he hoped would see it meanwhile he was furnishing these yellow house trying to realize his dream of creating an artist colony in the RL what he called a studio of the South he had spoken about his hopes to go down to his friend Bernard and now he was pressing go again to come go God had also asked I escaped the stresses of Paris but he grew under Brittany which was not only just as cheap but also primitive to Parisian eyes even exotic which suited go guy's idea that a new art should look very different and spring from the imagination as much as from nature the three artists exchanged portraits Vincent was an extravagant admirer of Gauguin who was the Wesley was the oldest and had much the most dominating personality definitely alpha who would say now just the man to be the abbot for the little monastic order that van Gogh had in mind bachelors living japanese-style and working and debating together in the pursuit of a new kind of art around the time he painted the night cafe Vincent got a close haircut partly because partly because it was hot out but also because he wrote his hero to go again because he was thinking of himself as a buddhist monk or bonza like these Japanese monks pictured in a novel that he was reading at the time about his portrait he said I exaggerated my personality I have in the first place aimed for the character of the simple bonza what we should worshiping the eternal Buddha right well he had been preparing a room for googa in the yellow house with paintings of sunflowers and portraits and and the public gardens in RO an entire program of decoration that he thought would be stimulating when Goga in the autumn DL fangirls role was to play a key a part of the project because he paid for gas trip and he provided Gaga a regular income in exchange for painting one painting per month that he would sell that summers work continued into the autumn and Vincent was showing the strain he wrote to his brother he was reduced once more to the deranged estate of Hugo Fonda hoosh in the painting by Emil Walters he's referring to a once famous painting that he's seen that shows the great Flemish painter 400 years earlier who suffered from depression and attempted suicide but Vincent had a remedy of sorts he wrote again I feel quite well again today my eyes are still tired but I have a new idea all the same this time it's simply my bedroom only here everything depends on the color and by simplifying it I'm lending it more style creating an overall impression of rest or sleep in fact I look at the picture or to rest the mind or rather the imagination the walls are pale violet the floor is red tiles the wood of the bed and the chairs is the yellow of fresh butter the sheets and pillows a very light green the blankets scarlet the washed and orange the basin blue The Doors lilac the sturdy lines of the furniture should also express undisturbed rest portraits on the wall and the mirror and a hand towel and some clothes it will form a contrast for example to the terrace called stagecoach and the night cafe want us to catch up for a moment with googa who had been painting some startling pictures himself in Brittany these were eccentric compositions of the locals in their habit like the one in the left and in their habit and their habitat GoGet had advice for Vincent he told Vincent I'll give you a hint don't paint too much direct from nature art is an abstraction draw it out from nature while dreaming upon it and concentrate more on the creative process than on the result that is the only true way to come close to God namely doing the same as our divine master creating on the right go down stepped far away from impression of subject matter and painted a miracle the female faithful have heard a sermon in church about the story in Genesis of Jacob wrestling with the angel and they have a vision of that's very event a go gown puts the event into a bright red kind of dream space he told Vincent for me the landscape and the fight only exist in the imagination of the people praying after the sermon I'll go gasps health was bad in Brittany and his finances were worse he arrived in late October and stayed for nine weeks at first the arrangement was pretty amicable they worked in the same places and from the same models and clearly there were clashes of temperament there were disagreements about fundamentals mainly that Vincent advocated painting from nature and go gamble it'll that well go gasps you heard favored painting from the imagination which van Gogh was skeptical about nevertheless they painted many of the same subjects they went to the famous avenue of ancient and medieval sarcophagi in our cold the alleys come and they rendered the view quite differently fangore sticking to conventional perspective while Goga used devices to confuse perspective they clearly stimulated each other at times in that same place the alleys car van Gogh painted another view combining tricks of Japanese design with colors suggested by pictures by Koga the red walkway the vivid blue tree trunks the strong outlines everywhere all part of an arbitrary approach to representing real places that Vincent experimented with for a while one revealing confrontation was go gasps answer to the night cafe if I'm gone had created an illusion of a disturbingly bright garish room that the viewer is invited to enter and is expected to shudder at the thought in go gasps picture we've already been tempted into the room and we've stopped at the table of the hostess madam she knew the owner's wife somebody will meet again in these lectures who looks at us with a knowing smile the space behind her is compressed and beyond the billiard table there's a sort of lush collection of prostitutes and Jon's smoke hangs in the air the absence is right there within our reach welcome welcome to hell go again push to fend off the let go of the actual world to abandon logical scale and geometry and instead to delve into his own memory for subjects van Gogh tried it in this picture a recollection of his mother in blue and his sister Wilhemina under a red parasol in one of the lush gardens that the family had in the Netherlands this had been a period of tremendous strain four years earlier when Vincent was living with his parents as a kind of black sheep novice artist moving into middle age still dependent on them who often quarreled with them he wrote to his back home in holland i don't know whether you can understand that one may create poetry solely by arranging colors as one can say consoling things in music in the same way bizarre lines selected and multiplied meandering through the picture may fail to give the garden a literary a literal resemblance but it may present the garden to our minds as in a dream that is depicting its character and at the same time stranger than it is in reality this is mrs. Vincent preaching to his sister but it could be Gogan I'm preaching to him I'm not sure if Vincent ever truly believed that he could create poetry solely by arranging colors or lines but such was the pressure of gogans beliefs that Vincent could advocate them and try them out at least for a little while the two of them observed a grim harvest that autumn with entirely different results van Gogh painted a full-blown celebration the last rays of the hot Sun turning the vines to incandescent reds and yellows and oranges busy women workers wear clothes of contrasting booze the Rays of the Sun ripple down the road making it look almost like a canal the colors are doing the work here for Goga on the other hand the harvest was a gloomy business three hard-working women and one younger one who sits apart in a melancholic funk overcome with what the artist called in his title human anguish what was angling to her is not made clear in the picture so we don't forget how far these painters were in the 1880s from the French mainstream we should look at other grape harvests by painters who exhibited annual sales in Paris and were awarded prizes for them like this one on the left by an artist that van Gogh admire very much called they all air meet 9 feet high I picked it because many of you have walked right past it in the Metropolitan Museum a picture of happy healthy statuesque workers with no anguish in a style that became the model for socialist realist painters in the Soviet Union 50 years later a few months after this Vincent had a catastrophic breakdown which led to his agreeing to be confined months later in an asylum near Arles Sam Raimi Vincent had always had a nervous disposition since he was in his 20s he also had a tendency to restlessness the irritability and depression living with Gauguin was all too stimulating Vincent had committed himself to depicting a life of the land and the people around him but now he was straining to become what go gala thought he should be and Vincent knew he was not a painter of abstracted forms and imaginary subjects life with Koga included a lot of arguing and a lot of drinking after several months of being cooped up with go gana in a very small house Vincent wrote that he was extremely tired and charged with electricity kogai had had enough he told Vincent that he's decided to go back to Brittany and that was clearly one of the factors that brought on a breakdown on November 23rd that van Gogh called a mental fever go Gann was the main witness to it according to him there had been a bizarre behavior earlier and Vincent had threatened him and threw absinthe in his face that night after a violent argument with Hill Gannon Vincent left the scene cut his left ear off and it's reported that he had someone present the ear wrapped up with a note to one of the women in a brothel he was hospitalized and during the next four months he had ups and downs at times he had paranoid symptoms he heard voices he became incoherent in between crises though he was painting in the yellow house by day and returning to the hospital to eat and sleep a group of his neighbors felt threatened and petitioned the city to keep him away and this helped provoke yet another breakdown Te'o came to see him and so did others and they reported he'd been lucid or else he's acted crazy depending on when they visited Bernard came to the yellow house and wrote he talked to me all day about painting literature and socialism he was a little tired by the evening there was a terrible mistrial blowing which might have irritated him he wanted to drink a liter of turpentine that was standing on the table in the room it was time to return to the hospital that spring Vincent came back to subjects that had captivated him the year before despite more bouts of terrific disturbance he was somehow able to work on complex compositions like this one and to paint under perfect control here he distanced himself literally and figuratively from the orchards that he painted a year before he set up his easel behind this screen of poplar trees across the canal from the city and the blooming orchard that screen of ordinary trees is not just there for decoration those trees may not make glorious flowers but they're putting out shoots Vincent saw consolation in that they've also survived the winter and in the spring they have revived his brother the had been his sole support he'd gotten engaged however and Vincent worried that the new arrangement might have to would change his life after Theo got married in April Vincent wrote him that he wasn't capable of caring for himself any longer and in May he traveled up to the asylum at Santorini where he would spend a year today I've been mostly speaking about landscapes and city views but Vincent made many more pictures during the 15 years months that he lived in ro including remarkable portraits and still lifes that we'll see in the next lecture you're invited thank you [Applause] you

Channel: Yale University Art Gallery

Views: 29,461

Keywords: Yale, University, Art, Gallery, Vincent vanGogh, John Walsh

Id: bT8zbcZekLQ

Length: 67min 6sec (4026 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 09 2019