Vincent van Gogh’s Turning Points: Van Gogh in Paris

you [Music] you this is the second lecture in a series of six on Vincent van Gogh it's about his two years in Paris which were a major turning point in his short brilliant career Vincent van Gogh may well have the most universally recognized name of any artist ever the images that come to mind for Vincent van Gogh are few and often they're the same ones the eccentric hothead who cut off his own ear the suicidal painter of ecstatic and possibly deranged visions of the landscape in fictionalized biographies and movies he's made into the ultimate romantic genius too far ahead of his time artistically to be understood well this is a caricature I can't under do undo today but I can show you how rational and purposeful and hard-working he was during his two years in Paris where he underwent an astonishing transformation well first let me give you a quick sketch of his earlier life his father who was an evangelical Calvinist minister came from a family of Protestant clergymen his mother came from a family of art dealers Vincent made a try for the ministry but he failed the theology entrance exam and for a while he was a lay missionary to coal miners three of his maternal uncles were art dealers and he tried that too for three years at 26 he turned away from evangelical Christianity and decided to be an artist then by dint of tremendous exertion teaching himself most of the time he became an artist of real skill although he dropped out of high school he was well read in modern literature and history and his experience as an art dealer had exposed him to the history painting but as for his own art his interests were narrow and passionate they were focused on the depiction of the Dutch peasantry and the land they lived on he was resolved to become a Dutch version of his hero Rolf was for me a whose pictures he studied and copied all his life like the other so-called Barbizon painters and painters in the hague he mainly confined himself to subjects of the countryside and to farming and primitive and labour he was already 32 when he painted an ambitious demonstration of his abilities this dark and intentionally clumsy looking picture of poor peasants at dinner eating potatoes with their hands as the artists said that suggests that they used the same hands to dig the potatoes he had a brief interlude in Antwerp where he quickly adapted to new subjects presented by city life which he sketched on the spot his painting technique developed further in a remarkable series of broad forceful portrait studies he was hoping he could make money with portraits but he was selling next to nothing and he was financially dependent on his younger brother who was an art dealer in Paris in their frequently frequent exchanges of letters they discussed the possibility of Vincent moving to Paris and joining Thao there early in March Vincent showed up in Paris unannounced having just written Te'o don't be mad at me for arriving out of the blue I'm sure we'll save time this way I'll be in the Louvre from noon on and earlier if you like please let me know when you can get to the cell curry we don't know what there was reaction was and in fact we don't know all that much about Vincent's life in Paris because he stopped writing letters to Thao since they were living together most of the time but we have some letters to others and we have his work to go on since he was only partly trained mostly by himself he craved more looking at the art of the past like this Rembrandt slaughtered ox in the Louvre which floored him with its thick texture and also paintings by more recent heroes of his especially Jean dellacroix on the Left whose dazzling colour you can see for yourself right now at the Metropolitan Museum a great great exhibition that's up till after New Year's and of course his French contemporaries including the Impressionists he'd heard about them but he'd never seen their pictures not a single one he needed to work on his drawing that he knew he thought he could sell work in Paris - with help from his brother the dealer and Selam in Paris which had lots of potential buyers home for Vincent and Theo was an apartment in Montmartre on high ground where he began to work soon after he arrived he made many drawings and paintings from various spots well I want to look at one of them with you this medium size view of the city about two and a half feet wide and let you take some care with it I'll be quiet for a bit and let you inspect I show you a couple details well you could see how skillful he is already at the beginning of his encounter with Paris the light is turned gray by the heavy clouds colors and contrasts are muted if you look at the patches of tone that are the walls struck by light here in the foreground and the subtle atmospheric perspective the middle and the far distance which is supported by the way--by believable linear perspective and by the way the clouds loom up and darken overhead here's a photo that shows you that he's made the view more legible by taking some liberties by making the monuments a good deal bigger than they are in life you can recognize them there's the Dome of the other lead in the center under the red arrow and note hadam in blue van gogh was painting Paris in much the way that he'd painted Holland under the influence of his relative and sometime coach Anton mova member of the so-called Hague school during the 1860s you see that especially in the rain laden clouds that are terrifically brushy and powerful like maulvis it's been suggested that van Gogh read the popular novel a love episode paz de mujer by emile zola and he painted something like one of SOLAS word pictures describing the light milky vapour in the sky over paris which he says resembles whether colored muslin we're now and then patches of yellow smoke broke loose and then melted into the air that seemed to drink them up and up above the immensity of this cloud that slept atop of paris an unblemished sky have washed out blue almost white unfurled it's deep vault and in fact taro wrote a Dutch friend about his and Vincents his apartment and Vincents he said it has a magnificent view of the whole town and over it an expansive sky nearly as large as one is standing on top of a dune that to a Dutch friend with different effects produced by various changes in the sky and it's a subject for I don't know how many pictures a description of such a view although I seen from a different spot is found in Zola's bean pouch de mujer the van Gogh view of Paris is colored by his very extensive reading as the artists story and Judy son has shown in her book which is in your recommended readings anyway Grice grey skies and downbeat moods might be fine for the Dutch market but van Gogh knew very well that he had a work on colour if he was going to sell pictures in Paris he had to learn more about color relationships and contrasts complementary hues and so forth and find practical applications for the color theories that he learned about from his reading he took a surprising tack he tremendously admired a painter from Provence in Paris a doll from Monticello who exhibited with the Impressionists and with a son nobody else use such a gutsy brushstrokes to build up paint textures in this way his flower pieces stand out also by their play of cool and warm colors to accentuate depth and their use of complementary colors to give extra energy to the bouquet Vincent wrote to a friend I've made a series of color studies and paintings seeking opposition's of blue with orange red green yellow and violet seeking broken and neutral tones to harmonize brutal extremes trying to render intense color and not an overall harmony well he'd been a reader of a treatise by Cheryl Blanc on color which sin the size color theory in the way that artists could really use to heighten our perceptions the color star here was what Vincent used to learn about how things worked there you see the three primary colors yellow at the top blue around right and red at the left and in between them is a secondary color which result from mixing each pair of primaries orange and green and violet the useful part for painters is this if you put any of those secondary colors green orange and violet if you put them next to each other each of them looks brighter more saturated more intense and the result we see what's perceived is a kind of vibration of color that van Gogh talks about the older artists who knew this best and used it most conspicuously was delaqua whom van Gogh admired hugely and not just for color but for his imagination and his fiery spirit he worked at improving his other's skills and he went to study figure drawing at the studio of Fennell core mall the result was some competent academic exercises yeah and at the upper right a few jokes boys jokes like Venus at the upper right where with a top hat being intimate with her supporting post he met other artists they're mostly younger than he some of whom would become important friends he also drew in the street these have a sharp feel for character the overweight woman at the left with her doggy the at the top that tired or maybe drunk a couple and the musicians in blue they're behind their music stands and behind their mustaches and on the menu he drew a panorama of couples promenade now he might have chosen right away to paint Paris boulevards and paint familiar buildings and cafes subjects that might sell but instead he stayed close to home he's not the streetscapes of mammarra but the parts of amo mantra that were underdeveloped or undeveloped even burl he explored the vegetable gardens on the back of the hill of Montmartre for subjects behind the famous windmills and in the cottage gardens and the gypsum quarries on top what startling is the blonde light and the higher key you'd think that impressionist paintings had gotten to him but looking back a few years later he wrote I did not even know what the Impressionists were but now I've seen them and though not being one of the club I have much admired certain impressionist pictures Duga nude figures Monet landscape van Gogh made atmospheric drawings on the spot like this one that he evidently used for the paintings though he may well have painted the view in the field - we don't know he'd been doing that in Holland for the past three years the painting in front of the subject was what come you Koro and the painters of the so-called Barbizon School had been doing since the 1840s Kouros blond light and suggestive brushwork would have given fangirl courage that first summer that's true of pictures by another artist of the same generation of the older generation I should say another painter from Holland who working in France called Johan Jung Kent was a kind of proto Impressionists a good 30 years earlier I think young Kent's pictures of French and Dutch subjects or a model for Franco which they were for Claude Monet do in fact Young Kent had been a teacher of Monet and then Camus which when young Ken the teacher saw what Monet was doing in the 1860s the teachers own picture soon fell in with the trend you could see that from young Ken's tremendously high key Paris street scene painted 20 years before Vincent arrived in Paris let me say a little more about painting out of doors on plein air this had been an established practice as I said since the 1820s part of a boom in landscape painting generally painting in front of the subject was a regular thing not just Koro but the other Barbizon painters too and also the young Charlotte OBE who illustrated in this little itching how he floated the rivers and painted pictures like this on the spot domine wasn't trying to recreate the full dazzle of sunlight in the sky and reflected in the water had to wait to the 1860s and 70s in the 1870s the reputations of mana and Monet and the impressionist generations were built partly on just this practice of working rapidly out of doors and exhibiting what they painted there of course they could and they did bring pictures that they'd begun in the field back into the studio and work more on them there just to remind you the impressionist got their name from a reviewer of the exhibition at 1874 where this picture by Monet was it included under the title impression sunrise the reviewer Louie Louie made himself immortal by making fun of it as being a mere impression a sketch not a finished painting he called it wallpaper in its embryonic State in other words a cheat like the other pictures in the show by Renoir and morisot and Cicely and Cezanne by 1885 when John Singer Sargent painted Monet working out of doors directly on a good-size canvas Monet MANET and other Impressionists were finally having some commercial success doing exactly this kind of thing but doubts about what they were doing had already arisen in the minds of critics who were normally sympathetic to them when Van Gogh got to Paris in 1886 some of the artists themselves were questioning what they've been achieving their pictures were relatively small as the critics pointed out and painted quickly to capture the look of particular conditions of changing light and atmosphere and their subjects were not very consequential pretty landscapes scenes of recreation people in comfortable circumstances enjoying themselves in beautiful places but was it enough to paint fleeting impressions of the good life what might be missing well for one thing painting quickly might be just a fad it might be better to sacrifice speed for richer effects that you could achieve in the studio Monet and Pizarro had been exploring more possibilities I'm going to show you a few examples of the kind of pictures that Monet would have seen when he arrived Monet the painter of this was developing a wider repertory of brushstrokes that were not as broad and quick and detached as they had been in the 60s and 70s but they sort of made webs out of strands of color he'd begun to weave dense tapestries of foliage using short criss-cross strokes and also pitting complementary colors against one another here it's the warm pink of the roof against the green of the sea to intensify the effect of bright light and Monet to try some surprising experiments in brushwork this is one of the most difficult exercises for a painter to make foamy breakers that aren't sort of frozen by details and sort of stop action but instead felt to be churning because churning is just what Monet's brush seems to be doing to reproduce to produce these incessant arcs and whirls Pissarro was never a painter who used big gestures with the brush but and in the 1870s he used patches of color with not much modeling in tone which you can best see up close in the buildings the cow even the cabbages in the 1880s like Monet Pissarro abandoned this broader application of paint and made his surfaces denser with many smaller touches that vary in hue and value they don't interfere with the illusion of depth and distance and they make the whole image vibrant he couldn't do all this out in the field like Monet he brought the pictures back to a studio and worked on them further in the mid 1880s some much younger artists like Georges Seurat looked at this kind of enriched Impressionism of Monet and Pizarro and felt it was passe they were gonna go beyond it and Syrah would show how Seurat was six years younger than the van Gogh 20 years younger than Monet he went to Normandy in the summers and set up on the channel coast as Monet had been doing but his choice of a strange cliff formation and his way of rendering the play of light on the land and sea were something new he didn't use broad strokes or even a tangle of small strokes like Monet he used touches of different colors all nearly the same size evenly applied with earth colors pretty much eliminated and in the shadowy cliff face here the touches are mostly red and blue creating lavender this vivid not because he blends blue and red to produce lavender but because he doesn't he keeps the touches distinct so that the optical interaction of those two complementary colors is what we experience so this patient systematic application of paint is very different from what you saw Monet and Pizarro doing before that summer of 1885 Seurat had applied his system in a view of a suburban site here's a detail view of a suburban site that was going to be a very much larger painting of people at leisure on a Sunday morning on the left is the sketch - the figures at the right one of the many small sketches of the figures that he was going to go on to paint at full size using his laborious process van Gogh must have seen this painting twelve feet wide when Seurat was showed it first in 1886 it's an impressionist subject treated in the most unimpressionist way possible painted entirely in the studio radically laborious strange and powerfully attractive to some artists and for many other people repellent after his summer on the coast Sarah came back and did more work on the finished painting applying a system of various even smaller points or dots of paint 20a that most of the painters of Van Gogh generation studied and some adopted what was called divisionism or point to use them the figures are mostly silhouetted and their outlines are smooth and stylized to the point of caricature it's as though this group of people were fixed in this unchanging light fixed in those poses can under a spell forever by Seurat method of rendering it's a very different world from that of another major statement the luncheon of the boating party where Renoir implies that the figures move they chat they flirt and the light shifts he uses the whole repertory of brush strokes to create textures from solid to wispy it's another kind of developed impressionist technique well the ground shot isn't familiar impressionist subject but now as I say with an alien kind of uniformity and stiffness about it when I was shown at this is exhibition of independent artists in August 1886 which van Gogh could hardly have missed it was panned by many critics but immediately of great interest to younger artists five years later a critic wrote everything was so new in this immense painting the conception was bold and the technique was one nobody had ever seen of heard before this was the famous pointillism well Pissarro had anticipated sir odds dots by some years as you saw and now at the age of 56 he quickly began to use the newer technique his dots and sometimes dashes are fairly uniform in size and density and there are clear emphatic lines and force reinforcing roofs and eaves and walls to structure the view other artists in their 20s picked up the technique and that suit included van Gogh this is by a younger friend of Van Gogh made soon after he got to Paris Paulson Yaak the technique is still Impressionists based on pictures by Monet and Pizarro and others but it's not a picture of the boulevards or momart but instead one of the modern subjects that attracted his own generation railroads iron bridges factories at the edge of the city infrastructure if we might say now painted in a high key with very broad strokes of thick paint no dots yet see now showed this in 1886 in the same exhibition where the grond grond shop made its debut and pretty soon see knock was experimenting with Seurat techniques translating Shady green areas on the right into masses of pink and blue touches making them vivid and also giving the scene a kind of clear linear structure and a little bit later on under a high bright Sun scene yak is doing full-on divisionist painting he makes the road a kind of squinty expanse of dazzling light created by countless hundreds of points of contrasting colors not of course made up the spot but in the studio remember what van Gogh the fangirls pictures looked like when he came to Paris like Koro two generations earlier pre Impressionists in color and brushwork and with his back turned to downtown Paris and drawn instead to its rural fringe we have to imagine van Gogh observing scene Yaak and moving around and other painters of the new persuasion debating the merits of the new way to paint debating hierarchy and how together get there how introducing exaggerated shapes and arbitrary geometries and conducting his own experiments the year or so later Vincent responds to what he's seeing and tries an impressionist subject using technique that's part drawing and part painting it's a streetscape quite ordinary and lacking the bustle of people and traffic that attracted most artists what's new to him and for him is this blond life he's produced especially the way that he's introduced bright colors not with dots but with dashes with short lines drawn with the tip of the brush as though he were using colored pencils in many placing in place they they form a kind of mesh of parallel lines it's a bit timid overall but he's turned a corner his experiments at the same time in other ways as well he makes an amazing series of studies in some wooded place he's found at the edge of the city and he sets up and goes right into the woods and immerses himself in it and he finds ways to use dots but not as a consistent system he paints the canopy of leaves with dabs of green and a few touches of red here and there and he creates a lighted clearing in the middle there with yellow yellow spots what is so effective here and so forward-looking is the bottom third of the picture the way the leaves of the undergrowth make a kind of undulating linear pattern that plays off against the spreading trees and the uprights there's nothing timid here there's real energy in the way his brush moves in this view we're still in the boundary zone between city and the surrounding suburbs which were still partly agricultural a farm labourer walks away from the settled edge in the distance between rows of new crops shovel on his shoulder headed out to work the trees have green dots of varying sizes clustered with dots of near black and blue pure white to give the impression of light and shade the blue sky vibrates with hundreds of separate touches of blue from very light to dark well that same spring van Gogh made a small painting quick and rough maybe on the spot of a locale that appealed to him a park with paved walks and small trees just planted a few years before it led to a larger picture that you know I'd like to slow down again for a minute and let you have a closer look at this afterwards you can go and look at it in the galleries but I can show you a few details which I will anyway have a look vengo uses pointless techniques more regular and more regularly and fully here than anywhere else and they have an exhilarating effect the foliage sparkles the pavement shimmers reflected light invades the shadowed areas with purples and greens he's not a prisoner of the system in the foreground he uses straight dashes here for the curb stones and in the sky something wonderfully new happens most of the sky is dots of blue with some white and pink that he's applied regularly and patiently but as he gets to the top and the corners the dots get longer they're stretched they suggest rays they radiate up and out and they make the sky a kind of exclamation here van Gogh has invented an expressive device because these strokes don't describe what you could actually see their function is to embody the painters own reactions to what he sees and feels emile zola had written a pregnant sentence 20 years earlier that van Gogh knew so what I said the painting is a corner of nature seen through a temperament the painting is a corner of nature seen through a temperament by temperament Zola meant the personality of the artist the spirit of the artist and these strokes convey van Gogh personality through the movements of his hand they take us beyond observable reality of the scene and they introduce the painters exuberant reaction to it doing that will be van Gogh's great contribution to art in the years that come where was he here you may be asking I'm gonna ask answer the question regardless he was he was here we now know it was in this park at the foot of the the hill of mow March which had been built and planted recently the square Sam Pierre it it's now the square Louie's Michel but never mind it had been built as I said and planted quite recently ten years earlier it looked like this with a Bosque of young trees and islands of planting there's a lot missing from fen golf's picture and not just the hill but also the new apartment blocks that surrounded the park except for that one building he puts in the distance when Van Gogh was there another project was underway the hill was going to be crowned by a vast church and not just any church but the over scale overbearing white landmark that you can see from most of Paris that's rivaled only by the tall steel tower across the river whose foundations were being poured that very summer it is something like enchantment for Van Gogh in this quiet corner of the city brand-new it's a public amenity that's soon to be surrounded and overpowered by the irresistible expansion of the city he painted another larger picture with three couples here the chestnut trees are in flower and what fend off reduced whether he knew it or not was a kind of modern version of an old theme in poetry and painting the garden of love the way it's painted lacks the energy of the Yale version and the sky has long parallel strokes that give the picture and all-over unity without the exuberance of the painting upstairs back on the hill of Montmartre van Gogh used his new pragmatic mix of dots and dashes for a view of the vegetable gardens a lot of the citizens up there something like the Victory Gardens of World War two in this country this view looking up the hill toward the windmills is more richly worked up using his full repertory of brushstrokes and his skill perspective it gives it rush forward into the picture and a rich vocabulary of color well a standing there and where he stood to take this view and turning around with his back to the windmills van Gogh who would have looked at this the picture at the bottom down to the north and the west of momart past the gypsum quarry you see and the old city wall and I crossed some farmland to the river sin and factories on the other side that summer he painted in the fringe of the city where there was still a lot of under too underdeveloped land undeveloped land around the old city wall between clichy and the river Sen and across the river was the suburb of an air this view is across an overgrown field as you see toward the factories between them as a fence blocking what most artists would show from here the river and the bridge is over at van Gogh though wants to be sure that we're jolted by the abrupt contrast of past and future and the spontaneous vitality of nature in the foreground versus the encroaching unhealthy world of profit just beyond among the people he met among the avant-garde at artisan in Paris I mentioned Polson yak who was influential and there were others Paul Gauguin was five years older than van Gogh and like him he'd had several careers before he became an artist like van Gogh Goggan was talented and stimulating and volatile he had some success showing his work but he found Paris onerous and expensive so he worked mostly in rural Brittany the real dilemma of his generation was how to find meaningful subjects not just Pleasant familiar ones and a style that would suit them go gasps solution again and again was to escape to faraway places that preserved more innocent he thought more innocent and authentic way of life and let him experiment with unconventional ways of painting effect off may very well have seen go gasps picture at the top here and this is a farm in Brittany and go get travel to Martinique at the bottom where he painted this picture and after that he spent a couple of months with van Gogh in oral that's a story for another lecture down on the river a van Gogh painted a view that celebrates the high hectic kind of lively coexistence between the river as a place for recreation the promenade a woman and the rowboats recreation on the one hand and the river is an obstacle miraculously overcome by modern engineering that allows trains to vault right over it a meal burner who was a friend of Van Gogh hand Gauguin who worked with him along the river Bernards painting of these same bridges has flat forms in his search for a personal authentic way of painting Bernard had moved away from expressive brush strokes towards this kind of flat uninflected area of mild color these two are two Bernard and Van Gogh respected each other and debated their difference in a constructive way Bernard even more than Goga believed in in expressive surfaces strong outlines few shadows simplified forms a kind of pseudo naive almost child childlike view of civilized leisure coexisting with the invading forces the forces of the future in these years van Gogh stretched himself further by continuing to paint still life we saw him experimenting with color and paint textures a year later he was using flowers and fruit for the same purposes here's a still life of apples arranged on a cloth of some kind he's shaped the fruit with robust detached stroke stripes of red and yellow with touches of white the mostly green cloth sets off the red apples in a sharp contrast of complementary x' the cloth is a sea of parallel strokes of all colors as though it were some kind of reflect reflective surface instead of cloth it's helpful to compare another contemporary event Gowe whose work he surely knew this is Paul Cezanne who had his own way of using brush strokes to make familiar things visually intriguing unlike van Gogh Cezanne uses them to work against illusions of volume and space you can see how his system of parallel strokes is he uses equally for the apples on the table that is the figure and the ground say San Bernard Goga and Van Gogh Oh patronized the art supply shop and gallery of this man Julia tungee he sold the materials and if necessary took their paintings in lieu of payment Berner wrote later that tongue he admired van Gogh's utopian ideas and his paintings which tongue he said were visual embodiments of hope in any case this first portrait of him - go on the right mix which is by the way a bit dulled by yellow varnish make stodgy look like any shopkeeper the one he painted later on in the year however makes him look like a sage he's dressed plainly he sits frontally looks at us calmly he's surrounded by colorful works of art all Japanese except for a still life by Van Gogh himself at the upper left the painting was a study and unusually a laboratory for a portrait that he intended to give to tungee this is the larger final version the frontal pose with the hands folded is not just a van Gogh invention it's a traditional pose that had associations with images of venerable elders that van Gogh admired with on the one hand the Buddha bronzes like this were being imported into Paris at great numbers and on the right with Rembrandt's solemn old men who conventionally wear hats indoors by the way pictures that he could find reproduced in books the way he paints tungee here particularly his knuckly hands calls the plain folk of the potato eaters painting but the contrast of color and gives you a sort of startling distance between that van Gogh has travelled between this gloomy and that bright view as for the background of the tungee it's a kind of collage of images based on Japanese woodblock color prints it shows off Vincent's own infatuation with this material and it's maybe a kind of homage to it these prints were produced in great quantities in Japan where they were popular and cheap and for the past 20 years they had been imported to Europe a Vincent and his brother bought a lot of them prints of actors of geishas landscapes flowering trees and so on and Vincent made a few painted copies of Japanese prints like this one at the upper right after a famous composition by Hiroshi go as I say they were cheap in Tokyo and cheap in Paris to tongue he didn't sell them as far as we know but according to a recent study Vincent had begun by buying a stack of them when he was living in Antwerp and had them in his studio and now he owned hundreds of them not so much to indulge his enthusiasm but to sell at a profit it was a sideline and picture dealing but evidently not very successful he wrote from Antwerp that he painted them he had these he wrote from anter that he pinned them up on the studio walls and later on he wrote about looking at them he said after some time your vision changes you see with more Japanese eyes you feel color differently he saw composition differently to these prints suggested pictorial ideas he was going to use unconventional viewpoints odd formats arbitrary perspective compared to the mathematical and the lack of modeling to produce instead of three-dimensional illusions flattened flatness for venko japanese pictures had joy to offer he said and the love of nature Vincent left Paris fairly soon after this believing that the South of France offered him something like Japan he wrote to Te'o we wouldn't be able to study Japanese art it seems to me without becoming much happier and more cheerful and it makes us return to nature despite our education and our and our work in a world of convention I can't leave the portrait of tungee without saying just how extraordinary it really is no other artist I can think of had ever applied his own personality to a portrait of somebody else quite so thoroughly and emphatically a fangirl ease on the paint in strong detached strokes almost crudely even in the face it's a surface like wooden relief carving he doesn't do this to show off his virtuosity does this to convey the blunt plain strength of the man Vincent's self-portraits mark out the distance he's traveled in a little more than a year when he painted this thoroughly conventional head of himself soon after arriving in Paris here he experiments with a mix of complementary dots for the background and short dashes for his coat and a mix of the two for his face and hair he's well groomed he's well dressed and he looks out at us with what seems like a kind of wary attention a little after his portrait of tangy before he left Paris he painted this using the full force of his brush technique to create something like what we saw in the sky of that park scene a pattern of strokes suggesting an emanation not of light as in the landscape but of intellectual energy it's like a halo knot of sanctity but I think of mental strength Venga was a more social and enterprising person than maybe I've suggested in the fall of 1887 he organized an exhibition that included his friends Bernard and to go check and where he met Goga and Pizarro and Seurat among others the portrait there on the left by him of him is by Toulouse Lautrec earlier in the year he'd put on a show of Japanese prints at the cafe Luo Tamura here which at the right which got a lot of attention from artists friends the owner of the cafe was Agostino negatory an artist's model and friend of the artist who seems to have had a brief affair with with him you see one of his Japanese prints on the wall van Gogh did not take his hybrid pointless technique indoors very often but he did in this case using it for the walls and the floor of this restaurant dining room which are jittery with spots of contrasting color giving life to the half light in the room those gorgeous bouquets and glasses are more conventionally painted and there's a painting on the wall yes you do recognize it it's the picture hanging there without a frame that one I just mentioned I imagine it may have been put there as a kind of in joke involving spots spots on spots but in any case there it is when winter came Vincent had had enough of the chill of Paris and the pressure just to survive he had dreamt of the South of France where he went to find warmth and Japanese color and great beauty in the landscape that had a lot in common with Holland and to realize em his ambition to be a painter of peasant life before he left he presented himself one more time explicitly as a painter in fact he borrowed a pose from a Rembrandt self-portrait and not just a painter but a modern painter using an up-to-date technique and displaying a palette loaded with the bright colors that he'd learned to use in Paris colors that would become one of his great gifts to us will pick up the thread in oral when I return in April April that should that should leave you plenty of time to go and see pictures in New York and Boston and Washington and Los Angeles and you've probably got time for Amsterdam in Paris too and to do the readings recommended for you on the website I hope to see you in April thank you [Applause]

Channel: Yale University Art Gallery

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Keywords: Yale, University, Art, Gallery, Vincent van Gogh

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Length: 53min 38sec (3218 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 15 2018