Vincent van Gogh: The colour and vitality of his works | National Gallery

good afternoon and so for the next half hour or so we will be focusing upon this and I was just talking to one of my colleagues a minute or two ago about this picture saying it really does kind of burn off the wall doesn't it and you could even believe that we've actually got a light behind it it's almost as if it's backlit it's just so resonant and yeah let's use the word dazzling now none of you are waiting for me to tell you who this is by are you listening to people talking about this I have never ever heard anyone say oh look it's a painting of some flowers I wonder who did that whoever it was must have been very interested in sunflowers because this isn't sunflowers is it it says some flowers on the label before being a picture of sunflowers you all know what it is it's a van Gogh because that's what all of these things they're recognizable from like half a mile away aren't they in this inimitable manner of painting that he invents that touches people's hearts and one thing I can absolutely guarantee at this precise moment in Amsterdam there will be a big queue outside the van Gogh Museum to get in because there always is there isn't another museum in the world like it especially another museum devoted to the art of just one person Vincent communicates he communicates the people who aren't interested in art which is a real tribute to the guy well let's think about Vincent first of all in his biography his story is so well known we can whoosh through it he's born in a little town called Noonan in the Netherlands his father is a Protestant pastor he spent about the first thirty years of his life failing at everything he was pretty old when he got started the early painting that we have by Vincente in our collection comes from his first serious campaign of work it's the one over in the corner there the head of a peasant woman he was getting on for 30 when he painted that picture and that's quite old to have your artistic career starting and six or seven years later he's gone so his career is incredibly short and I think it's as well to remind ourselves how short his working life was especially when you compare him to other iconic artists in this collection like Turner or Michelangelo or Rembrandt optician particularly Vincent is like a meteor bush and he's gone now working in Newnan he'd gone back there because he'd messed up everything else he worked briefly as an assistant in an art dealership but he got sacked allegedly because his religious zeal was upsetting the customers he becomes or tries to become a schoolmaster he moves to England for a while first of all to Ramsgate then to eyes'll worth I live fairly near a little road called Van Gogh close his eyes are worth and whenever I Drive past I always kind of do a little nod and there's the house he lived him with a blue plaque on it and well it's an extraordinary story he had one or two disastrous tragicomic love affairs that ended in disaster and failure he tried to become a preacher because he did have a real almost fundamentalist religious zeal that he inherited from his Protestant pastor father and he goes to live amongst the workers of an area called the borinage the miners this was a very deprived area of Belgium and all they did was laugh at him so he messed up everything he goes back to Noonan decided to become a painter now this is the extraordinary thing because he'd failed at everything but reading his letters and the course we know a lot about Vincent from the letters he wrote particularly to his brother Theo and letters back he had absolutely no doubt that he was a great artist and his early works met with bafflement and derision but it didn't Fox didn't flummox him at all he was just completely focused if they didn't get it they didn't get it he knew what he was on about now working with the peasants in Newnan leads to his great potato eaters we won't talk about that because we want to get to Paris as quickly as we can because Theo his brother is working for an art dealership in Paris Theo invites him to come to Paris too and he goes there and he meets the Impressionists he meets people like Pizarro he meets people like Emile Bernard and Toulouse Lautrec now Pizarro is an extraordinary man himself and he's one of those artists who would like put his arm around a younger artist like he did with his like he did with go gand like he did with suzanne he encourages Vincent Vincent ups his color range because coming from noonim coming from the Netherlands where his great hero is Rembrandt he's painting brown earthy pictures when he sees the Impressionists he thinks hey there's color in the world and also his life coincides with a time when new pigments are being invented so a picture like the sunflowers and indeed the other ones we've got here they are painted in new artificial pigments which when you do the round of the National Gallery through the chronology of it you will suddenly notice the colors change you get to room 41 with dellacroix Courbet Angra and then you move into the next room we've got beggar man a Monet and suddenly zing all of these colors are being invented they're a kind of byproduct of the Industrial Revolution and also let's take a moment to pay homage to John G R and John G R and without whom john jeer and invented the little squeezy tube so because of that we've got paintings like this and you've all got clean teeth that enabled artists to you to buy these new pigments in a portable fashion and to go outside and it makes painting so much more practical now in Paris he meets go again and he's very impressed with Gogan but Vincent gets an idea in his head and that brings me back to these Japanese visitors standing in front of these pictures he loves Japanese art he makes friends with a man called Pere Tanguy Tanguy is an artist's color man he deals in these new pigments Vincent befriends him paints two portraits of him and Vincent sees his vast stock of Japanese prints now let's think about those for a moment they were initially coming into Europe as basically wrapping paper for fine porcelain they weren't seen in Japan as high art they were basically folk art street art mass-produced images of actors mass-produced images of beautiful courtesans mass-produced images of tea houses and landscapes and the really the impressionist artists find these things and think wow so different to the European tradition flat beautiful colors direct zingy compositions clear and fattening and beautiful and Vincent decides that he's going to set up a colony of artists in the South of France inspired by this idea he had in his head that the Japanese artists lived in colonies like halfway up mountains and things just making art now where he got this idea from whoever knows but Vincent had this idea that he would set up a colony of artists in the south of France and be just like those Japanese artists now he goes on his own first of all and hey guess what no one will go with him now why won't people go with him well we know what he was like when he was living with fear in Paris I won't go into specific incidents but Theo's friends stopped visiting him he wasn't the easiest of men to get on with Theo lived a kind of conventional middle-class lifestyle and had friends round to supper but with Vincent there this irascible short-tempered man speaking French with a funny guttural accent I think he could pick fights with anyone and people just stopped going and I think also Vincent realized what a stress he was putting on his brother because Theo had been supporting him financially this too is absolutely fascinating because Y was Theo supporting Vincent he started supporting him at the time he went back to Noonan and started painting the peasant women and the peasant men now two theories you have to decide he was supporting Vincent because he believed passionately in Vincent's art nobody else did but Theo could see the potential genius that he'd got as a brother theory too he supported Vincent out of brotherly love that he'd got this lame duck brother who wasn't going to be doing anything he'd failed as a preacher he failed as a school teacher he'd failed as an art salesman he'd failed in love he had failed absolutely anything that he tried to do and Theo loves him he's his brother so Theo supports him financially but I think Vincent in Paris realized that he was kind of getting in the way and thought it would be good for the both of them to go down to if he went down to all so he goes to all where he painted this and Theo meanwhile has a word with Gogan saying look he really loves you he loves you work will you go and live with Vincent in all and go again realizes he owes a debt of gratitude to Theo because Theo's been selling his works as well and giving him a little bit of support and go again in the end cracks is it okay I'll go I love instance work I think go again possibly felt might not work how sensible is that but anyway Vincent gets terribly excited at news that go ganz going and what does he do he buys up as much yellow paint as he can and paints this and for other pictures of the same subject there are actually seven of these that he makes three of them are copies when I say copies they are copies by Vincent of his own work and his original plan was to make these sunflowers paintings as a decoration for gogans room when he comes to our and so they're made in this sense of excitement they're made with this idea that hey go ganz going to come and we're two artists and other artists will come and join us and we'll live this fantastic life just making pictures now when Gogan arrives of course it it all goes wrong and it culminates in the off with year story that everyone knows so well but let's just rewind before that shall we go gam paint pictures like this Goggan hasn't yet gone but go guarantor to the South Seas to Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands where he finishes up but go gam paints from the imagination go again doesn't need to go and sit in a field and look at everything and copy what he's seeing go gang can sit in his studio shut his eyes and conjure up these things and the two artists is a different way of working because Vincent always needed something in front of him there which is why he goes out into the landscape I mean these pictures here were done outside he would pack his easel on his back this is when he was in the asylum the famous story which will come on to in a minute but he would go outside and work in the open air go again try to get Vincent to work from his imagination and with go gambiing a very dominant powerful personality Vincent tries to do this but he can't he needs things in front of him so when he's painting the sunflowers he's actually got a pot in front of him and the flowers let's have a look at it shall we looking at it yesterday the thing that struck me that it really hadn't hadn't really struck me before is the spiciness of it that particularly in the center part of the picture the petals are like have got this kind of metallic sense a real kind of sharp edge spiky menacing this now I'm saying that of course with hindsight because we know what happened to this artist and it's pretty much impossible for any of us to look at this picture without thinking of the story behind it now I don't believe for a minute it's the story behind Vincent's life that makes him such a successful and popular a much loved artist today but the story doesn't get in the way it helps in a sense that's engage with the pictures and and as it were meet the personality who made the picture but I think what people don't notice about the picture and I never noticed this until I known the picture for quite a few years but most of the sun's now here are dead that these are the seed heads the dry prickly seed heads that the petals have fallen off and you'll see this one here's got just one petal left on it now by the time Vincent was working in all his religious faith hadn't lessened but it had changed and he'd no longer he was no longer focused on the the Protestant Christianity he was much more focused on a kind of universal religion and a almost kind of nature worship somehow yellow is his favorite color because it's the color of life it's the color of Sun and it has a kind of symbolic value that I think we can say works in two ways first of all color we we register color because of cultural preconceptions red equals danger stop green means go yellow means happiness blue means oh I'm sad so these are things that we learn but also they are innate properties of the colors that the colors have a psychological resonance an artist's following Vincent following Gogan artists to the next generation like for example Kandinsky who's at the moment in the beautiful dellacroix show are using color and thinking about color for the psychological effect what you might even call the emotional effect that it has on the viewer and yellow it it's not a color that makes you go or if this was blue you'd stand in front of it like Picasso's blue period pictures you stand in front of them and you don't kind of jump up and down with excitement but here it energizes you that yellow really gives you a kick doesn't it now Vincent is a Dutchman and flowers are so much part of Dutch cultural memory Dutch cultural heritage early next notes later this year it's 2016 isn't it yes if you're watching this in the future this was filmed in 2016 right later this year we are having a showing room one of Dutch 17th century flower paintings or 17 and 18 but the Golden Age of Dutch flower paintings is the 17th century and of course flowers from the time of so-called tulip mania in the late 1620s early 1630s are so much part of dutch culture and flower painting is also so much part of dutch culture now those beautiful flower pieces they are painted in a profoundly Christian Protestant culture and they are meant to be understood meant to be seen and read as reminders of our own mortality as things that are beautiful and blooming one moment they fade and they die and the Protestant Calvinists interpretation of these is that our lives are like the flowers we prosper and bloom and then die and those pictures are there to remind you the prosperous 17th century Dutch businessman and burger master that no matter how rich you are how much you can afford where your big townhouse is one day you are going to die and it's actually going to be very soon don't you forget it now I'm not saying that Vincent is consciously making a flower painted painting in the tradition of 17th century flower paintings but most certainly he's inherited that subconsciously so when he sets himself the task of painting a series of flower paintings he's making memento mori as we would say a reminder of our own mortality and the fact that we've got the flowers that are dead and flowers that are dying emphasizes that but hold on I can see you're all looking as if you're thinking about your own mortality now there's no need because inside the seed heads I've given it away now haven't I there's the seeds and already there's the germ the little trigger full of energy and potential life waiting to burst into life next spring with the next generation of son so it's a kind of cycle of life picture isn't it Vincent is a New Age pagan wouldn't you know so a picture like this has got both this abstract quality of that extraordinary zing of the different yellows but it's also got inbuilt within it a potential of bursting into life even more with the hundreds if not thousands of little sunflower seeds that are buried away in here now Vincent of course had his breakdown our only account for this of the ear chopping episode is godamm so we you've got to ask yourself do you trust it what Gogan tells us is that Vincent was behaving very strangely and late at night he threatened go down with a razor and go gay and ran off well that's all go game tells us and what happens next is famously off comes the ear or part of his ear he wraps it up and takes it to a brothel and gives it to one of the girls in the brothel I mean I imagine that she changed careers after gay man but he was then hospitalized he lost a lot of blood very very nearly died and then he painted that profound self-portrait that we're lucky enough to have just a few hundred yards away up the strand in the Courtauld collection of him with his bandaged ear with behind him a Japanese prints so I'll come back to the Japan idea in a moment but he's nursed back to health in the hospital and then the next part of his life across Theo is terribly concerned and go again never meets Vincent again go again runs just when his friend needs him most Gauguin doesn't come out of this very well at all and it might even be that Gauguin is telling this story hey he attacked me with a razor to justify him abandoning his friend we actually the only person who says go gang got attacked by a razor razor wielding van Golf is go gang himself now go gang I'm conscious that this can be edited but never mind go gang was not a nice person could use lots of other words of fabulous wonderful extraordinary artists whose work I absolutely love I don't think I'd have liked him very much Vincent is abandoned and then I hear music ray sorry Vincent is abandoned and he submits himself to be a voluntary patient at the asylum in San Remi which is where he paints this picture that picture he goes out with a member of staff I'm just to make sure he's all right but backpack on easel paints and off you go sets himself up in the landscape and paints these amazing things this is in the grounds of the asylum and the last move he makes is to ovair where we have this extraordinary picture which isn't finished it's fascinating looking at this picture it says problem when it is finished because Vincent's died but there are areas of it where you can see it's so interesting where he's planning out areas as a work that I'm sure had he not died he would have gone back to now I'm now going I hope to make you well up a little bit because I'm going to read you a letter from emile bernard to a critic and writer called ory a Albert or EA or a recognized Vincent's genius was the first writer to actually recognize what a great artist Vincent was when Vincent was alive it's a myth that he was not recognized the avant-garde circles in France and in Belgium had recognized they've got someone really special here but this is the letter from Emile Bernard because Bernard heard of Vincent's death and goes running down to ovair which is not so far from Paris just before the funeral and attends the funeral and this is what mu Bernard writes I've cut it down because it's a very long letter our dear friend Vincent died four days ago I think you will already have guessed that he killed himself he went into the fields near ovair placed his easel against the haystack then shot himself with a revolver on the walls of the room where the body lay all his last canvases were nailed and in fact it seems that Emile Bernard and Theo did put all the pictures around the coffin and the first great van Gogh exhibition it had Vincent in the middle of it and all the late canvases forming something like a halo around him and making his death through the brilliance and genius that shone from the paintings even more deplorable on the coffin were masses of flowers sunflowers yellow flowers which he loved so much a symbol of that light of which he dreamt in hearts as well as in paintings near him also his easel his folding stool and his brushes were placed on the floor by the coffin now that's installation art isn't it what I mean you can imagine it can't you the dead artist his brushes his stool his paint box and then the pictures that he's just been making the last few days around it you can only imagine it and but Wow must have been a sight mustn't it now then the last bit dr. Gachet now dr. Gachet was someone who was nursing him in ovair who was an amateur artist himself we know of a whole lot of the people that work the funeral that came to pay tribute to him dr. Gachet tried to say a few words but he wept too much and could only stammer a confused farewell and then we went back Theo van Gogh was completely broken by his grief and I think that's absolutely true because it wasn't long afterwards that Theo died as well and the two of them are buried together in ovair now that's a wonderful scene the coffin with the sunflowers on and we're very lucky to have ML Bernards account of this but that brought me back to the Japanese visitors because he learnt so much from Japan he loved Japan so much and one of the copies that Vincent made himself is actually in Japan it was acquired twenty thirty years or so ago and is in a privately owned modern art museum in Japan and that's very very appropriate because Vincent is an artist who communicates whatever culture you're from and I think he would have been touched delighted to see his picture here with loads of Japanese people coming every single day and standing next to this probably on a trip of a lifetime coming halfway around the world wanting to come to Europe and having one of the first things that they have to do while they're here and they can't go back home until they've done it is come and see this so I find that rather wonderful rather touching really and the other thing that I haven't mentioned in this talk in connection with Japan is that crabs now I did a project last year with some postgraduate students from Wimbledon College of Art and after their project I went back to the college to see their work and and it was a master's degree and that the students were set the task of choosing a painting to make what we call a transcription of them and this Japanese student had chosen that because she said crabs are so much part of our culture and I said well show me your work then with you and she said well it's in here it's down on the floor and what it consisted of was a big sheet of green paper and two crabs walking about and she said well I thought Vincent had done it all I couldn't do anything more to it and I said well what are you going to do with them and she looked at me as if I was a complete idiot and just went eat them and I just thought Vincent bless you for doing that picture of krabsy did the picture of crabs because again Japanese woodblock prints it's a subject artists like hawks I hear oh she gay have done images of crabs and so that's where that is coming from and Vincent no let's get this right Japan affects Vincent Vincent repays the compliment thank you

Channel: The National Gallery

Views: 789,355

Rating: 4.919467 out of 5

Keywords: Vincent van Gogh, Van Gogh, Amsterdam, The Sunflowers, Colin Wiggins, Lunchtime talk, Paul Gaugin, Gaugin, Memento mori, Dutch Culture, abstract art, Arles, Paris, lecture Impressionist painting, impressionism, impressionist artist, post-impressionism, post-impressionist, Van Gogh paintings, Van Gogh flowers, Vincent van Gogh sunflowers, Art, fine art, museum, National Gallery, London, Trafalgar Square, Paintings, Art history, Dutch art

Id: YV4YGUAHPJU

Length: 29min 32sec (1772 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 11 2016

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Special Projects curator Colin Wiggins walks you through the life and work of Vincent van Gogh, from the bright colours of 'Sunflowers' to his battles with depression. Discover Van Gogh's changing style and the influence of the Post-Impressionist artists in Paris.