3.
Nevertheless—and fortunately for his artistic ambitions—van Gogh did not believe that previous artists had captured everything there was to see in southern France. To the contrary, many had, in his view, completely missed the essentials. ‘Good Lord, I have seen things by certain painters that did not do justice to the subject at all,' he exclaimed. ‘There is plenty for me to work on here.'
No one had, for example, captured the distinctive appearance of the middle-aged middle-class women of Aries, of whom van Gogh asserted, ‘Some women resemble a Fragonard and some a Renoir, but there are others who cannot be labelled according to anything that has ever yet been done in painting” (emphasis added). The farm labourers whom he saw working in the fields outside of Aries had likewise been ignored by artists: ‘Millet has reawakened our minds so that we can see the dweller in nature. But until now no one has painted the real southern Frenchman for us.' He elaborated, ‘Have we in general learned to see the peasant now? No; hardly anyone knows how to pull that off.'
The Provence that greeted van Gogh in 1888 had already been the subject of painting for over a hundred years. Among the better-known Provenqal artists were Fragonard (1732-1806), Constantin (1756-1844), Bidauld (1758-1846), Granet (1775—1849) and Aiguier (1814—1865). All were realistic painters, adhering to the classical and until then relatively undisputed notion that their task was to render on canvas an accurate version of the visual world. They went out into the fields and mountains of Provence and painted recognisable versions of cypresses, trees, grass, wheat, clouds and bulls.
Yet van Gogh insisted that most had failed to do justice to their subjects. They had not, he claimed, produced realistic depictions of Provence. We are apt to call any painting realistic that competently conveys key elements of the world. But the world is complex enough for two realistic pictures of the same place, at the same moment, to look very different, as a consequence of differences in artistic styles and temperaments. Two realistic artists may sit at the edge of the same olive grove and produce divergent sketches. Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence; no painting ever captures the whole, as Nietzsche mockingly pointed out in a bit of doggerel verse entitled ‘The Realistic Painter':
‘Completely true to nature!'—what a lie:
How could nature ever be constrained into a picture?
The smallest bit of nature is infinite!
And so he paints what he likes about it.
And what does he like? He likes what he can paint!
If we in turn like a painter's work, it is perhaps because we judge that he or she has selected the features that we believe to be the most valuable within a particular scene. There are selections so acute that they come to define a place, with the result that we can no longer travel through that landscape without being reminded of what a great artist noticed there.
Alternatively, if we complain that, for example, our portrait does not look ‘like us', we are not accusing its painter of trickery; we are simply suggesting that the process of selection that goes on in any work of art has in this instance gone wrong, and that parts of us that we think of as belonging to our essential selves have not been given their due. Bad art might thus be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.
And leaving out the essential was precisely what van Gogh accused most of the artists who had painted southern France before him of doing.
4.
There was a large book on him in the guest bedroom, and because I was unable to sleep on my first night, I read several chapters, eventually falling asleep with the volume open on my lap as a trace of dawn-red appeared in the corner of the window.
I awoke late and found that my hosts had gone to Saint-Rémy leaving a note to say that they would be back around lunchtime. Breakfast was laid out on a metal table on the terrace, and I ate three pains au chocolat'm guilty, rapid succession, all the while keeping one eye out for the housekeeper, who I feared might put an unflattering spin on my gourmandise for her employers.
It was a clear day with a mistral blowing that ruffled the heads of the wheat in an adjacent field. I had sat in this same spot the day before, but only now did I notice that there were two large cypresses growing at the end of the garden, a discovery that was not unconnected to the chapter I had read the night before on van Gogh's treatment of the tree. He had sketched a series of cypresses in 1888 and 1889. ‘They are constantly occupying my thoughts,' he told his brother. ‘It astonishes me that they have not yet been done as I see them. The cypress is as beautiful in line and proportion as an Egyptian obelisk. And the green has a quality of such distinction. It is a splash of black in a sunny landscape, but it is one of the most interesting black notes, and the most difficult to get exactly right.'
What did van Gogh notice about cypresses that others had failed to see? In part, the way they moved in the wind. I walked to the end of the garden and there studied, thanks to certain works (Cypresses and Wheat Field with Cypresses of 1889 in particular), their distinctive behaviour in the mistral.
Vincent van Gogh, Cypresses, 1889
Vincent van Gogh, Wheat Field with Cypresses, 1889
There are architectural reasons for this movement. Unlike pine branches, which descend gently downwards from the top of their tree, the fronds of the cypress thrust upwards from the ground. The cypress's trunk is, moreover, unusually short, with the top third of the tree being made up wholly of branches. Whereas an oak will shake its branches but keep its trunk immobile in the wind, the cypress will bend, and furthermore, because of the way the fronds grow from a number of points along the circumference of the trunk, it will seem to bend along different axes. From a distance, the lack of synchronicity in its movements makes it look as though the cypress were being shifted by several gusts of wind blowing from different angles. With its conelike shape (cypresses rarely exceed a metre in diameter), the tree takes on the appearance of a flame flickering nervously in the wind. All of this van Gogh noticed and would make others see.
A few years after van Gogh's stay in Provence, Oscar Wilde remarked that there had been no fog in London before Whistler painted it. Surely, too, there were fewer cypresses in Provence before van Gogh painted them.
Olive trees must also have been less noticeable. I had the previous day dismissed one example as a squat, bushlike thing, but in Olive Trees with Yellow Sky and Sun and Olive Grove: Orange Sky of 1889, van Gogh brought out (that is, foregrounded) the shape of the olives' trunks and leaves.
I now noted an angularity that I had earlier missed: the trees resemble tridents that have been flung from a great height into the soil. There is a ferocity to the olive trees' branches, too, as if they were flexed arms ready to hit out. And whereas the leaves of many other trees make one think of limp lettuce emptied over racks of naked branches, the taut, silvery olive leaves give an impression of alertness and contained energy.
After van Gogh, I began to notice that there was something unusual about the colours of Provence as well. There are climatic reasons for this. The mistral, blowing along the Rhone Valley from the Alps, regularly clears the sky of clouds and moisture, leaving it a pure, rich blue without a trace of white. At the same time, a high water table and good irrigation promote a plant life of singular lush-ness for a Mediterranean climate. With no water shortages to restrict its growth, the vegetation draws full benefit from the great advantages of the South: light and heat. And fortuitously, because there is no moisture in the air, there is in Provence, unlike the tropics, no mistiness to dampen and meld the colours of the trees, flowers and plants. The combination of a cloudless sky, dry air, water and rich vegetation leaves the region dominated by vivid primary, contrasting colours.
Painters before van Gogh had tended to ignore these contrasts and to paint only in complementary colours, as Claude and Poussin had taught them to do. Constantin and Bidauld, for example, had depicted Provence entirely in subtle gradations of soft bl
ue and brown. Van Gogh was incensed by this neglect of the landscape's natural colour scheme: ‘The majority of [painters], because they aren't colourists… do not see yellow, orange or sulphur in the South, and they call a painter mad if he sees with eyes other than theirs.' He abandoned their chiaroscuro technique and soaked his canvases in primary colours, always arranging them in such a way that their contrast would be maximised: red with green, yellow with purple, blue with orange. ‘The colour is exquisite here,' he wrote to his sister. ‘When the green leaves are fresh, it is a rich green, the likes of which we seldom see in the North. Even when it gets scorched and dusty, the landscape does not lose its beauty, for then it takes on tones of gold of various tints: green-gold, yellow-gold, pink-gold…
Vincent van Gogh, Olive Grave: Orange Sky, 1889
And this [is then] combined with blue, from the deepest royal blue of the water to the blue of the forget-me-nots, a cobalt, particularly clear bright blue.'
My own eyes grew attuned to see around me the colours that had dominated van Gogh's canvases. Everywhere I looked, I could see primary colours in contrast. Beside the house was a violet-coloured field of lavender next to a yellow field of wheat. The roofs of the buildings were orange against a pure blue sky. Green meadows were dotted with red poppies and bordered by oleanders.
It is not only the day that abounds in colours in Provence; van Gogh saw that and brought out the colours of the night as well. Previous Provenqal painters had depicted the night sky as groupings of little white dots against a dark background. But when one sits under the Provenqal sky on a clear night far from the glow of houses and street lamps, one notices that the sky in fact contains a profusion of colours: between the stars, it seems a deep blue, violet or very dark green, whereas the stars themselves appear to be a pale yellow, orange or green, diffusing rings of light far beyond their own narrow circumference. As van Gogh explained to his sister, ‘The night is even more richly coloured than the day. … If only one pays attention to it, one sees that certain stars are citron yellow, while others have a pink glow or a green, blue and forget-me-not brilliance. And without my expiating on this theme, it should be clear that putting little white dots on a blue-black surface is not enough.'
5.
The tourist office in Aries is housed in an undistinguished concrete block in the southwestern part of town. It offers visitors the usual fare: free maps, advice on hotels and information about cultural festivals, child-minders, wine tastings, canoeing, ruins and markets. One attraction is emphasised above all others: ‘Welcome to the land of Vincent van Gogh,' exclaims a poster with the sunflowers in the entrance hall; inside, the walls are decorated with harvest scenes, olive trees and orchards.
The office particularly recommends what it describes as the ‘van Gogh trail'. On the one hundredth anniversary of his death in 1890, van Gogh's presence in Provence was honoured by a series of plaques—fixed onto metal rods or stone slabs—positioned in some of the places he painted. The plaques feature photographs of the relevant works and a few lines of commentary. They are to be found both within the town and in the wheat and olive fields that surround it. They extend as far as Saint-Rémy where, after the ear incident, van Gogh ended his Provenqal days at the Maison de Sante.
I persuaded my hosts to spend an afternoon following the trail, to which end we stopped in at the tourist office to collect a map. By chance we learnt that a guided tour, a once-weekly event, was about to start in the courtyard outside, and that there were still places available for a modest sum. We joined a dozen other enthusiasts and were first taken to the Place Lamartine by a guide, who told us that her name was Sophie and that she was writing a thesis on van Gogh at the Sorbonne in Paris.
At the beginning of May 1888, finding his hotel too expensive, van Gogh had rented a wing of a building at 2 Place Lamartine known as the Yellow House. It was one half of a double-fronted building that had been painted bright yellow by its owner but left unfinished inside. Van Gogh developed a great interest in the interior design. He wanted it to be solid and simple, painted in the colours of the South: red, green, blue, orange, sulphur and lilac. ‘I want to make it really an artist's house—nothing precious, but with everything from the chairs to the pictures having character,' he told his brother. ‘About
Vincent van Gogh, ‘The Yellow House' (Vincent's House), Aries, 1888
the beds, I have bought country beds, big double ones instead of iron ones. That gives an appearance of solidity, durability and quiet.' The refurbishment complete, he wrote elatedly to his sister, ‘My house here is painted the yellow colour of fresh butter on the outside, with glaringly green shutters; it stands in the full sunlight in a square that has a green garden with plane trees, oleanders and acacias. It is completely whitewashed inside, with a floor made of red bricks. And over it there is the intensely blue sky. In this house I can live and breathe, meditate and paint.'
Sadly, Sophie had little to show us, for the Yellow House had been destroyed in the Second World War and subsequently replaced with a student hostel, which itself was now dwarfed by the giant Mono-prix supermarket that had gone up beside it. We drove next to Saint-Rémy and there spent more than an hour in the fields around the asylum where van Gogh had lived and painted. Sophie had with her a large plastic-coated book containing the main Provence paintings, and she frequently held it up in spots where van Gogh had worked, letting the rest of us crowd around to look on. At one point, with her back to the Alpilles, she held up Olive Trees with the Alpilles in the Background (June 1889), and we admired both the view and van Gogh's version of it.
But there was a moment of dissent in the group. Next to me, an Australian wearing a large hat said to his companion, a small, tousle-haired woman, ‘Well, it doesn't look much like that.'
Van Gogh himself had feared he might encounter such accusations. To his sister, he wrote that many people already said of his work, ‘ “This really looks too strange,” not to mention those who think it a total abortion and utterly repulsive.' The reasons for such opinions were not hard to find: the walls of his houses were not always straight, the sun was not always yellow or the grass green, there was an exaggerated sense of movement in some of his trees. ‘I have played hell somewhat with the truthfulness of the colours,' he admitted, and he played similar hell with proportion, line, shadow and tone.
Yet in playing hell, van Gogh was only making more explicit a process in which all artists are involved—namely, choosing which aspects of reality to include in a work and which to leave out. As Nietzsche knew, reality itself is infinite and can never be wholly represented in art. What made van Gogh unusual among Proverai artists was his choice of what he felt was important. Whereas painters such as Constantin had expended much effort in getting the scale right, van Gogh, though passionately interested in producing a ‘likeness', insisted that it was not by worrying about scale that he would end up conveying what was important in the South: his art would involve, as he mockingly told his brother, ‘a likeness different from the products of the God-fearing photographer'. The part of reality that concerned him sometimes required distortion, omission and the substitution of colours to be brought to the fore, but it was still the real—the ‘likeness'—that interested him. He was willing to sacrifice a naive realism in order to achieve realism of a deeper sort, like a poet who, though less factual than a journalist in describing an event, may nevertheless reveal truths about it that find no place in the other's literal grid.
Van Gogh elaborated on this idea in a letter he wrote to his brother in September 1888 about a portrait he was planning: ‘Rather than trying to reproduce exactly what I see before my eyes, I use colour more arbitrarily, in order to express myself forcibly. … I'll give you an example of what I mean: I should like to paint the portrait of an artist friend, a man who dreams great dreams, who works as the nightingale sings, because it is his nature [the portrait was Poet, of
The van Gogh Trail, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence
early September 1888]. He'll be
blond. I want to put my appreciation, the love I have for him, into the picture. So I paint him as he is, as faithfully as I can, to begin with. But the picture is not yet finished. In order to finish it, I am going to be the arbitrary colourist. I mean to exaggerate the fairness of the hair, even get to orange tones, chromes and pale citron yellow. Behind the head, instead of painting the ordinary wall of the mean room, I will paint infinity, a plain background of the richest, most intense blue I can contrive, and by this simple combination of the bright head against the rich blue background, I will achieve a mysterious effect, like a star in the depths of an azure sky. … Oh, my dear boy… and the nice people will see the exaggeration only as a caricature.' [Emphasis added}
A few weeks later, van Gogh began another ‘caricature'. ‘Tonight I am probably going to start on the interior of the café where I eat, by gaslight, in the evening,' he told his brother. ‘It is what they call a café de nuit (these are fairly common here), one that stays open all night. Night prowlers can take refuge there when they have no money to pay for a lodging or are too drunk to be taken in elsewhere.' In painting what would become The Night Café in Aries, van Gogh abandoned adherence to some elements of ‘reality' for the sake of others. He did not reproduce the proper perspective or colour scheme of the café; his light bulbs metamorphosed into glowing mushrooms, his chairs arched their backs, his floor buckled. Yet he was still interested in expressing truthful ideas about the place, ideas that would perhaps have been less well expressed if he had had to follow the classical rules of art.
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