Van Gogh

Travelling to the railway station this morning there was a wonderful quality of light  – a low winter sun making brown parched bracken glow on the fell sides, their rocky tops above holding the last remnants of bright white snow. Remarkable colour for a January day.

A good precursor to the day’s attraction at the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square: the Gallery is 200 years old and has assembled a ‘once in a century’ Van Gogh exhibition to mark the bicentenary.

Van Gogh famously flourished only after he had been advised by his brother Theo to paint ‘en plein air’ to use the natural light enhanced colours of the Southern French countryside.

On arrival London’s plein air is grey and misty, enhancing nothing much.

Admission to the exhibition is a mess. This isn’t down to teething troubles – the exhibition is close to the end of it’s run.  Queuing outside to have bags checked, then queuing solidly again on a long flight of stairs (who did the risk assessment on that?), then queuing again to have tickets checked meant that arrival to admission was 35 minutes. For a £25 admission price that is poor.

The queueing continues through the congested entrance and into the exhibition because most people decide to start at exhibit 1. I start elsewhere. In an effort to try to dissipate the throng, a member of staff suggests ‘Take any picture you want’. Not literally, surely…

The poets and lovers of the title are friends of Van Gogh whom he cast into roles to allow his self expression, but there are not so many portraits in the exhibition. The six rooms – for it is an extensive exhibition – have loose themes such as gardens, home, surrounding landscape. The paintings seem as though they could have been chosen and grouped in different rooms on the basis of dominant colours. Van Gogh was famously bold in his use of colour, taking colours made more vivid by sun or seasons or even nighttime. These colours are tempered by the use of various Farrow and Ball backdrop wall colours which fit well.

All the paintings on show are from the last two years of Van Gogh’s life, when he was trying to secure recognition – and some sales – by painting prolifically. This time was spent in Provence but also in hospitals due to his mental deterioration and self harm. This proved terminal in 1890.

Highlights of the exhibition include a triptych of two sunflowers paintings against a central portrait of a mature enough lady acquaintance of Van Gogh’s rocking an unseen baby to sleep (La Berceuse/The lullaby.) Van Gogh had suggested these three should hang together in his house in Provence: this did not happen so the three now alongside can be regarded separately as well as together. More mundanely, the expression of the lady looking down at the unseen baby with some intent allows the viewer to ponder what she is thinking. Willing the baby finally to sleep, probably. I like a painting that makes me ask a question.

La Berceuse (Augustine Roulin), 1889, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Vincent van Gogh, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The star(ry night over the Rhône) of the exhibition is stunning. There are three broad bands of bold blue colours – the sky, the sea and the darkened sward of grass on which stand the lovers (?) who are enjoying the starry night. The bright stars and the reflection of what were then new external gas lights puncture the scene with luminous and technical brilliance. Good of the French to loan it. I’ve seen the painting just once before, some twenty years ago. Then, it was displayed in isolation in the centre of a room to allow it to be viewed through 180 degrees

Starry Night Over the Rhône, 1888. Musée d’Orsay, Paris
Vincent van Gogh, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

and seen by a good number of visitors at once. That also allowed an appreciation of the texture of the painting from the sides: Van Gogh used a heavily loaded brush such that the oil paint does not produce a flat finish and has an element of 3D to it.  Here in London, the painting is stuck in a corner and it’s a scrum.

So, the quality and range of the exhibition is great, the focus on just two years of (prolific) output is revealing but the curation is mixed and the entry process poor. Glad I went? Yes. Perhaps not once in a century but certainly once in a decade.
 

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