A tragic life, in words and pictures

Vincent Van Gogh epitomises the image of a penniless artist whose genius was recognised only after their death. A new exhibition of his art and letters gives insights into his work, its context and his troubled mind

VINCENT VAN GOGH is the supreme example of that popular stereotype: the penniless, tortured, misunderstood artist whose genius is recognised only after his tragically early death. In fact, given that the description is all too close to the truth of his brief, intense life as a painter, you could say that the stereotype is largely moulded in his image. In the 120 years since he killed himself, aged just 37, while in the grip of a profound depression, his fame and reputation have grown immeasurably. He is not only recognised as one of the founders of modern art, whose works sell for tens of millions of euro at auction, but is perhaps the most popular and best-loved figure in the history of western art.

It’s not surprising that the Royal Academy’s The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters is proving to be a popular exhibition. What is mildly surprising is just how extraordinarily popular it is, fully booked online to the end of its run, with lengthy queues winding through the courtyard of Burlington House daily, in conditions that are, so far, close to freezing.

Once inside, no-one is in a hurry, and not only because it takes ages to make your way from room to room through the crowds. With more than 60 paintings, 30 drawings and close to 40 original letters on view, it is an enormous exhibition that takes time to negotiate, particularly since the letters often refer directly to the adjacent paintings. And people are spending a lot of time, approaching the work with reverential care, reading and discussing as well as looking.

It’s worth the effort. Most of the letters, and many of the paintings, come from the show’s first venue, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, but work has come from public and private collections the world over to make this exhibition, and it’s hard to imagine anything like it happening again in a hurry. No wonder that it offers a memorable, unprecedented insight into the artist’s inner world and the extent of his achievement, an insight that is practically impossible to exaggerate. How often do you hear a 19th-century artist’s close, articulate commentary on the minutiae of their work and its context?

One thing that comes across vividly is the brevity not so much of Van Gogh’s relatively short life, but of his artistic career, which spanned just 10 years, including his industrious apprenticeship to what was to begin with a late vocation. Within such tight constraints he was fantastically prolific, with most of his best-known, iconic paintings produced latterly, within a couple of years. Very close to the end of his life, for example, during his last productive spell, he produced about 70 canvases in as many days.

DEBATE PERSISTS about the nature of Van Gogh’s mental problems, but there is no question that he was, throughout his life, a deeply unsettled, troubled spirit. He craved close relationships but had profound difficulty in building and maintaining them. He did live with Sien Hoornik, who modelled for him, and had been a prostitute, for about a year and a half from the spring of 1882 before breaking up with her – the evidence that he was not the father of her children is fairly strong. In many ways he was closest to his brother, Theo, who was his tireless supporter, emotionally and financially. Apart from Vincent’s sojourn as an artist in Paris, where Theo was based, the brothers lived far apart, a fact to which we owe virtually all of the 900 or so letters written by Van Gogh – a huge archive of information on his life and art.

The eldest of six children of Anna Cornelia Carbentus and her husband, a Reformist Dutch Minister, he was born in 1853. Several of his paternal uncles were art dealers and Vincent’s younger brother, Theo, became one. Vincent might have gone into the business, as well. After unhappy school experiences, an uncle found him work with a dealer who sent him to London, where he was exceptionally content, until an infatuation with his landlady’s daughter ended badly and he turned to religion with some zeal.

There followed an uneasy period in his life, with several abortive attempts at settling into an occupation, and unsuccessful bids to formally qualify as a pastor and a missionary – though he did spend some time as an evangelical missionary among impoverished working people. His family despaired. As he confessed to Theo, he simply wanted a role in life, and Theo suggested that he become an artist.

He was mostly self-taught, using training manuals as guides, though he did eventually attend the Antwerp Academy for a term. There is an obvious contrast between the work he made in The Netherlands and that for which he is best known, made in the south of France. It’s not just a question of geography, but geography is important. His drawings and paintings of peasants, and of the Dutch landscape, employ a sombre, earthy palette, and the drawings too are dark and moody. They are accomplished and strongly stated, displaying more than the rudiments of the style we now associate with Van Gogh, with an emphasis on linear patterning and emphatic, simplified form. It’s a bit unfair that they are eclipsed by the vivid colours of the later work, because they are formidable in their own right.

IN 1886, VAN GOGH went to Paris. While he certainly endured wounding rejections on several levels, in both his personal and professional life, it would be wrong to think of him purely as a romantic outsider in terms of life and art, adrift from his age, or as an untutored innocent, responding only to unmediated instinct.

He had actually studied assiduously and, by the time he arrived in Paris, had learned a great deal, impressed as much by the Japanese woodblock prints as classical painters such as Rubens. He felt art should be socially engaged and inventively modern and, on a personal level, he desperately wanted to belong, taking a keen interest in forging alliances with other artists. When he moved to Arles at the beginning of 1888 it was with the intention of establishing an artists’ commune.

In Paris he was most closely associated with Paul Gauguin, Emile Barnard and others identified with a Post-Impressionist style dubbed Cloissonism, after the technique of cloissoné enamel, in which metal boundaries outline discrete areas of strong, flat colour. One can see the link with Japanese prints, as well, and indeed with the direction Van Gogh increasingly took in his own work. He was critical of the Impressionist, “stereoscopic realist” preoccupation with the effects of light, and much more interested in feeling and how it might be conveyed with colour. What he didn’t have, as the woodblock printmakers and most of the Impressionists did, is a light touch.

Still, as he proved again and again, the bold linearity of his painting could produce images of powerful concision, as with his studies of sunflowers, a single chair, many of his portraits and, even more impressively, expansive Provençal landscapes that are sweepingly orchestral in their command of detail, colour and form.

Still, Arles was both a liberation and a disaster. Van Gogh idealised the peasantry but on the whole he was disenchanted with the local inhabitants. When Gauguin, himself by no means the easiest of companions, arrived and joined him in the house he had rented and painstakingly prepared – it is a heartbreaking tale – they fell out spectacularly. Having brandished a razor at Gauguin, Van Gogh ran off into the night, sliced off a piece of his own ear and presented the severed flesh to a woman in a nearby brothel. Fearing, or suspecting, madness, and suffering recurrent mental collapses, he was persuaded to check himself into an asylum, where he spent a year, continuing to work throughout. Still uneasy on emerging into the outside world, he lived under the care of a sympathetic doctor, and art lover, Paul Gachet, in the final months of his life.

There is an argument that, while Van Gogh was clearly emotionally unstable in his everyday life, he was fundamentally balanced in relation to his work. Yet his drawings and paintings, just like his letters, are absolutely fired with emotion. He repeatedly says as much himself. This is not to discount his gift as an inspired, even profound observer of the world around him.

Still, not for nothing was he adopted as a forerunner by the Expressionists. And sometimes the emotions seem to overbalance the art. Some of the paintings in the show come across as overly, wildly, self-indulgently expressive. What is striking is that they do not represent a final or even a progressive degeneration: some of the very last paintings are quite brilliant, just as, strikingly, in his letters, his eloquence endured to the end. As he said in his last, unfinished letter to Theo: ”I risk my life for my own work and my reason has half foundered on it.”

The Real Vincent Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters is at the Royal Academy, Burlington house, Piccadilly, London. Admission £12, various concessions. Until April 18. See royalacademy.org.uk