Margaret Drabble wrote a couple of weeks ago in the NS about Van Gogh’s letters, ahead of “The Real Van Gogh: the Artist and his Letters“, a major exhibition just opened at the Royal Academy in London. Here, our art blogger Anna Maria Di Brina looks more closely at the relationship between that correspondence and the paintings on display at the RA.
More than 35 original letters, mostly addressed to Vincent Van Gogh’s brother Theo, are on display in this exhibition, alongside 65 paintings and 35 drawings. Together, they offer a unique view of the artist’s creativity and inner world.
“He was not the mad, tormented genius we used to think,” says Ann Dumas, curator of the exhibition. “He was instead a thoughtful, reflective, highly educated man, who thought very carefully about the aim of his work. The letters give a much more rounded view of him than the clichéd image we have.”
A review of the show in the Independent takes it for granted that the juxtaposition of words and images is risky, as if the viewer were being told how to experience the paintings. Van Gogh’s letters, devotedly preserved by Theo’s widow, are certainly full of detailed descriptions of his pictures and his thinking about them. However, instead of lessening the ability of the paintings to speak for themselves, words and colours seem to act in harmony, offering an extraordinary insight into Van Gogh’s work. The letters get us to focus our attention on details that were important to the artist, with the result that we get what Ann Dumas describes as a “direct line from his mind into understanding the paintings”.
Take The Pollard Willow, for example. Van Gogh’s description of “a sky in which the clouds are racing, grey with an occasional gleaming white edge, and a depth of blue where the clouds tear apart for a moment”, far from telling us what to see, instead offers poetic clues that enhance our pleasure in the watercolour. When, in another letter, Van Gogh points out to Theo the “very red face” in the Portrait of a Peasant Girl in a Straw Hat, something similar occurs. These remarks help us to concentrate on the sun’s reflection caressing the overheated cheeks of the seated young woman.
Vision of Arles
“A meadow full of very yellow buttercups, a ditch with iris plants with green leaves, with purple flowers . . . A little town surrounded by countryside entirely covered in yellow and purple flowers. That would really be a Japanese dream,” writes Vincent to Theo, describing his recently painted View of Arles with Irises in the Foreground.
The artist’s enchantment with nature is contagious. Watching the oil painting hanging beside these lines, it is impossible not to imagine Vincent standing in an open field, the sun burning his face, enjoying the colourful view. It’s almost as if we are seeing things through the painter’s own eyes.
It is interesting to notice how words and sketches are juxtaposed and intermingled in the letters. The mixture highlights the fever and excitement of self-expression and creation (something one sees elsewhere, in Frida Kahlo’s visual diaries, for example). The same hand writes and draws. Lines from the drawings occasionally leak out into the text. Likewise, the text, particularly when the artist is short of paper, continues on the backs of drawings. At times, the words end up becoming images themselves — the word “joune” (yellow), for instance, handwritten on a sketch of a field of buttercups in the letter accompanying View of Arles.
Even though Van Gogh’s work would resonate without any textual accompaniment, his words nonetheless open new perspectives on its meaning. But all the same, there’s no chance of the letters ever getting in the way of the paintings. As he wrote in one of his last letters to Theo, “These canvases will tell you what I can’t say in words.”
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