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

Good afternoon, for the next half hour we're going to focus on this and a minute or two ago I was talking to one of my colleagues about this image and I said to him that it really burns into the wall, doesn't it? You would even believe that we actually have a light behind us, it's almost like it's backlit, it's so resonant and yes, let's use the word dazzling, now none of you are waiting for me to tell you who it is, are you listening? people talking about this I never 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 these are not sunflowers. He says some flowers on the label before. being a picture of sunflowers, everyone knows what it is, it's a Van Gogh because that's what all these things are recognizable from a distance of half a mile, isn't it in this inimitable way of painting that he invents and that touches the people's hearts and One thing I can absolutely guarantee at this very moment in Amsterdam will be that there will be a huge line outside the Van Gogh Museum to get in because there is always, there is no other museum like this in the world, especially another museum dedicated to art of a person Vincent communicates, he communicates with people who are not interested in art, which is a real tribute to the guy.

Well, let's first think about Vincent in his biography. His story is so well known that we can tell it. He was born in a little. city ​​called Noonan in the Netherlands his father is a Protestant pastor he spent the first thirty years of his life failing at everything he was quite old when he started the first painting we have by Vincente in our collection comes from his first serious campaign of work is the one that is in the corner, there is the head of a peasant woman who was 30 years old when she painted that painting and who is quite old to start your artistic career and six or seven years later she left, so her career is incredibly short and I think it is good to remind us how short his working life was, especially when you compare him to other iconic artists in this collection such as Turner, Michelangelo or the optician Rembrandt, in particular Vincent is like a meteorite bush and has now gone to work in Newnan.

He had returned there because he had ruined everything else. He briefly worked as an assistant at an art dealership, but was fired supposedly because his religious zeal bothered the clients he became or attempted to become a teacher. He moves to England for a while. while first he swims to Ramsgate then the eyes are worth it. I live quite close to a small road called Van Gogh. He closes his eyes and every time I pass by there I always make a small gesture with my head and there is the house in which he lived 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 had a real almost fundamentalist religious zeal that he inherited from his Protestant pastor father and he went to live among the workers of an area called Borinage, the miners, this was a very disadvantaged area of ​​Belgium and the only thing they did was laughing at him, so he ruined everything. He returned to Noonan and decided to become a painter. Now this is extraordinary. Because he had failed at everything except reading the letters and his course.

We know a lot about Vincent from the letters he wrote to her, especially to his brother Theo, and the letters he wrote back to her. I had absolutely no doubt that he was a great artist and his early work matched it. with bewilderment and mockery, but it wasn't like that, Fox didn't faze him at all, he was just completely focused, if they didn't understand him, they didn't understand him, he knew what he was working on now with the peasants in Newnan. We won't talk to his big potato eaters about that because we want to get to Paris as quickly as possible because Theo, his brother,

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for an art dealer in Paris.

Theo invites him to come to Paris too and he goes there and meets the Impressionists, he meets people like Pizarro, he meets people like Emile Bernard and Toulouse Lautrec. Now Pizarro is an extraordinary man and he is one of those artists who would like to embrace a younger artist like he did with his, like he did with go. And as he did with Suzanne, he encourages Vincent to improve his palette because he comes from midday and comes from the Netherlands, where his great hero is Rembrandt. He is painting earthy brown pictures. When he sees the impressionists, he thinks that there is color in the world and also in his life.

It coincides with a time when new pigments are being invented, so a painting like the sunflowers, and indeed the others we have here, are painted with new artificial pigments that, when you walk through the National Gallery through its chronology, you will see Suddenly you notice that the colors change, you arrive at room 41 with Dellacroix Courbet Angra and then you go to the next room, we have a beggar, a Monet, and suddenly, all these colors are being invented, they are a kind of byproduct of the industry. Revolution and let's also take a moment to pay tribute to John G R and John G R and without whom john jeer invented the little squeeze tube that's why we have paints like this and you all have clean teeth that allowed artists to buy these new pigments portable and going outside, that makes painting much more practical.

Now in Paris he meets Go again and is very impressed with Gogan, but Vincent gets an idea and that brings me back to these. Japanese visitors standing in front of these paintings. He loves Japanese art. He befriends a man named Pere Tanguy. Tanguy is a painter of colors. He deals with these new pigments. Vincent befriends him, paints two portraits of him, and Vincent sees his large stock of Japanese prints. Now let's think about those for a moment. They initially arrived in Europe basically as wrapping paper for fine china. They were not seen in Japan as high art.

They were basically folk art. Street art. Mass-produced images of actors. Mass produced fine art images. courtly mass-produced images of tea houses and landscapes and really impressionist artists find these things and think: how different from the European tradition! flat, beautiful colors, direct, sparkling, clear, fattening and beautiful compositions, and Vincent decides that he is going to establish a colony. of artists in the south of France inspired by this idea that he had in his head that Japanese artists lived in colonies like in the middle of the mountains and things just making art now, where he got this idea from who knows, but Vincent had the idea that he would establish a colony of artists in the south of France and be like those Japanese artists.

Now, first of all, he goes off on his own 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 lived in fear in Paris. I won't go into specific incidents, but Theo's friends stopped visiting him. He wasn't the easiest man to get along with. Theo lived a sort of conventional middle-class lifestyle and had friends around. to dinner, but with Vincent there, this irascible, short-tempered man who spoke French with a funny guttural accent. I think he could get into a fight with anyone and people would just stop coming and I think also Vincent realized the stress he was putting on his brother because Theo had supported him financially, this is also absolutely fascinating because AND it was Theo who supported Vincent .

He began to support him the moment he returned to Noonan and began painting peasant women and men. Now two theories, you have to decide that he was supporting Vincent because he passionately believed in Vincent's art, no one else did, but Theo could see the potential genius he had as his brother. The theory also supported Vincent out of brotherly love and had this ducky brother that he wasn't going to do anything. he failed as a preacher he failed as a schoolteacher he failed as an art dealer he failed at love he absolutely failed at everything 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 getting in the way and he thought it would be good for both of them to go down if he took everyone down, so he goes to all the places 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 live with Vincent in everything and come back?

He realizes that he owes Theo a debt of gratitude because Theo has also been selling his

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and giving him some support. and come back to the end cracks, okay? I will go. I love instance work. I think going again I possibly felt like it might not work. How sensible that is, but anyway Vincent gets very excited about the news that he's going and what he's doing. Buys. He collects as much yellow paint as he can and paints this and other paintings of the same subject, there are actually seven of these that he makes, three of them are copies, when I say copies, they are Vincent's copies of his own work and the original plan of he.

It was making these sunflower paintings as decorations for Gogan's room when he comes to ours and so they're made with this sense of emotion, they're made with the idea that hey, come on, let's come and we're two artists and others. . The artists will come and join us and we will live this fantastic life just taking pictures now, when Gogan arrives of course everything goes wrong and culminates in the story of the year that everyone knows so well, but let's back up before that. Go paint pictures like this Goggan has not left yet, but go as a guarantor to the South Seas, to Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands, where he ends, but go paint from the imagination, go again, he does not need to go and sit in a field and looks at everything and copies what he is seeing.

The gang can sit in his studio, close their eyes and conjure up these things and the two artists it's a different way of working because Vincent always needed something in front of him there, that's why he comes out. the landscape, I mean, these photographs here were taken outside, he carried his easel on his back, this is when he was in the asylum, the famous story that will begin in a minute, but he went out and worked outdoors. go again. He tries to get Vincent to work from his imagination and opts for a powerful and very dominant personality.

Vincent tries to do this, but he can't. He needs things in front of him, so when he paints the sunflowers, he actually has a pot in front of him. and the flowers, let's take a look. Shall we look at them yesterday? What caught my attention and hadn't really caught my attention before is its spicy flavor, that particularly in the central part of the image the petals are like it has this kind of metallic sense, a kind of sharp, pointed edge, threatening. Now I say this, of course, in retrospect, because we know what happened to this artist and it is virtually impossible for any of us to look at this image without Thinking now about the story behind this, I don't believe for a minute that it is the story. behind Vincent's life that makes him such a successful and popular artist, much loved today, but the story doesn't get in the way in the sense that it helps in a sense. interact with the images and, so to speak, meet the personality that made the image, but I think what people don't notice about the image and I never realized this until I knew the image for quite a few years, but most of the sun is here now.

They are dead that these are the seed heads, the dried and prickly seed heads that the petals have fallen off and you will see that this one here only has one petal left now that when Vincent was working on all his religious faith had not diminished but he had changed and he was no longer focused on Protestant Christianity, he was much more focused on a kind of universal religion and almost a kind of nature worship in some way yellow is his favorite color because it is the color of life. It is the color of the Sun and it has a kind of symbolic value that I think we can say works in two ways: first of all, the color, we register it 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 they are also innate properties of colors, that colors have a psychological resonance, that an artist follows Vincent and follows the Gogan artists to the next generation, like for example Kandinsky, who is currently in the beautiful Dellacroix show. using color and thinking about color for the psychological effect, what you could even call the emotional effect it has on the viewer and yellow is not a color that makes you go or if it were blue you would stand in front of it like Picasso .

Vintage pictures in blue, you stand in front of them and you don't jump with excitement, but here it gives you energy, yellow really kicks you, doesn't it? Vincent is Dutch and flowers are a very important part of them. Dutch cultural memory Dutch cultural heritage at the beginning of next notes at the end of this year, it's 2016, right? Yes, if you're watching this in the future, this was filmed in 2016, right at the end of this year, we'll have a showroom of one of the 17th century Dutch flower paintings. or 17 and 18, but the Golden Age of Dutch floral paintings is the 17th century and, thereforeOf course, flowers from the time of the so-called tulip mania in the late 1620s and early 1630s are a big part of Dutch culture and floral painting is a big part of it too.

From Dutch culture now those beautiful flower pieces are painted in a deeply Christian Protestant culture and are meant to be understood, seen and read as reminders of our own mortality as things that are beautiful and bloom in a moment fade and die. and the Protestant Calvinists' interpretation of this is that our lives are like flowers that we thrive and bloom and then we die and those images are there to remind the prosperous 17th century Dutch businessman and hamburger master that no matter how rich you are, how much you can afford, where is your big house is that one day you are going to die and it is actually going to be very soon, don't forget it now.

I'm not saying that Vincent is consciously making a painted picture of flowers in the tradition of 17th century flower paintings, but he certainly inherited it unconsciously, so when he sets himself the task of painting a series of flower pictures, he is making memento mori, as we would say, a reminder of our own mortality and the fact that we have flowers that are dead and flowers that are dying emphasizes that, but wait, I can see that everyone looks like they are thinking about their own mortality. Now there is no need because inside the seed heads I have given them away.

It is not like this? There are the seeds and there is the germ. the little trigger full of energy and potential life waiting to come to life next spring with the next generation of children, so it's kind of a picture of the cycle of life, isn't it? Vincent is a New Age pagan, wouldn't you know? An image like This has this abstract quality of that extraordinary brilliance of the different yellows, but it also has built-in the potential to come to life even more with the hundreds, if not thousands, of little sunflower seeds that are buried here now, Vincent, for supposed. had his meltdown, our only account for this ear-cropping episode is OMG, so you have to wonder if you trust it.

What Gogan tells us is that Vincent was behaving very strangely and late at night he threatened to fall with a knife. and he turned gay and left, well that's all the game tells us and what happens next is famous, his ear or part of his ear comes out, he wraps it up and takes it to a brothel and gives it to one of the girls from the brothel. I mean, I imagine she changed careers after the gay man, but then he was hospitalized, he lost a lot of blood and almost died, and then she painted that profound self-portrait that we're lucky to have just a few hundred yards away.

In the Courtauld collection he appears with his ear bandaged and behind him a Japanese print, so I'll come back to the idea of ​​Japan in a moment, but he was nursed back to health in the hospital and then the next part of his life a through Theo is terribly worried and never meets again Vincent runs again just when his friend needs him more Gauguin doesn't come out of this at all well and it could even be that Gauguin is telling this story hey, he attacked me with a knife to justify abandoning your friend, we're actually the only person saying go gang was attacked by a van with a razor blade.

Golf is the same go gang now go gang. I'm aware this can be edited, but it doesn't matter, go gang was not a good person. use many other words from fabulous, wonderful, extraordinary artists whose work I love. I don't think I would have liked it very much. Vincent is abandoned and then I hear music. I'm sorry. Vincent is abandoned and submits to being a voluntary patient. in the San Remi asylum, which is where he paints this painting, that painting comes out with a member of the staff, I just want to make sure he is okay, but he carries the easel paintings in his backpack and that's it, he settles into the landscape and paints . these amazing things this is on the grounds of the asylum and the last move he makes is to leave where we have this extraordinary image that is not finished it is fascinating to look at this image it says problem when it is finished because Vincent died but there are areas where you can see it it is very interesting where He's planning areas like a job that I'm sure if he hadn't died he would have returned to now.

Now I'm going, I hope you get a little better because I'm going to read you a letter from Emile Bernard to a critic and writer called Ory, an Albert or EA or a recognized genius of Vincent was the first writer who really recognized what a great artist Vincent was when Vincent was alive. It is a myth that was not recognized in avant-garde circles in France and in Belgium, they had recognized that they had someone really special here, but this is Emile Bernard's letter because Bernard found out about Vincent's death and ran away to Ovair, which is not far from Paris. just before the funeral and attends the funeral and this is what mu Bernard writes.

I have cut it because it is a very long letter. Our dear friend Vincent died four days ago. I think you've already guessed that he committed suicide. He entered the fields near Ovair, placed the easel against the haystack and then shot himself with a revolver at the walls of the room where his body lay. All his last canvases were nailed up and in fact it seems that Emile Bernard and Theo put all the paintings around the coffin and Van Gogh's first major exhibition had Vincent in the middle and all the last canvases formed something of a halo around him and they made his death even more deplorable through the brilliance and genius that shone in the paintings on the coffin were masses of flowers. sunflowers, yellow flowers that he loved so much, a symbol of that light that he dreamed of in the hearts and in the paintings close to him, also his easel, his folding stool and his brushes were placed on the ground next to the coffin, now that is not It is installation art.

That's what I mean, you can imagine it, right?, right?, the dead artist, his brushes, his stool, his paint box and then the images that he has been making in the last few days around him. You can only imagine it and boy, it must have been quite a sight. Shouldn't it be like this now? So the latest from Dr. Gachet now dr. Gachet was someone who was taking care of him in ovair and who was also an amateur artist. We know of many people who work at the funeral and who came to pay tribute to you, dr.

Gachet tried to say a few words but he cried too much and could only stammer a confused goodbye and then we went back. Theo van Gogh was completely devastated by his grief and I think that is absolutely true because not long after Theo died as well, and the two of them are buried together in Ovair, that is a wonderful scene, the coffin with the sunflowers and we are very lucky to have ML Bernard's account of this, but that brought me back to the Japanese visitors because he learned so much from Japan, he loved Japan so much and one of the copies that Vincent made himself is in Japan, it was acquired about twenty thirty ago years and it's 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 loved to see his photo here with a bunch of Japanese people who They come every day and stand next to this, probably on the trip of a lifetime, to the other side of the world wanting to come. to Europe and having one of the first things they have to do while they're here and they can't go home until they've done that is to come and see this, so I find it quite wonderful, quite moving, and the other.

What I haven't mentioned in this talk in relation to Japan is crabs. I did a project last year with some postgraduate students from Wimbledon College of Art and after their project I went back to the university to see their work and it was an MA and the students were given the task of choosing a painting to do what which we called a transcription of them and this Japanese student had chosen that because she said that crabs are a very important part of our culture and I said, well, show me your work then with you and she said well it's here it's on the ground and what it consisted of on a big green sheet of paper and two crabs walking and she said well I thought Vincent had done everything I couldn't do anything else and I said well what are you going to do with them and she looked at me like I was a complete idiot and just I went to eat them and I thought Vincent bless you for taking that photo of Crab he took the photo of the crabs. because again Japanese woodblock prints are a subject of artists like hawks.

I heard that she, gay, has made pictures of crabs and that's where that comes from and Vincent, no, let's do it right. Japan affects Vincent. Vincent returns the compliment, thank you.