Joyce Glasser reviews Van Gogh: Poets & Lovers (November 6, 2024) Cert. 12A, 89 mins
The latest Exhibition on Screen film takes you around London’s National Gallery’s blockbuster show that focuses on the two-year-three-month period of Vincent Van Gogh’s peripatetic life spent in the South of France. Poets & Lovers is not so much a documentary as an invaluable guide to this gorgeous exhibition. So helpful, that while you would normally not want to spoil the spontaneous thrill of finding yourself face to face with the paintings, it’s worth seeing this film before the exhibition.
Without doing so, you will still be awestruck by so many colour-infused great works of art, many of which not even the most ardent Van Gogh fans will have seen before. It’s just that several things are happening in Van Gogh’s work during this productive time which are illuminated by the extensive use of the artist’s letters (mainly to his brother Theo) read in the film, and the insightful, targeted comments by the two co-curators and the art critic Rachel Campbell-Johnson.
For one thing, Van Gogh had just left Paris where his dark, Northern palette had been influenced by the colour theories and experiments used by the Impressionists and neo-Impressionists he saw and met. When he abandoned the over-stimulation of Paris he was convinced that, to be part of, and compete with, the avant-garde, he had to take what he saw to a new level. That’s the first clue to the exhibition.
Van Gogh is repositioned. He is not a clueless outsider but a conscious professional, thinking about decorating homes and galleries with his work and what work would complement another in a room. Famously he did not sell during this lifetime, but within 25 years of his death the world had caught up with Van Gogh. He was one of the most influential and purchased artists in the world, inspiring fakes onto the market.
The first room contains just three paintings there to dispel a literal reading of the exhibition title. Though poets and lovers occupied the learned, lonely artist’s imagination, his work is seldom literal. Although forced to leave school at 15, Van Gogh was extremely well and widely read (in five languages); a fact illustrated in the exhibition, which draws a direct connection between his reading and his paintings.
The first of the three paintings in room one, entitled The Lover, is a portrait of Lieutenant Milliet, a “bad poser”, tolerated because Van Gogh was desperate for studies of “a good looking, very jaunty”, model who was “easy going in his appearance” for his lover, and Milliet fitted the bill. A bit of a cad, Milliet’s military uniform and swagger attracted ladies even if they were largely prostitutes.
But that didn’t bother Van Gogh, because – and here’s another clue to the exhibition – in Arles, from February 1888 until the spring of 1890, he was striving to express the feeling of love (and other emotions) with colour.
The second painting is entitled The Poet’s Garden although in reality it’s a grubby little neighbourhood park opposite Van Gogh’s new home in Arles, referred to as The Yellow House (this famous painting is in the exhibition). The Yellow House is a basic, cramped two-bedroom, studio/living room rental. But again, Van Gogh transformed it, describing the outside as “the colour of butter” and the inside as a place “where I can live and breathe and think and paint” – something he could no longer do in Paris.
The third painting is entitled The Poet, but you won’t be surprised to learn that the model is the Belgium painter Eugene Boch, a wealthy member of the Villeroy & Boch family whom Van Gogh met that year (1888). Boch was known for helping struggling painters and Van Gogh tells his art-dealer brother Theo:
‘I’d like to put in the painting my appreciation, my love that I have for him… I’ll paint him then, just as he is as faithfully as I can – to begin with.’
And with that “to begin with” we get to the heart of this ground-breaking exhibition.
‘But the painting isn’t finished like that…Because instead of trying to render exactly what I have before my eyes, I use colour more arbitrarily in order to express myself forcefully…instead of painting the dull wall of the mean room, I paint the infinite.’
With that we realise that the only poet here is Van Gogh himself. His own writing is so potent, erudite, expressive and beautiful it can move you to tears. His empathy is boundless, but lovers exist in the artist’s imagination. As Van Gogh wrote to Gauguin, his schedule is painting and a fortnightly trip to the brothel. (The exhibition covers the ear incident, which took place not long after Gauguin joins Van Gogh in the “yellow house” for his ultimately tragic “studio of the south” experiment).
Armed with what we’ve gathered from these three paintings, we venture forth into a dazzling display of variations on themes. The starry background of The Poet becomes Starry Night Over the Rhône (River) with the lovers in the foreground.
Reworkings on the same subject (wheat fields, parks, grass and cypress trees) abound, each transformed by the application of paint, the speed and length of strokes and the application of colour into a new painting. And when confined to the Asylum of St Rémy, he does the same with the hospital gardens, and snarled tree trunks – described in letters as dark or sad, perhaps to reflect the painters mood.
When you come across one of the glories of 19th century art, The Sewer, we see Van Gogh defiantly competing with his masters. He takes on Millet (whose own painting, The Sewer, Van Gogh copied when learning to draw) and Gauguin (whose recent Visions after the Sermon also features a Japanese style tree dividing the canvas) without abandoning his cherished labourer who he crowns with the sun’s golden halo.
The curators dispel the myth of the aimless, mad genius in his little bubble, revealing a professional, avant-garde master, aware of the art world around him and taking not only colour to new heights, but also expressionism, years before the German Expressionists (Die Brücke and The Blue Rider).
And that is why the gallery wall, materialising the sketch in a letter to Theo, is such a revelation. Van Gogh places the ground-breaking portrait La Berceuse (The “rocker,” referring to a baby crib, but also a sailor’s boat) between two large canvases of vases of sunflowers in an exhilarating dialogue. Whether Van Gogh knew it or not, no one was painting like that or imagining an exhibition display with such a complex, thought provoking and thrilling arrangement of canvases.
