Art review: The Real Van Gogh: the Artist and his Letters

Published on Monday 25 January 2010 18:55

THE REAL VAN GOGH: THE ARTIST AND HIS LETTERS **** ROYAL ACADEMY, LONDON

• Vincent Van Gogh: Enclosed Field with Peasant, October 1889. Picture: Complimentary

HE HAD huge ambitions as a painter, but was a complete failure commercially. He lived in poverty, became unhinged and died after a botched attempt at suicide. No. Not Vincent van Gogh, but Benjamin Robert Haydon.

From that brief summary, however, you could suppose that the only difference between them was that Haydon was buried with both his ears, but he is forgotten and Van Gogh is a legend. If their lives were otherwise parallel, it cannot have been Van Gogh's life that first made him a legend. It was the extraordinary appeal of his art. Its power and its accessibility have made it universal. You cannot stand in front of one of his great canvasses and remain unmoved, no matter how little you are familiar, either with the story of his life, or with the history of Western art. There is poetic justice in that, too. It was his ambition, he said, "to paint for those who don't know the artistic side of a painting." Few have succeeded in that so well.

Nevertheless, the legend still obscures the art. Even people who should know better see madness reflected in his painting. The ambition of The Real Van Gogh: the Artist and his Letters is to challenge the legend. Although the stress on the letters makes it sound like an archival show, it is not. The letters are there, but only as an ancillary. He was a prodigious correspondent, especially to his brother Theo. Excerpts provide texts for the labels and the relevant letter is shown alongside. He also illustrated his letters with vivid little thumbnails of his latest works or whole sheet illustrations and these are shown too.

• Wheat Field with White Cloud

There are also other magnificent works on paper, especially a series of grand drawings of peasants at work from early in his career. Nevertheless this is above all an exhibition of his painting. It shows that far from dissolving into madness, what is extraordinary is its sustained coherence. Even when it flames with passion as it does in a late painting of cypresses at St Remy, or in a painting of olive trees in front of the surging silhouette of the Alpilles, the contorted hills that frame that little town, there is never a wasted brushmark.

He was painting a canvas a day, yet he cuts no corners, never seems to put down a wrong mark. Nor does he mess up his paint. The colours remain brilliant even as they change, brushmark by brushmark, in rhythmic patterns that dance across the canvas. He cannot have had time to plan his canvasses except in the most summary way, yet these rhythms are always in balance, never crowded or in conflict, but perfectly contained by the canvas edge.

Contain fire and it gives you heat and energy. Let it go and it may destroy you. In these paintings the fire is contained. They blaze with it. Perhaps in the end it did destroy him, but the very latest picture here, a view of wheatfields after the rain painted only days before his death, is full of energy certainly, but it is also a masterful rendering of space and light that radiates tranquillity.

There are several wide views that are equally serene. One of them, a very beautiful large watercolour, he himself compared to the wide horizons of the 17th century Dutch master, Koninck. That reminds us that Van Gogh was himself a Dutch painter. Like his predecessors his objective was to paint the world we know, not literally perhaps, but informed by feelings inspired by its observed beauty.

Just a few weeks before his death he painted a great vase of pale pink roses that is a masterpiece of vibrant colour in a composition that pulsates with energy, yet it is as balanced and harmonious as any 17th century still life. These things suggest we should not look in the pictures for evidence of the illness that brought about his death.

The tension in them is creative, not destructive. It springs from the balance he struck between his passion and his systematic, even methodical way of expressing it. This balance is there already in his very earliest work, too. A big pen drawing of a stretch of wet marshland from 1881, for instance, is awkward certainly, but very powerful. He works over the whole surface making rhythmic patterns with his pen. He was still doing the same thing with his brush loaded with pure colour in the last pictures he painted.

His ability to be so systematic without it checking his energy is apparent in several lovely drawings that he made after a painting he had done of boats at Les Saintes Maries de la Mer. The painting itself is as vivid an account of water as you could wish for.

In the drawing he renders this with changing patterns of repeated marks, with squiggles, dots and spirals, that cross the paper in formation like a troupe of dancers, at once lively and disciplined.

When he started to paint in Holland, his pictures of toiling peasants were dark and solemn. As he began to learn about Impressionism his palette lightened and when he moved to Paris in 1886, he began to use pure colour. It was then that his art took off.

After he moved to Arles in 1888, he painted portraits that are among the most familiar of their time, the postman Joseph Roulin, for instance, or his wife Augustine, called La Berceuse, but it is his feeling for landscape that we see here best of all.

There is a wall hung with a series of delicate paintings of trees in blossom from the spring of 1888. He painted gardens in flower and a view of Arles seen across fields of buttercups is quite exquisite in execution. There was a wheat field outside the window of his room in the asylum at St Remy. In three pictures that are elegiac in their pastoral beauty, he painted the wheat first when it was still green, then when it was gold and finally as it is being harvested.

This is five star art if ever there was, but because of the layout it cannot be a five star exhibition. Typically the pages of a letter are followed by tiny drawings, all in glass cases and each with a label, then by a canvas that has another label so wordy it takes a couple of minutes to read. All this is in the space of just a few feet. The show will be mobbed. Van Gogh is the biggest draw of all.

This cramped display will mean fierce elbow battles, even a breakdown in the normally douce behaviour of the Academy crowd. It is a great pity. There was enough space. Little more than half the Academy's main floor is used. This is the first major Van Gogh exhibition for many years and it's going to be almost impossible to see it properly.

The exhibition also loses focus because of the way it is arranged in seven thematic chapters. They start with the early work and end with the late landscapes as you would expect, but in between they wander off to reflect on topics like Colour, Portraits, Art and Literature, or Japanese prints. This is a muddle. It obscures the creative drama of Van Gogh's career and dilutes its extraordinarily concentration.

He decided to become a painter in August 1880. He died in October 1890. His whole achievement was packed into just ten years. Within this narrow time-frame Vincent moved from sombre landscapes of dark, damp corners of Holland to paintings of such blazing chromatic intensity that they have no rival.

&#149 Until 18 April