National Gallery London: If there is one exhibition you should see in London this autumn, it has to be Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers at the National Gallery. A cornucopia of delights, it is the first major exhibition of the artist’s work put on by the gallery. It includes many of his most famous paintings, such as The Sunflowers and his little straw-seated yellow chair, but also stunning pen and ink drawings and works from private collections, including The Peasant (Portrait of Patience Escalier).
In 1888, Van Gogh went to live and work, first in Arles and then in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in the South of France, where, for two years, he created some of the most innovative work within modern art. Despite all the mythology surrounding his life – the cut-off ear, the arguments with Gauguin, the prostitutes and brothels – he was a highly cultivated, deep-thinking and well-read man. Determined to focus on the emotional charge of a painting and its symbolism rather than on descriptive detail, he was desperate to find a unique painterly language concerned with expressiveness rather than veracity. Poetry seemed to be the key. When leaving Paris for the South, he was already well versed after his many conversations with fellow artists, including Pissarro, Paul Signac, Georges Seurat and his nemesis, Paul Gauguin, on the current debates surrounding poetry and painting. Of his The Trinquetaille Bridge, painted in 1888, the year he arrived in the south – with its giddy perspective, its roughly painted (almost Munch-like) figures and sky “the colour of absinthe”– he wrote that he was “attempting something more heartbroken and therefore more heartbreaking”. As with the best poems, he wanted to get to the heart of the matter.
Poetry appealed because of its emotional directness. It went hand in hand with intensity. In a letter to his brother Theo, he referred to it as terrible– the same word used by the German Poet Rainer Maria Rilke to describe the overwhelming sense of awe and wonder experienced in the face of beauty and the natural world. It is this quality of the sublime, this translation of the everyday and ordinary into something heightened, to which Van Gogh aspired. He read widely – Zola, Flaubert, Charles Dickens, George Elliot – and from a letter written to Theo when he was living in England, we know he was much moved by the raw feeling of the American Poet Longfellow. It was the idea of the Poet, along with his heightened sensibility and imagination, that appealed to him. One of the first portraits, painted to decorate the Yellow House that he rented with the idealistic hope that his artist friends from Paris would join him to work there, was of Eugène Boch, a young Belgian Impressionist. His angular face reminded Van Gogh of the Poet Dante. Though he didn’t think much about the young man’s work, he felt he’d ”painted him as something of a poet, his refined and nervous head standing out against a deep ultramarine background of the night sky, with the twinkling of stars.” Surrounded by gleaming points of light, the ‘poet’ appears to be the brightest star in the firmament.
Van Gogh also whimsically imagined Dante, along with other Renaissance poets, including Petrarch and Boccaccio, in a Poet’s Garden. His vision was based on the banal public park opposite the Yellow House, in which he imagined them strolling on the lawns and among the trees. His first Poet’s Garden was a verdant scene built of heavy impasto, the sky a sulphurous yellowish/green that casts a mysterious light on the foliage and speckling of pink oleanders. The empty park, in his hands, becomes an imagined Eden. In The Poet’s Garden (Public Garden at Arles, two faceless lovers walk hand in hand beneath shadows cast by the dense trees. As a disappointed lover and failed suitor, such romantic scenes amounted to little more than fanciful, wishful, and wistful thinking. Van Gogh’s love life was far from successful. Other gardens take over, namely that at the asylum to which he was to be admitted, the Hospital at Saint-Rémy, after a series of nervous crises. Here, the soaring corkscrew trees tower like vertical prison bars while solitary Lowry-like figures, rather than lovers, shuffle past the low yellow institution. Romance and the celestial meld in one of the most magical paintings in the exhibition, Starry Night over the Rhône. Beneath a dark blue velvet sky where the yellow/green stars explode like fireworks and are reflected on the dark skin of the water, he paints a pair of tiny imagined lovers in the bottom right-hand corner.
Alongside the archetypal Poet, the archetypal Lover is represented by the figure of Paul-Eugène Millet, a young soldier, dapper in his uniform: the flaming red kepi, the virile winged moustaches and penetrating eyes set against a deep turquoise backdrop. Perhaps Van Gogh was jealous, for he wrote, “he has all the women in Arles he wants.” It may be that not enough attention has been paid to the frustration and ensuing depression the romantic Van Gogh must have felt at not being able to sustain a loving and meaningful sexual relationship.
Walking around the exhibition, you cannot help but be exhilarated and moved by his genius. The quiet of the asylum at Saint-Paul de Mausole in Saint-Rémy, the psychiatric hospital to which he moved voluntarily after having his hand forced by his neighbours in Arles who saw him as a potential threat to public safety, seemed to provide him with some much-needed tranquillity to paint. Something happens. A new fluidity. A new freedom. Although he painted mostly from models and en plein air, Van Gogh always wanted to work more from his imagination. In many ways, this was his chance, à la Voltaire’s Candide, to ‘cultivate his garden.’ Whole days were spent absorbed in portraying it from various angles and perspectives. There is something paradisal about the beautiful painting The Garden of the Asylum of Saint-Rémy. The tangle of trees and flowering shrubs with the little stone bench set beneath a bower of hanging branches appears to invite peaceful solitary contemplation.
More and more, Van Gogh seems to move towards the symbolism he craved. It is as if he physically inhabited his paint. The urgent swirls in The Ravine (les Peiroulets) 1899, the dancing olive trees that burst from the red soil in an atavistic explosion, where the very earth seems to move in The Olive Trees, and the swirls of drifting starlight in The Starry Night 1889. In his stunning Field of Poppies, it’s as if, through his patchwork grid of brush marks, he was trying to stabilise what he knows to be an unstable world. Over and over again, he paints with his whole being, every nerve, every synapse, encapsulating what that great language-busting priest-poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called ‘inscape,’ the very essence of the inanimate that for him contained God, and for Van Gogh, the life force.
In many ways, it is not surprising that Van Gogh shot himself, not because he was ‘mad’ but because it must have been so draining to live within the whirling vortex of his imagination. Along with Picasso, he was the most original and important modernist painter, the one who changed how we see the world and how we relate to art. Look at the paintings. Read his diaries and letters. “Glory be to God for dappled things”, wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins in his poem Pied Beauty. It’s a poem full of love and wonder, just like the love, wonder, and awe to be found in Van Gogh’ stunning paintings.
Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers 14 September 2024 ‒ 19 January 2025 The National Gallery Rooms 1‒8, Admission charge
Sue Hubbard is an award-winning poet, novelist and freelance art critic. She has published five collections of poetry, a book of short stories and four novels, which have been translated into French and Mandarin.
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