All posts tagged Arles

The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles by Martin Gayford (2006)

‘I should like to have been born a pig’ – Paul Gauguin

‘One cannot forgo a woman for too long with impunity’ – Vincent van Gogh

‘Calm down, eat well, fuck well, work well and you will die happy’ – Paul Gauguin

‘We painters must get our orgasms from the eye’ – Vincent van Gogh

‘… an art that offers consolation for the broken-hearted’ – Vincent van Gogh

Executive summary

From October to December 1888 two great artistic innovators, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, lived and worked, ate and collaborated and argued, in a small house in Arles in the south of France. It was a period of intense inventiveness and productivity – in the month from late November to late December van Gogh painted no fewer than 35 paintings! But as Christmas approached, Vincent’s mood became more troubled and his behaviour more difficult until finally, on 23 December, Gauguin announced he was leaving, prompting van Gogh to carry out the inexplicable atrocity of cutting off his own left ear.

This book, by long-established art critic Martin Gayford, is a fairly long (356 pages), detailed but very readable account of those torrid two months, shedding light on the two men’s careers up to the fateful stay, painting a picture of the networks of experimental and avant-garde artists they operated within, shedding light on aspects of contemporary French society and artistic practice, but mostly concentrating on the day-to-day nuts and bolts of their lives together – who did the cooking, which locals they got on with and painted, locations they chose as subjects of their paintings, letters to and from Vincent’s brother Theo, fellow artist Emile Bernard, and so on.

Longer synopsis

On 20 February 1888, Vincent van Gogh arrived in Arles in the South of France, after having lived and painted in Paris for two years. He had only started painting in 1880, at the age of 27 (born March 1853) but had developed a quirky and unique style, of composition, colour and technique.

Now 35, after staying in various rented rooms, in May 1888 Van Gogh rented what became known as ‘the yellow house’, at Number 2 Place Lamartine, for 15 francs per month. Here he lived and set up his studio. He hoped it would form the nexus of a community of artists, a commune, almost a monastery of ascetics devoted to ‘the new art’, and had reached out to several of his peers.

The Yellow House by Vincent van Gogh (1888) Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent Van Gogh Foundation)

Early on the morning of 23 October the most talented of these friends, Paul Gauguin, having received many invitations, finally arrived in Arles and took the bedroom next to Vincent’s.

For the next two months the two artists lived and painted together, in intense camaraderie, but it was a fractious difficult relationship, Gauguin finding it hard to live with the increasingly unstable Vincent. He threatened to move out several times and the whole thing climaxed on the notorious evening of 23 December 1888 when, after Gauguin announced that he was moving out, van Gogh sliced off pretty much his entire left ear with a razor.

Gauguin went ahead and moved out but van Gogh stayed on in the Yellow House until February of the next year, when he checked himself into a hospital. He continued to work in Arles for a few more months but had himself interned voluntarily in the asylum in Saint-Rémy on 8 May 1889.

The totality of his time in Arles, from February 1888 to May 1889, was a period of intense artistic productivity during which he created over 300 works, including masterpieces like ‘Sunflowers’, ‘The Starry Night Over the Rhône’, ‘The Bedroom’ and ‘The Night Café’.

This book by English art critic Martin Gayford (b. 1952 and so 72 years old) is a retelling of this well-worn story. Does his retelling justify the cost of admission? Well, there are already 1) umpteen editions of Vincent’s letters, which any chronicler of the period has to quote and 2) umpteen other accounts of this famous period, including exhibitions devoted to it and accompanied by scholarly catalogues.

Gayford adds lots of details and spin-off facts, the banalities of life such as how, on the night of Saturday 13 October, Vincent slept for 16 hours straight. He has the letters and memoirs to go on, and so is able to produce a pretty much day-by-day account.

Notable factoids

Neither Gauguin nor van Gogh were leading figures in the art world of the time. That was probably 29-year-old Georges Seurat who had invented an entirely new way of painting (with dots – pointillisme) that had seduced some of the older generation of impressionists. Gauguin loathed it as the peak of rationality, the opposite of the dreamy symbolism he aspired to (p.124-5).

But lots of it is more along the lines of how on 29 September, van Gogh bought two beds for the house, at a cost of 150 francs. He spent more money having gas lighting installed.

Vincent’s drinking was sometimes ‘out of control’. When he was depressed he drank to liven himself up. When he was troubled by anguished thoughts he drank to stupor himself. So whatever mood, drink was the answer. He often stayed late drinking at the Café de la Gare, and spent three evenings making his famous painting of it.

The Night Café by Vincent van Gogh (September 1888) Yale University Art Gallery

Gauguin, by contrast, drank little or nothing, making a small glass last all night, mainly for appearance’ sake. After a couple of months Gauguin thought Vincent was an alcoholic.

That said, Vincent was ‘addicted’ to coffee and one of the first things he did after moving into the yellow House was buy coffee-making apparatus.

Both Gauguin and Vincent smoked pipes, the pipe prolétarienne, the Bohemian alternative to cigars.

They were both frank about visiting one of Arles’s six brothels or maisons de tolerances, agreeing that sex was good for the health. About once a fortnight, though a local later remembered that Vincent was always ‘hanging round’ the brothels.

Prostitution was part of Vincent’s life and long had been. The only women he ever went with, he remarked rather bitterly to Theo, were whores at 2 francs intended for Zouaves. At one time Vincent had lived with a reformed prostitute; now in Arles his only sexual relations were bought with small sums of money. (p.119)

(In fact van Gogh had lived for 21 months with a prostitute, from January 1882 to September 1883 – Cristina or Sien Hoornick in the Hague. She had a four-year-old daughter and during their time together gave birth to a son by another man. Van Gogh declared he wanted to marry her until his scandalised family stepped in and threatened to suspend his financial support. Regretfully Vincent left her, moving away, but was haunted by a sense of loss which informs some of his greatest paintings – pages 228 to 231.)

Prostitution, Vincent felt, would have been bad if society were ‘pure and well-regulated’. As it was, materialism and sanctimonious morality ruled; prostitutes seemed more like ‘sisters of mercy’ to an outcast such as Vincent. He felt no scruple about associating with them; he liked their company. There was something ‘human’ about them. (p.230)

The rent for the Yellow House was paid to Bernard Soulé, manager of the hotel on the Avenue Montmajour.

Vincent liked creating gangs, introducing his friends to each other, choreographing their relationships, trying and continually failing to create a community of artists.

Someone who lives in Arles is a called an Arlésien, or Arlésienne for a woman. The Arlésiens spoke a dialect of French known as Provencal or Occitan, which was closer to Catalan than French. Neither Vincent nor Gauguin could understand them. In any case, Vincent spoke French more purely than Gauguin who had been born and raised abroad.

Paul Cézanne (born 1839), the prototypical painter of the French south, was a god to Gauguin but van Gogh disliked him, thinking his work to finicky and controlled. On the one occasion when Vincent showed the older man his work, Cézanne told him he was a madman.

Gauguin was a keen fencer and brought his foil, gloves and mask with him from Brittany. He also liked boxing. He played board games. He could also play the piano, badly. Vincent could do none of these things.

Gauguin was a detached, rational almost scientific painter, making painstaking preparations. He believed art was an intellectual activity and involved generating abstract patterns from what was in front of you.

‘Do not paint too much from nature. Art is an abstraction; extract it from nature, while dreaming in front of it.’ (quoted on page 69)

‘Abstract’ was a favourite word of Gauguin’s (p.101).

Van Gogh was the direct opposite, working feverishly, impetuously, long splashes of paint worked into swirls and whorls resonating with his passion – ‘very rapidly in one exhilarating rush’.

Which is why van Gogh produced in a working career of just under ten years more paintings than Gauguin produced in 30 (p.113).

Van Gogh wanted to paint what was in front of him but in a feverishly stylised way, especially the heightened colouring. Gauguin didn’t give a damn what was in front of him but wanted to extract the essence of the dream. Which is why he was soon to be invited into Symbolist circle of the poet Stéphane Mallarmé (p.101).

When van Gogh lost his religious faith he discovered a fervent belief in contemporary literature (p.145). Vincent loved the writings of Émile Zola and read his realistic novels avidly. He was reading Zola’s latest novel, The Dream. Gauguin disliked Zola, thinking his style false. Vincent also liked Guy de Maupassant, the Goncourt brothers, Alphonse Daudet and the popular novelist Pierre Loti.

The best art quote is from Gauguin and not about life in the South but in the Brittany he’d just come from, and is a good insight into his painting.

I love Brittany. I find here the savage and the primitive. When my clogs clang on this granite earth, I hear the dull, muffled tone, flat and powerful, that I try to achieve in painting.
(quoted page 58)

Gauguin was designated the cook of the household, he had a feel for good food. Van Gogh on the other hand, had a functional attitude: food was fuel which kept going his intense mind and perceptions. Plus he had a long history of stomach problems, exacerbated by long spells of poverty and/or religious zeal in which he deliberately starved himself. (Both men took a similarly functional attitude towards sex; it was a healthy release from what really mattered, which was painting.) Disappointingly, neither of them left any record of what Gauguin cooked.

Gauguin had attended Roman Catholic school and been drilled in his catechism. Van Gogh was the son of a Protestant pastor. In England he got work as a teaching assistant in a Protestant school and gave sermons (the first, on the subject of pilgrimage, at the Wesleyan chapel in Richmond, p.106). By the time they were at the Yellow House, both men had lost their faiths but Vincent never lost his northern, Protestant earnestness.

Van Gogh wrote repeatedly about wanting to paint the ordinary men and women of his time with the intensity the olden artists reserved for Christian saints. A noble wish but Gayford thinks he was crippled by his Protestant honesty, his dogged commitment to the truth in front of him, ‘too truthful, too wedded to the facts, too Dutch’ (p.250).

Gauguin, with his background in a Catholic seminary, found it much easier to create paintings with a Christian resonance and later would paint works with explicitly religious imagery, invoking Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the Fall, the Crucifixion and much more (p.248).

Both van Gogh and Gauguin were essentially self-taught, picking up tips and ideas from everywhere and their contemporaries.

They had picked it up from other artists and, in Vincent’s case, from life classes at which he tended to clash angrily with the teachers. Essentially, they were self-taught, and that made them more open to innovations of every kind: stylistic, spiritual, technical. (p.71)

This was one of the great objections made by academic artists and critics to the impressionists and the wave of artists who followed them – that they went through none of the careful preparation for a painting enjoined on students, but used their own slapdash methods. (Gayford explains the correct academic stages for creating a painting – consisting of: preliminary sketch; sketch; study; then final tableau – page 104.)

Van Gogh was very messy; he never put the lids back on the paint tubes which were always oozing paint all over the place, which drove Gauguin nuts. And he wasn’t the only one. Half a century later the daughter of a local shopkeeper remembered van Gogh as ‘very ugly, ungracious, impolite, crazy and bad-smelling’ (p.73).

They walked and moved differently. Plenty of eye witnesses testified to van Gogh’s ‘short, quick, irregular’ steps which were echoed by his whole bodily movement which was jerky and ungainly (p.289). All this contrasted with Gauguin who cultivated a calm and stately air, sober gestures and dignity which could come across as aloofness (p.114).

Van Gogh was intolerably prolix. Once started, he tried to persuade everyone he was talking to of his views, yoking in examples from art, music, philosophy, literature and his experiences. His friend, the young painter Emile Bernard, remembered him as ‘vehement in discourse, interminably explaining and developing his ideas’ (p.162). This came over in his letters, which sometimes ran to 16 pages of rambling argumentation. Just one of the things that wore Gauguin down.

Gauguin heard a great deal of Vincent’s views about portraiture, as about everything else. (p.241)

Gauguin was very excited when he learned that Edgar Degas liked his latest paintings. Degas (born 1834) was from the generation above Vincent and Gauguin. According to Gayford he was a ‘crabby and caustic man, known for displays of acerbic wit at Parisian dinner parties’ (p.222).

Gauguin humorously signed his many letters PGo, which could be pronounced as ‘pego’ which, apparently, is French slang for penis.

Les Alyscamps

In the first weeks of the joint stay, Gauguin and van Gogh spent days in Arles’ ancient cemetery, Les Alyscamps, which dated back to Roman times, still very atmospheric despite being encroached on by a big factory and cut across by a modern railways line.

Their different approaches to the purpose of art, their styles and techniques are vividly distinguished in the paintings they made. Gauguin extracted from the scene an abstract view of mysterious figures in a portentous landscape, coloured with rich and unnaturalistic colours.

‘Les Alyscamps or the three graces at the temple of Venus’ by Paul Gauguin (1888) Musée d’Orsay

Van Gogh used colours intensely but a) left in all the modern details, included the factory with smoke coming from its chimneys and b) his people are almost accidental details, giving a sense of the everyday and contingent but made feverishly intense. You can see how messily – and incompletely – the paint has been applied in the foreground.

‘Les Alyscamps, Avenue in Arles’ by Vincent van Gogh (October 1888) Source/Photographer: Goulandris Foundation

Two portraits of Mrs Roulin

Showing just how different two portraits of the same person can be, when executed by two such very different sensibilities. Augustine-Alix Roulin, born in 1851 and so 37, was the wife of a local postal official, Joseph Roulin. In December 1888, Vincent persuaded the entire family to sit for their portraits, including the children and the little baby Marcelle.

On the first occasion, Vincent and Gauguin both painted Madame Roulin at the same sitting, sitting in the same chair, wearing the same clothes, against the same background. The resulting portraits not only show the two artists’ contrasting styles but are a revelation of how utterly differently two people can see exactly the same thing. In fact van Gogh is quoted saying as much, saying of portraits that ‘one and the same person may furnish motifs for very different portraits’ (p.239).

Here’s Vincent’s rendering.

‘Portrait of Madame Augustine Roulin’ by Vincent van Gogh (November to December 1888) Winterthur: Oskar Reinhart Collection

And Gauguin’s. They could barely be more unalike in composition but also the handling of the paint.

‘Madame Roulin’ by Paul Gauguin (1888)

Gayford tells us it was by his portraits that van Gogh wished to be judged whereas Gauguin wasn’t much of a portraitist, except of himself (p.254).

Comments

Gayford’s book is enjoyable partly because it has a great subject and that subject is absolutely awash with sources to draw on. Van Gogh’s paintings, his letters (‘Few people have left a fuller self-portrait in words than Vincent did, p.315); Gauguin’s letters, his later memoirs; the memoirs of their correspondents (notably brother Theo van Gogh and the young painter Emile Bernard); and memories of inhabitants of Arles – there is a wealth of information, before you even start on the secondary material, namely loads of biographies of both men, thousands of essays by art critics and scholars, the catalogues of countless exhibitions, and so on.

Gayford synthesises all this into a competent, interesting and – in the final scenes around the notorious ear-cutting incident – quite gripping narrative. It is told in a straightforward, magazine style, with fairly interesting inserts about Zola or the academic process for creating a painting, the merits of jute versus canvas as a support for an oil painting, a light summary of van Gogh’s rather incoherent colour theory, and so on and so on.

But for such an eminent art writer, and a man who loses no opportunity to remind us how he’s good friends with contemporary artists such as David Hockney and Lucien Freud, Gayford’s commentary is often surprisingly banal.

When he tells us that in the late nineteenth century a lot of people lost their Christian faith and goes on to quote Matthew Arnold’s super famous poem, Dover Beach, as proof, I felt the heavy thump of banality and obviousness. This is A-level standard, if not GCSE English level.

Same with his page and a half explaining Zola’s sequence of Les Rougon-Macquart novels (pages 212 to 213), or telling us that Wagner was a revolutionary composer. GCSE level. Everywhere you look, Gayford states the fairly obvious in an amiably anodyne style. The first page of Sue Prideaux’s epic biography of Gauguin is more arresting and insightful than anything in Gayford.

It’s a good enough book but nowhere does Gayford rise to the eloquence you feel is really required to do justice to van Gogh’s extraordinary genius and the astonishingly creative symbiotic relationship between him and Gauguin. It has puffs on the back from the Mail on Sunday and the Sunday Times. Well, quite. Sunday supplement stuff. Intelligent, thorough, competent, but lacking any fire.

Oh yes, the illustrations The paper quality is poor, cardboardy and the illustrations are in poor quality black and white and small. I had to look all the paintings up online in order to appreciate them. Since this is a book about artists who were revolutionaries in the use of colour, giving the paintings themselves as tiny, poor quality black and white reproductions is so poor as to be absurd.

All in all, it demonstrates Simon’s Law of Books which is: the more you pay for a book, the more you’re likely to be disappointed.

Studio of the South: Van Gogh in Provence by Martin Bailey

In the Royal Academy shop I just saw a copy of this book, ‘Studio of the South: Van Gogh in Provence’ by Martin Bailey. This looks like it’s a different league from the Gayford. It’s not only more recent (2021 compared to 2006), but it’s a bigger format book with lovely shiny paper and lavish full colour illustrations. I haven’t read the text but for the illustrations alone, I’d ignore the Gayford and go with Bailey.

Lautrec’s van Gogh

One of the best things I learned from Gayford’s book was the existence of a portrait of van Gogh done by fellow Bohemian Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, before Vincent left Paris in early 1888. Lautrec was just 23. Genius, isn’t it? And for all its brash technique and colour palette, figuratively accurate in a way nothing by Vincent or Gauguin is.

Vincent van Gogh by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1887) Pastel on cardboard

Credit

The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles by Martin Gayford was first published by Fig Tree books in 2006. I read the 2024 revised Penguin paperback edition.

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by Simon on October 6, 2025  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on October 6, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/10/06/the-yellow-house-van-gogh-gauguin-martin-gayford/

Kiefer / Van Gogh @ the Royal Academy

Introduction

I didn’t think I liked Anselm Kiefer – some time in the past I went to a show of his which oppressed me with its heavy German guilt and huge, murky pictures – but this show is a revelation, completely changing my opinion of him. The seven enormous Kiefer paintings here are all stunning and two or three of them feel like real masterpieces, transformative dazzling works, thick layers of paint encrusted with twigs and straw and shimmering with gold highlighting – immersive and awesome. Photos cannot convey how entrancing and mesmerising they are.

Installation view of Kiefer / Van Gogh @ the Royal Academy (photo by the author)

Biography

Kiefer is German, born in 1945 in the last months of the Second World War (hence the heavy weight of guilt which hangs over so many of his works). During the 1980s and 90s he went from strength to strength becoming one of the Big Names of contemporary art. In 1996 he was elected an Honorary Royal Academician and his close relationship with the Academy might explain why he seems to have had a big hand in curating this show.

Kiefer’s odyssey

The premise is simple: Way back in 1963, as a promising 18-year-old art student, Kiefer received a travel grant which helped him embark on an artistic and spiritual. He set out to follow in the footsteps of his artistic inspiration Vincent Van Gogh, starting at his home in the Netherlands and travelling through Belgium to Paris and beyond, to Arles in the south of France, where van Gogh spent his last years.

As you go into the exhibition there’s a free A4 handout which contains 20 or so quotes from the diary Kiefer kept of his journey. This very close engagement with the life and locations and works of the earlier artist cemented what was to become a lifelong influence.

Exhibition layout

This exhibition brings together works by van Gogh and Kiefer and sets them side by side to show the influence of the post-impressionist master on the post-modernist master.

The show is in the three big rooms which make up the Gabrielle Jungels-Winkler Galleries round the back of the Academy.

Room 1 contains four absolutely massive, immersive, recent works by Kiefer, dating from 2019 or so.

Room 2 is more intimate and contains 4 van Gogh drawings set against 6 Kiefer drawings from that 1963 trip, most of them very small – less than A4 size – as they were done in the notebook he took with him. Plus 5 van Gogh paintings, late works which demonstrate the Dutchman’s staggering talent, some of which (the poppy field) gesture very clearly towards the kind of abstraction Kiefer was to pick up 80 years later (van Gogh died in 1890, Kiefer really got going in the 1970s).

Room 3 returns to the monumental scale and contains 3 absolutely huge Kiefer paintings and, almost lost in their overwhelming scale, the famous little painting by van Gogh of a pair of empty boots. But it’s the vast Kiefers which overwhelm you.

Installation view of Kiefer / Van Gogh @ the Royal Academy showing Starry Night (2019) (photo by the author)

Influences

There are wall labels for each of the rooms and for many of the individual works. You can read them for yourself in the large print guide (link below). I’ll pick out some themes which struck me.

1. Surface texture

While van Gogh worked in the traditional media of oil paint and ink, Kiefer uses conventional materials – such as oil and acrylic paints, watercolour and photography – combined with more unusual elements such as straw, seeds, lead and gold leaf.

In some of his paintings, Kiefer scorches their surface with fire, evoking a sense of destruction and desolation. Despite these differences of media, the two artists share an affinity for painterly surface textures.

This is most obvious in the two most impactful works here, Starry Night (a direct homage to van Gogh’s painting of the same name) and the Crows (a reference to an equally famous van Gogh work). Here’s a shot of the Crows in its entirety. A photo can’t begin to do its visceral impact justice.

The Crows by Anselm Kiefer (2019). Emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf, straw and clay on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and White Cube (photo: Georges Poncet) © Anselm Kiefer

And here’s a close-up I took of the surface, which is covered with bales of straw, thrusting out from the canvas, immensely tactile and visceral – you can feel them, their coarseness, you feel like you’re wading waist-high through a field of hard abrasive straw stalks.

Detail of The Crows by Anselm Kiefer (2019) showing how the swirls and ridges of paint are densely encrusted with clusters of straw (photo by the author)

In this side view of Starry Night (2019) I try to capture the way these encrusted elements really stick out of the painting, to some distance, blurring the division between painting and sculpture.

Side view of Starry Night by Anselm Kiefer (2019) showing the canvas’s dense encrustation with straw (photo by the author)

2. The natural world

Kiefer’s and Van Gogh’s works are related through their use of recurring motifs from nature such as earth, fields of wheat, sunflowers and crows, all alluding to the cycle of life.

I’ve been talking about the two massive works which depict wheat fields. In room 3 there’s a big Kiefer work which speaks directly to ‘the cycle of life’, given the portentous title Eros and Thanatos.

In my reviews of Sigmund Freud I explained how, in his later, post-Great War theory, Freud tried to take account of humanity’s lust for destruction by positing the existence within us – in fact within all life forms – of an impulse to live and reproduce, and an equal and opposite impulse, to make the struggle for existence stop, to find complete rest. He rather pompously named these two theoretical ‘drives’ Eros and Thanatos, Greek gods of love and death.

In this huge painting, a life-sized scythe is stuck to the surface – which is already cluttered with swirls of oil and emulsion and acrylic paint, with shellac, sediment of electrolysis, metal wire and burnt wood, all showered with gilt highlighting – and represents not only the life-bringing activity of harvesting wheat to make bread to sustain human life – but also the traditional medieval symbolism representing the Grim Reaper who cuts short every human existence. And so the cycle, or maybe just the tragedy, of life.

Installation view of Eros and Thanatos by Anselm Kiefer (2013 to 2019) Emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf, sediment of electrolysis, metal wire and burnt wood on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and White Cube

3. Yellow and gold

Van Gogh’s love for and repeated use of yellow is also mirrored in the work of Kiefer, who sees the Dutch artist’s recurrent golden skies and fields as resembling the gilding of religious icons.

The yellowest van Gogh here is ‘Field with Irises near Arles’ from 1888. From one point of view, what’s really striking (certainly about this small reproduction) is the way the composition allows colour to be applied in bands across the painting, from the dark green irises in the foreground, to the lighter green band behind them, and then the narrow triangle of yellow plants behind them, before the row of turquoise trees.

Field with Irises near Arles by Vincent van Gogh (1888) Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

Anyway, gold and gilding is what really distinguishes the two most epic of Kiefer’s works here, ‘The Crows’ and ‘Starry Night’ (as well as the less awesome ‘Eros and Thanatos’). It’s hard for a photo to capture the sense of the gleaming, reflecting, shimmering effect Kiefer’s lavish application of gilding across the surface of his twigs and wheat stalks gives to the works. But in this close-up you can see that the gilding along the top of the work is as lavish and solid as the equivalent gilding in a Renaissance religious painting – hinting at the subliminal religious values of Kiefer’s works.

Detail of ‘Eros and Thanatos’ by Anselm Kiefer in Kiefer/ Van Gogh at the Royal Academy

4. Horizons

The influence of Van Gogh on Kiefer can also be seen in relation to the use of compositional devices characterised by elements depicted at close range combined with deep perspectives, high horizon lines and panoramic formats.

As soon as this is pointed out to you, you realise how true it is. All the van Gogh paintings here have a very strong horizon, a very clear horizontal frontier between land and sky. Regarding van Gogh’s painting of irises, above, the curators note that:

In it, the purple of the irises is set against the yellow of the field, and in the background the green of trees is a foil for orange roofs. Describing this work as just like ‘a Japanese dream’ in a letter to his brother Theo, Van Gogh made use of compositional devices found in Japanese woodblock prints, such as zooming in on a foreground detail, juxtaposed with a deep perspective onto the distant town
in the background.

Vivid foreground detail (the individual petals of the irises) set against the deep perspective across the field, through the row of trees and to the rooves of the houses on the horizon. Yes. Beautifully composed.

Horizons may not appear as starkly in the Kiefer works with the exception of The Crows, which is a very direct homage to van Gogh, but nonetheless it is hinted at, spectrally present in one of the not-quite-totally-overwhelming but still huge and powerful and spooky painting of big black ravens flying over another of Kiefer’s wheat fields.

Nevermore by Anselm Kiefer (2014) Emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf and sediment of electrolysis on canvas. Eschaton Kunststiftung (photo by Charles Duprat) © Anselm Kiefer

This also is a wild image of the dark forces of the natural world, his trademark scouring of the canvas indicating the huge, wayward, uncontrolled stalks of wheat, chaotically astrew an unnatural turquoise background, dominated by a thick flock of matt black ravens, looking a bit like Stuka dive bombers. An enormous and hugely powerful, minatory image.

Thoughts

Obviously it’s worth going to see the van Gogh paintings alone, irises, poppies, a snow-covered field… The man was a magician with oil paints.

But I haven’t dwelt on them (and haven’t even mentioned the lovely drawings and the one sculpture) because you should really go to this exhibition to see what Anselm Kiefer is capable of. I was staggered by the scale but also by the power of his compositions; the use of sheaves of sticks and twigs and straw sticking out all over the surfaces; the awesome sense of composition so that each one has its own distinct visual rhythm and feels just right; and the canny juxtaposition of turquoise colouring with the shiny gilt backgrounds; and everywhere the dramatic eruption of the hugely powerful, non-paint elements of sticks and sheaves, indicating forces way beyond man’s control or understanding.

Absolutely stunning.

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by Simon on October 5, 2025  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on October 5, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/10/05/kiefer-van-gogh-the-royal-academy/

Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers @ the National Gallery

Obviously this is an absolutely fabulous, to-die-for, once-in-a-century exhibition, 61 works showcasing van Gogh’s genius, half a dozen of them super-world famous classics (Self portrait, Starry Night over the Rhône, Sunflowers, Van Gogh’s Chair), many of them about as thrilling an encounter with a work of art as you could possibly imagine.

Self-Portrait by Vincent Van Gogh (1889) Image Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

Surprisingly, this is the first van Gogh exhibition ever staged at the National Gallery; it’s been timed to commemorate a century since the Gallery bought the famous Sunflower and Chair paintings. But, as NG Director Gabriele Finaldi put it, a centenary isn’t enough – ‘every exhibition needs to have an idea, a concept’ and this one is no exception. It is very much a show with a thesis or argument to make, which it maintains across its six big exhibition rooms (which are):

  • Room 1 Introduction
  • Room 2 The Garden: Poetic Interpretations
  • Room 3 The Yellow House: An Artist’s Home
  • Room 4 Montmajour: A Series
  • Room 5 Decoration
  • Room 6 Variations on a Theme

And the thesis which holds it all together? Rather than summarise I’ll let the curators explain in their own words:

In February 1888, the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh (1853 to 1890) went to live and work in the South of France. Over the next two years, in both Arles and Saint-Rémyde-Provence, he created an extraordinary and innovative body of work in which he transformed the people and places he encountered in life. Parks, landscapes and corners of nature became highly expressive, idealised spaces full of literary and poetic references. Similarly, Van Gogh chose individuals from his new surroundings to create portraits of symbolic types, such as The Poet or The Lover.

The careful planning behind Van Gogh’s art extended to creating works in groups or series, and to thinking about how these might be displayed both at his home in Arles and for exhibition in Paris. By gathering a selection of his most famous and beloved creations – and showing them alongside his carefully developed works on paper, a less familiar Van Gogh emerges: an intellectual artist of lucid intention, deliberation and great ambition.

So the curators raise and address about five themes (the ones I’ve put in bold, plus one more which emerges later):

1. Painting archetypes

So this is why the introductory room has just three paintings in it, all of which have the kind of generic, typical titles the curators are talking about, being The Lover, The Poet and the Poet’s Garden. And, indeed, why the entire show is titled ‘Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers’.

In later rooms we see many more paintings of The Garden, along with image of the beautiful Woman of Arles and The Peasant. The idea is to impress us that van Gogh was seeking for archetypes behind the everyday.

2. Literary references and poetic effects

On the walls are quotes from van Gogh’s letters which have been selected to show how he invoked poets and writers as he thought about his painting. Thus the park at Arles is said to be worthy of Dante or Petrarch while, later on (in the room full of landscape drawings) he says the countryside of Montmajour outside Arles strongly reminds him of a favourite Émile Zola novel, ‘The Sin of Abbé Mouret’. Wherever possible, the curators quote Vincent referring to literature or reflecting how views, scenes and people remind him of literary types.

3. Drawing

Room 4 is devoted to showing six amazing drawings. Drawings, being quicker and easier, are more given to being conceived as sets or series than paintings, which are often unique one-off works. As the curators put it:

Van Gogh marvelled at the landscapes surrounding Arles, some of which put him in mind of places mentioned in his favourite novels. Among the most evocative were the grounds surrounding the ruined 12th century Montmajour Abbey, a well-known landmark north of Arles. After making a number of drawings of Montmajour in May 1888, he returned in July to create a series of large-scale works on paper. These remarkable drawings depict a hybrid place; at once the result of meticulous observation and the artist’s imagination.

According to the curators it was during van Gogh’s 2-year sojourn that he realised for the first time that he could really draw, as opposed to paint, and the drawings here show him revelling in that discovery.

Landscape near the Abbey of Montmajour by Vincent van Gogh (1888) © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

4. Series

In Room 2 we see quite a few paintings on the theme of the garden, specifically 1) the public gardens at Arles and 2) the garden at the hospital of Saint-Paul de Mausole at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence where he admitted himself in May 1889 after a series of mental breakdowns in the preceding months.

Later on, the last room – Room 6: Variations on a theme – shows how he worked on series or sets depicting variations on several themes, notably 1) the Arles woman, 2) views of the mountains and 3) most brilliantly of all, an amazing series of paintings of wild, writhing olive groves.

Olive trees with the Alpilles in the Background by Vincent Van Gogh (1889) © The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence

5. Displaying his work

Finally, the idea that van Gogh put a lot of thought into how he wanted his work displayed. This is based on what he did with the house he rented in Arles.

Initially Van Gogh only used the Yellow House, which he rented in early May 1888, as a studio because it needed both renovation and furniture. By September he moved in and had bold plans to turn the modest house into an ‘artist’s home’ and a communal ‘studio of the South’ in which his artist friends from Paris could join him to work. He devised a decoration for the house that included his major paintings. This then evolved into carefully conceived ideas about how to present his
art to the public.

So, again, the curators are are at pains to overhaul the image of van Gogh as a kind of naive or mad genius, instead bringing out the sophisticated, calculating, planning and designing part of his personality. A lot of the evidence for this is based on the famous painting of his bedroom.

The Bedroom by Vincent van Gogh (1889) © The Art Institute of Chicago

All very casual, you might think, but the curators bring out van Gogh’s conscious effort to hang and display his works in a deliberate way to create an effect and so describe the 6 paintings you can see hanging in this picture, what they meant to the artist, and why he arranged them the way he did.

6. In the studio

Not mentioned in the curators’ initial survey, as the show progresses another theme emerges, which is Van Gogh’s work painting in the studio, composing scenes from memory.

It came as a surprise to learn that when he was a patient in the asylum he was given a room as a studio to paint in. Some of the paintings in The Garden part of the show (Room 2) depict the view from this ‘studio’ out over the asylum gardens, but we also learn that – in line with the curators’ emphasis on the artifice and intentionality of his work – a number of paintings were painted entirely in the studio, from memory and imagination, as he mixed and matched elements from the real world to achieve a creative and ‘poetic’ effect.

A small example is how in the classic ‘Starry Night over the Rhône’ can Gogh added in the constellation of stars in the sky and the lovers walking in the foreground, to create the poetic effect.

Starry Night over the Rhône by Vincent van Gogh (1888) Photo © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt

Larger-scale inventions included adding trees to the garden views of the asylum, along with female figures (which we know are fictional because no women were allowed into the asylum).

And, in the last room, we see many more examples of this invention: landscapes where he added in mountain backdrops to fields or groves which didn’t, in reality, have them. And learn that, lastly, the fabulous rhythmic elements in the paintings of olive trees which cover the last wall in the show, were products of the studio i.e. depicting trees and landscape which he’d certainly seen, but reconfiguring their shapes and layout to create the swirling rhythm he was seeking (see below).

Drawings

I’ve mentioned drawing several times. I think about a dozen of the 61 works are drawings and they serve a number of purposes:

One, they are preparatory studies. Vincent drew and sketched a scene before he painted it to work out his composition and treatment. This applies to the several drawings of the garden at the asylum which he made before he painted the scene.

2) Sometimes he made a drawing after he’d made the painting. These were drawings he sent to his brother Theo as quick guides to paintings he had just made and was describing.

3) Lastly, as indicated above, he realised that he could make series of drawings with a thematic unity, that drawing was a new and distinct medium separate from oil painting. Hence, as I’ve mentioned, the room here devoted to the six brilliant Monmajour drawings.

What you get from the drawings (apart from their intrinsic beauty) is a sense of how his pictures are built up from different types of markings. There are lots of the arrays of dashes and hatching, blizzards of centimetre-long rectangular marks, in sets or groups which you see in the paintings. But there are also dots, intense patches of cross-hatching. If I were a teacher I’d ask my pupils to count how many different types of hatching, shading, stippling and so on he uses in this drawing.

The Rock of Montmajour with Pine Trees by Vincent van Gogh (1888) Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

In this respect the drawings are like x-rays of the paintings. In the paintings you can see the same technique at work but the paint is ‘joined up’ to cover the whole canvas, creating a kind of continuous sea of marks and ridges. In the drawings the marks remain isolated, more distinct, much clearer. In this sense the drawings are much more conventional but still radiate the Vincent intensity.

And it’s fascinating to learn that all the drawings were done with reed-pens and quills that he carved and made himself.

Impasto

Impasto is the Italian word used as a technical term in painting and meaning ‘the process or technique of laying on paint or pigment thickly so that it stands out from a surface’ – and, my God! van Gogh is a genius at it.

All the reproductions in this review are useless. They make the paintings seem flat and slick whereas, in the flesh, they are tormented with whorls and ridges of paint applied as with a trowel, building up landscapes of paint across the surface which work with or against the landscapes of the composition. Here a close-up of leaves on an autumnal tree.

Detail of The Public Garden, Arles, by Vincent van Gogh (1888) (photo by the author)

Seeing them so close up, seeing the great ridges of impassioned paint, is like being swept up in a maelstrom of emotions.

Detail of Starry Night over the Rhône by Vincent van Gogh (1888) (photo by the author)

The tiles on the floor of the famous picture of his chair seem to be melting and reforming, rising and rippling from the surface.

Detail of van Gogh’s Chair by Vincent van Gogh (1888) © The National Gallery, London (photo by the author)

In some his technique goes way over the edge, leaving realistic depiction far behind in the really heavy, clotted effect seen in the frankly bizarre ‘The Green Vineyard’.

Detail of The Green Vineyard by Vincent van Gogh (1888) (photo by the author)

This felt like an experiment which he took as far as he could in a particular direction, although there are one or two others of the same murky heaviness. And yet in the same painting, he uses the same technique to create a bird-haunted sky with spectacular results. You feel as you’re entering another universe.

Detail of The Green Vineyard by Vincent van Gogh (1888) (photo by the author)

Maybe simply because it was hung at head height so that my eyes were exactly level with it, but I found that in the painting of his bedroom it wasn’t the table or chairs or paintings hanging on the wall, but the wooden floor which I became more and more mesmerised by, transfixed by.

Detail of The Bedroom by Vincent van Gogh (1889) photo by the author)

Amazing! It’s like a modern abstract painting, a delirious adventure of industrial green and scrappy pink, sculpted into abstract patterns. It feels like the paint has not been applied but has been scraped away to reveal another world beyond, as if we’re peering through a dirty windowpane into a different reality.

Genius

It’s not very often you find yourself in the presence of real genius but in painting after painting, and before some of the drawings, you feel yourself in the presence of a mighty power, a primal energy, a supernatural ability to carve and sculpt blotches and pads of primary colours so as to create great swirling images overflowing with life and energy. I was spellbound, I was overcome, I kept going back to the ones I really liked, it was like drinking sweet wine or strong liqueurs, drinking at the fountainhead, fuelling my eyes and soul.

More masterpieces

Van Gogh’s chair (in which, as I’ve said, it was the floor tiles which got me).

Van Gogh’s Chair by Vincent van Gogh (1888) © The National Gallery, London

The exhibition for the first time brings together two paintings of sunflowers, the one the National Gallery owns hung alongside the one owned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, reuniting them for the first time since they were painted.

Sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh (1888) © The National Gallery, London

Another example of the vivid depictions of an olive grove which hang side by side in the last room, creating a tremendous impression.

Olive Grove by Vincent van Gogh (1889) © Photo: Gothenburg Museum of Art / Hossein Sehatlou

And an example of maybe his quieter more domestic style, one among several still lives and studies of flowers, in this case a vase of oleanders but still done with his vibrant use of dramatic colour contrast and, when you look close, great swirls of impasto paint.

Oleanders by Vincent van Gogh (1888) © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The promotional video

This is the best exhibition in London for years, outclassing everything else. Go along and be rhapsodised and bewitched by works of unique genius and intensity.

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by Simon on September 14, 2024  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on September 14, 2024

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