Van Gogh's work sometimes suffers from overfamiliarity, but a new exhibition in Vienna suggests we don't know his work quite as well as we might think, writes Derek Scally
WITH ENDLESS Sunflowers calendars and a hacked-off ear lobe, it's easy to lose sight of the real importance of Vincent Van Gogh. The Dutchman worked as an artist for just one short decade before killing himself in July 1890. He was barely cold in the ground before being hailed as the painter of his time. It was an overnight success 10 years in the making, as a handful of his 1,100 works made the swift transition from artistic masterpieces to consumer durables.
But the overfamiliarity with his "greatest hits" have distorted their place in his oeuvre of 900 paintings and 1,100 works on paper and obliterated the progress they marked in the life of this autodidact artist.
Now Vienna's Albertina museum has gathered together 140 works from all phases of Van Gogh's career with the ambition of showing the painter and his works in a new unified light.
"Long before Van Gogh was a painter, he was a draughtsman, one who I think can be ranked alongside Michelangelo and Dürer," said Klaus Albrecht Schröder, director of the Albertina. "This exhibition is about showing his sketches and paintings in a new artistic unity and thus showing a new Van Gogh."
It's a tall order to promise a fresh look at one of the most popular and ubiquitous artists of modern times. But the Albertina exhibition succeeds, presenting sketches and paintings alongside each other for the first time in decades, perhaps ever.
The Albertina's approach is motivated partly by self-interest. Since it re-opened in 2003, the museum's chief aim has been to rehabilitate drawing from its current position as the poor relation of the visual arts world.
It's a mission that has allowed the museum to play to its own strengths, showing off in particular its extraordinary Egon Schiele collection, while providing a new lens through which to view even familiar works.
The exhibition, Van Gogh: Heartfelt Lines, is the result of four years on the road by its curators, seeking out familiar and obscure works from Moscow to Chicago.
Insured for a breathtaking €3 billion, the range and quality of the Van Gogh works on display in Vienna is staggering and unlikely to be seen for many years to come.
The curators rigorously explore the intricate artistic interaction between the worlds of draughtsmanship and painting. In Van Gogh's case, this is no one-way street. Since he was a great draughtsman long before he was a great painter (even after he mastered oils) he always returned to his favoured reed pen.
Born in 1853 in Groot-Zundert in the southern Netherlands, Van Gogh was a nervous child raised in the religious and cultured home of his pastor father. After a failed attempt to become a preacher himself and later an art dealer, he began drawing and painting in 1880.
The Albertina exhibit opens with his four-year apprenticeship from this time, opening with early copies of the Dutch masters and closing with moving landscapes such as the Pollard Willows produced in 1884 after restless years in The Hague and Nuenen, near Eindhoven. Even from this early period, Van Gogh's sketches were not merely the preliminary work for paintings — although many examples of this are on show — but the first step in a multi-layered, multi-media meditation on a theme.
Painting captured his attention in 1884 and, after his arrival in Paris two years later, Van Gogh spent his time reworking his heavy style into something lighter, with a more fashionable technique and brighter palette.
With that in mind, visitors can pore over Van Gogh's self-portrait sketches of 1887 before progressing to his famous Self Portrait with Straw Hat a few months later. It's an enthralling exercise in artistic reinvention, as the artist himself noted at the time. The Dutch artists he had so admired, "did not use whole colours (and) were forever working in grey," he wrote. "With all due respect and love — (this) does not satisfy the present-day craving for colour. The painter of the future will be a colourist such as has never yet existed."
From this point on in the exhibition, visitors can experience the thrill of watching Van Gogh become that painter of the future, with his use of colour illustrated in Vase with Cornflowers and Poppies and subsequent works.
But the Albertina curators are careful not to get carried away with the swirling, splashy calendar-print Van Gogh. The show keeps its steady pace by giving proper prominence to his extraordinary reed-pen works from the period.
With more than just a nod to Japanese prints, works from 1888 like Landscape with Path and Pollard Willows and The Road to Tarascon counter a popular myth that Van Gogh's work from this point on were epileptic explosions of colour and undisciplined line.
Many of his best sketches from this time are re-workings and translations of the original motifs and lines in paintings. "I think all these ideas are good but the painted studies lack clearness of touch. That is another reason why I felt it necessary to draw them," wrote Van Gogh to his brother Theo during a prolific period on the shores of the Mediterranean.
DESPITE THE HUGE ATTENTION given to Van Gogh's sketches in the exhibition, his more famous painted works don't suffer. His Paris years are well-represented in paintings and sketches, as well as his later country periods.
If anything, studying the reed-pen Mediterranean waves or busy ploughed fields in The Sower gives a more satisfactory explanation and understanding of his wheat field and hay stack landscapes. These works were not, as the legend has it, lumpy, paint-heavy products of delirium and mental illness, but, as with the drawings, careful studies with controlled lines.
Nowhere are those lines more affecting than as driving rain in the landscape Auvers-sur-Oise that closes the exhibition. Days after completing the work, he returned to this spot and shot himself in the chest. He died two days later in the arms of his brother, Theo.
Van Gogh: Heartfelt Linesis running at the Albertina, Vienna until December 8. For more information see albertina.at