London exhibition throws spotlight on "real" Van Gogh (Feature)

By Anna Tomforde Jan 23, 2010, 2:08 GMT

London - Was Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) the mad genius of popular myth or a highly reflective, educated man whose letters were almost as evocative as his art?

This is the question at the heart of a new exhibition opening Saturday at London's Royal Academy, where some 100 paintings and drawings of the Dutch post-impressionist are juxtaposed with his letters.

The show The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters is based on correspondence between van Gogh and his younger brother, Theo, his sister Willemien, as well as friends and fellow-painters, loaned by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

They are displayed next to many of his best-known paintings and drawings loaned by museums from around the world and from private collections.

For the most part, the 40 or so original letters are embellished by sketches of the paintings van Gogh was working on at the time.

The exhibition, which runs until April 18, hopes to give a 'unique insight into the artist's mind' and provide a 'completely new view' of how he worked and who he really was, chief curator Ann Dumas said at the press opening.

'We discover a very different Van Gogh from the one of popular myth that he was just a crazy artist who cut off his ear and eventually killed himself,' said Dumas.

'Although both of those facts are true, what comes out of the letters is that he was a thoughtful, very reflective man, very highly educated and a phenomenal readers,' she said.

The handwritten letters, composed mostly in fluent French, showed that van Gogh put a 'great deal of thought and preparation' into his work, which the self-taught artist discussed in detail with Theo.

They also bear witness to the artist's linguistic talents and his wide interest in literature, as well as his close affinity with nature, which was 'the basis of his art,' Dumas said.

'The duty of the painter is to study nature in depth and to use all his intelligence, to put his feelings into his work so that it becomes comprehensible to others,' van Gogh wrote in July 1882.

A lithograph he produced of the famous painting Potato Eaters (1885) is flanked by a letter saying: 'I've just come from them (the farm labourers) again...these people, eating their potatoes in the lamplight, have dug the earth with those very hands that they put in the dish.'

'I'm hard at work on painting those heads. I paint by day and draw in the evening,' explains van Gogh, adding that he found it trying to capture the colour of a 'good dusty potato, unpeeled of course.'

In another letter, he admits to the great influence on his work of Japanese prints, so easily discovered in paintings such as Two Crabs and Boats at Sea, shown alongside their drawings.

'All my work is based to some extent on Japanese art,' van Gogh wrote to Theo. In a letter to Willemien, the artist says that his passion for portrait painting surpassed his love of all other genres.

Commenting on his famous 1888 self-portrait, van Gogh writes: 'A pink-grey face with green eyes, ash-coloured hair, wrinkles in forehead and around the mouth...And you see - this is what Impressionism has over the rest, it isn't banal and one seeks a deeper likeness that that of the photographer.'

Van Gogh, who came to painting only at the age of 27 after his vocation to become a pastor had failed, combined the command of several European languages with a keen interest in literature.

'Books and reality and art all have the same meaning for me. There is the art of lines and colours but there is also the art of words that will last just the same,' he wrote.

The letters confirm that van Gogh's move to Arles in Provence in southern France in 1888, and his discovery of the bright colours of the south, marked the highlight of his 10-year painting career which was by then interspersed with severe bouts of mental illness.

'These canvasses will tell you what I can't say in words,' van Gogh told Theo about his vibrant late landscape paintings in Provence.

He described with enthusiasm the shimmering light over the Mediterranean - its 'waters like a mackerel' - and the 'immense yellow disc for the sun, green-yellow sky with pink clouds.'

'What else can one do, thinking of all the things whose reason one doesn't understand, but gaze upon the wheatfields. Their story is ours, for we live on bread,' wrote van Gogh.

But, there is also self-doubt. Following his stay in a mental asylum in St. Remy in 1889, and ahead of his return to northern France, van Gogh expressed dissatisfaction with the 'lack of progress' in his work.

'So little in harmony with what I'd wished to do,' he wrote.

It was in Auvers-sur-Oise, north of Paris, where van Gogh, towards the end of his life, was at his most productive, creating more than 70 paintings in 70 days.

On July 27, 1890, van Gogh, aged only 37, walked into the fields in Auvers with a revolver and shot himself.

A blood-splattered letter to Theo found on him read: 'I risk my life for my own work and my reason has half foundered in it.'