Vincent Van Gogh: A New Way of Seeing (2015) - full transcript

Someone needs to stop Clearway Law.
Public shouldn't leave reviews for lawyers.

"My dear brother,

"the painter's household with its great and petty vexations,

"with its calamities,

"with its sorrows and griefs,

"it has a certain good will in its favour, a certain sincerity,

"a certain genuinely human quality.

"And I ask,

"'What most makes me a human being?'

"Zola says, 'I, an artist,

"'I want to live life to the full,



"'want to live without ulterior motive,

"'naïve as a child... no, not as a child, as an artist,

"'with good will.

"'Just as life unfolds, so I will find something in it,

"'so I'll do my best in it.'"

There were a number of reasons why we felt

a rehang, a new presentation of the permanent collection,

was necessary.

The previous presentation had some shortcomings,

particularly with regards to the person of the artist.

When we first started out,

What is the importance of Van Gogh? Why is he still appealing to so many?

What is it in his art that appeals to our emotions so much?

What did he want to say with his art?



Van Gogh is a phenomenon so when people enter the museum,

they will already have an idea about Van Gogh.

They probably will have

his most important paintings in their heads

or they know about his troubled life.

So it's really a challenge for us

to have them look beyond the sunflowers,

to have them look beyond the suicide.

We really hope

that when they come here they will discover

that the story is much more intricate

and has a lot deeper meaning.

I think the rehang makes it clear Van Gogh was not an isolated genius

who just fell from heaven and just was.

He was an artist who developed,

who took lots of cues from the artistic world around him.

He lived and worked in a context within a network of other artists.

He exchanged ideas with them.

He was inspired greatly by earlier generations of artists

and, of course, subsequent generations were also inspired by him

and we also want to show Van Gogh in that sort of continuum

and really show

what, on the one hand, made him an artist of his time

and, on the other hand, also what makes him special

with regards to the art and artists around him.

The man and the artist are one. It's not two separate identities.

So we do address some of the myths.

We discuss his illness, what we know about it.

We discuss his suicide.

We give all the information we have assembled as an institution.

It's not an illustrated diary that we are presenting here.

It's the oeuvre of one of the greatest artists of all time.

We put the focus back on the art

by giving more attention to the myths as well.

That sounds contradictory

but I think it really helps in understanding

what makes Van Gogh so important and special.

Vincent's brother, Theo, was an art dealer in Paris

and he supported Vincent all his life.

So when Vincent died Theo owned over 450 paintings

and many hundreds of drawings by Vincent.

After the death of Vincent and Theo, and his mother as well,

my grandfather inherited the entire collection.

And in the '30s he decided to bring half of his collection

to the municipal museum of art, the Stedelijk Museum, in Amsterdam.

The other half he had in his home, hanging on the walls

and in, as we say nowadays, a walk-in closet.

200 paintings by Vincent van Gogh, 500 drawings

and Vincent's letters to Theo

and also many hundreds of contemporaries

like Paul Gauguin, Émile Bernard.

And he had the idea, together with his mother,

to keep the collection together

and to get the collection accessible for everybody.

The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam opened in 1973.

After Theo's death

his widow Jo started to read the letters

Vincent wrote to his brother Theo.

And while reading them

she noticed they were of huge importance to art history

because Vincent and Theo had a very close relationship,

very intimate,

and Vincent already wrote letters to his brother

before he became an artist.

And the last letter is dated five days before his death.

So we know all about the development of Vincent as an artist,

about his doubts, about his influences,

about his relations with his peers, his contemporaries, everything.

The letters are an enormous treasure for us

because in the letters Van Gogh talks so much

about his becoming an artist,

what moved him, what inspired him.

He refers to hundreds and hundreds of works of art,

to literature, to music, to religion,

all the sources of inspiration that he used.

The letters are extremely well written so it is really a joy to read them

in Dutch or in French, or in English even.

He writes in various different languages depending on the correspondent

and on the place where he writes them.

And you really get a very comprehensive picture

of who he was as a personality,

his trials and tribulations, his joys and fears.

In that sense the letters are an essential aspect

of our understanding of Van Gogh the person

and also of Van Gogh as an artist.

We have so many works by Van Gogh.

It's amazing. We have over 200 paintings.

So you really can follow his development as an artist,

as a person, his intentions,

technique developing, materials.

There is a lot to discover

for us as researchers but also for the visitor.

Being the Van Gogh Museum - that's what it says on the can -

you expect when you enter to encounter Van Gogh.

And we did that in a rather drastic way

by presenting him just with a series of self-portraits,

12 self-portraits in one room,

so you really come eye to eye with Van Gogh.

It has immediately a strong impact

and then you enter the story.

"My dear brother,

"people say, and I'm quite willing to believe it,

"that it's difficult to know oneself,

"but it's not easy to paint oneself either.

"Thus I'm working on two portraits of myself at the moment,

"for want of another model,

"because it's more than time that I did a bit of figure work."

His face in itself, of course, is an icon.

Everyone knows his face.

Maybe they figure there might be an ear missing,

but of course there's not.

For him in the first place they were just practice.

But it's also a sort of artistic and maybe even psychological research.

I paint self-portraits and I know a lot of other artists who do.

We do it because, for a start, the model is always there.

He's for free.

And the model doesn't mind too much

if you take liberties and you're testing out something.

You are not compromised

by the need to get a likeness.

You are at liberty to explore

how you are going to use paint to shape a face

and to communicate character and feeling

as well as reproduce the geography

of a human physiognomy.

Because it's potential for him to explore

stylistically what he wants to do

and because capturing a human presence on canvas

is a great achievement.

Those are the paintings in any gallery, I think...

It's the faces people instinctively look towards

because we are always programmed to be looking for other people.

I don't think you could surmise that by painting himself

he was engrossed in the idea of his own identity

or the trauma that we might imagine he was exploring about himself.

I think he was just painting the model that he knew best.

It's a bit funny to talk about "Van Gogh"

because actually he wanted to be named as "Vincent"

and we know him as "Van Gogh".

But he signed his pictures all with "Vincent",

partly because he didn't like the family name,

partly, perhaps, this is also a tradition with great masters.

Rembrandt is also a first name.

Van Gogh had the personality of a driven man, a man obsessed,

somebody who wanted to achieve something in life.

Partly that had something to do with his character.

He was a man who had emotions, strong emotions.

If you were to go out with him to the pub,

you would have, within five or ten minutes,

not fighting but perhaps fighting in words

because he would immediately try to convince you of his opinions.

The testimonies we have of his parents, for instance,

say that from early on, when he was still a kid,

there was always something with him.

It also had to do with his mood. He could easily change moods.

Even also in later life we have testimony

of the Zouave lieutenant in Arles in 1888.

He remembered afterwards

that in fact he was quite a gentleman and a soft man as well,

an interesting man,

but he could suddenly change his mood just like that.

Vincent van Gogh was born in 1853

in the rural Dutch village of Zundert, near the border with Belgium.

He was the eldest son in a family of six children

and his father was the local Protestant preacher.

Vincent attended a boarding school

where he was well educated, learning several languages.

From an early age Vincent loved nature

and being surrounded by the natural world.

He would often go on long walks,

exploring the rural landscape around him.

He also loved to read

and this was the normal thing in the 19th century.

If you belonged to the middle class, you read.

Especially in a Protestant family where the word is very important,

you read.

So the whole family read books, like we watch television nowadays.

But in the case of the Van Goghs this really grew into,

"You have to read to develop yourself and to learn about yourself."

And that's what he did.

Vincent's father decided that his eldest son should be

an apprentice at Goupil & Cie,

an art dealership partly founded by Van Gogh's uncle,

also called Vincent.

Goupil was a very big firm

with showrooms and offices across Europe.

During this period Vincent became exposed to the art market,

visiting many galleries and museums.

He was quick to formulate opinions on what appealed to him.

He started communicating his thoughts through letters with his family,

and particularly with his younger brother, Theo,

who had also joined Goupil.

"My dear Theo,

"I saw from your letter that you have art in your blood

"and that's a good thing, old chap.

"Find things beautiful as much as you can.

"Most people find too little beautiful.

"Always continue walking a lot and loving nature

"for that's the real way to understand art better and better.

"Painters understand nature and love it

"and teach us to see.

"Have I already told you that I've taken up pipe-smoking again?

"I've rediscovered in my pipe an old, trusty friend

"and I imagine we'll never part again."

Vincent was transferred to Goupil's offices in London.

He moved into lodgings in Brixton, south London,

and spent his time reading, taking long walks

and visiting museums.

Vincent became increasingly disillusioned with his work

but found solace in reading and writing, particularly religious texts.

You have to keep in mind

that London was the biggest city of all Europe at the time

with all the negative and maybe also the positive sides of such a city.

But I think Van Gogh was mainly impressed by the negative sides of it,

so a lot of people who were poor,

and this was already at the time being recognised

as the great problem of the age, of that particular period.

The Van Gogh that we know was being born in London

because he simply realised at the time that he had to look for something else.

He liked art

but I don't think he liked what he was doing within the firm.

In 1875

Vincent was transferred to Goupil's head office in Paris

to improve a lacklustre attitude to his work.

The plan failed and Vincent left Goupil & Cie,

having decided his path lay with helping the disadvantaged.

He travelled back to England

to take up a poorly rewarded teaching position

at a boys' school in the coastal town of Ramsgate.

"My dear Theo,

"herewith a little drawing of the view from the school window

"where the boys watch their parents going back to the station after a visit.

"Many a boy will never forget the view from that window."

After a few months Vincent took up a post

as a supply teacher and apprentice preacher

in Isleworth, a poor suburb on the outskirts of London.

While he worked fervently, writing sermons and rhetorical texts,

he also read books about pathos and the human condition,

writers like Dickens, Shakespeare and Hugo.

No matter the sacrifice,

Vincent's whole purpose in life

was focused on evangelising to the poor.

"My dear Theo,

"not a day goes by without praying to God

"and without speaking of God,

"not only praying but also admitting to it,

"not only speaking but also holding fast to prayer.

"O Lord, join us intimately to one another

"and let our love for Thee make that bond ever stronger."

After returning home that year for Christmas,

Vincent's parents prevented him from going back to London

out of concern for his health.

But the seed of religious conviction had been sown.

Vincent was determined to follow his religious vocation

and started studying for the theology entrance exams

in Amsterdam.

But he found the academic demands overwhelming.

He gave up and returned home.

He wanted to do something with religion and wanted to preach.

And he thought, "Well, you don't need an academic degree to be a minister.

"If you know the Gospel very well, by heart," like he almost did,

"and you care for people,

"then you can also preach the word of God."

He decided, or it was more or less decided within the family,

that he would go on a short course in Brussels

for the Protestant church

to be trained as a preacher, an evangelist,

and after that he decided to go to the Borinage

which was a difficult region in the south of Belgium,

French-speaking, but with a heavy accent,

quite difficult to understand in the beginning,

as he said in his letters.

But he wanted to be there. It was mining country.

"My dear Theo,

"one of the oldest and most dangerous mines in the area no less

"is called Marcasse.

"This mine has a bad name because many die in it,

"whether going down or coming up,

"or by suffocation or gas exploding,

"or because of water in the ground,

"or because of old passageways caving in and so on.

"It's a sombre place.

"At first sight everything around it

"has something dismal and deathly about it.

"The workers there are usually people emaciated and pale,

"owing to fever,

"who look exhausted and haggard, weather-beaten and prematurely old.

"The women are generally sallow and withered.

"All around the mine are poor miners' dwellings

"with a couple of dead trees, completely black from the smoke,

"and thorn hedges, dung heaps and rubbish dumps,

"mountains of unusable coal.

"Later I'll try and make a sketch of it to give you an idea of it."

This is one of the earliest drawings that we have in the collection.

It's from 1879

when Van Gogh was staying in Belgium in the Borinage in the mining region.

What we see here is a coal mine

with a little person standing here

and some kind of animal in the field.

It's a bit naïve.

It's not yet as developed

as when he was really starting out as a draughtsman.

He's experimenting with pencil and watercolour

but this was before he decided to become an artist.

It's quite interesting to see that he's put little colour notations in the drawing,

so probably he made the drawing on the spot

and then finished it at home

or added the watercolour at home.

So, for example, here we can see "vert jaune",

which is green yellow,

"clair", which is bright, and here "rose".

He put those notations in order to know how he should fill in the colours later.

Vincent's time in the Borinage village of Petit-Wasmes

was full of self-sacrifice and dedication to the small mining community.

But after six months he lost his position as an evangelist,

largely due to his poor skills at delivering sermons,

which were often very long and full of biblical rhetoric.

Vincent moved to the neighbouring village of Cuesmes

where he found new lodgings.

From that moment on, almost for a year, we don't know what he actually did.

He didn't write any letters any more to his brother Theo.

We have some letters from his parents to Theo where they talk about Vincent

and they only have concern about him and what he's going to do with his life.

When Theo and Vincent started writing to each other again,

Vincent's despair and wretched situation were all too apparent.

Theo was now working in the Paris office of Goupil & Cie

and he thought it might help his brother

if he considered a new path as an artist.

It must have triggered something.

"OK, I've been drawing already for quite some time.

"It's not much. I'm not very confident of becoming an artist.

"I probably lack the talent."

But he set himself to this course

and the next letter we have,

from that letter onwards

it's only about art and becoming an artist.

"Dear Theo,

"you should know that I'm sketching large drawings after Millet.

"I've done the four times of the day as well as the sower.

"Despite the fact that every day new difficulties present themselves

"and will continue to present themselves,

"I couldn't tell you how happy I feel to have taken up drawing again.

"It had already been on my mind for a long time

"but I always saw the thing as impossible and beyond my reach.

"But now, while feeling both my weakness and my painful dependence

"in respect of many things,

"I have recovered my peace of mind

"and my energy is coming back, day by day."

Catholics, when they want to become worthy of God,

they go to the cloisters and they pray.

Protestants want to be worthy of God as well, but they do not pray.

They have this duty to show in their work

that they are worthy of God.

And how do they show that? By doing their work as well as possible.

And that's how you get obsessed men. That's how you get driven men.

That happened with Van Gogh.

He was aware of the Protestant ethic from the moment he was born.

He also had the idea that he had to find his way in life

so he had to choose a certain kind of occupation.

That's the Protestant ethic too.

You have to find your position in life.

He really believed that if you want to do something in life,

it had to be small, not large.

You didn't have to join a large institution.

And what happened when he became an artist,

he didn't want to go to the Academy

because it wouldn't be authentic, it wouldn't be original.

He really believed that he had to do it himself.

So he went out in nature and simply started to draw,

which I always find very fascinating

because this is a nice way of starting.

But that defined him as a man.

And with somebody who really could not draw very well...

He wasn't Degas, he wasn't Hockney.

He had to conquer it.

He really had to fight for it. And that's also what you see in his art.

The Protestant work ethic also includes

that you should not be rewarded

because in the end it is God who is going to decide.

You do not know whether you are rewarded or not.

How you do it is simply to organise your work

as economically and as healthily and as rationally as possible.

That's the Protestant work ethic.

So he's not a romantic genius who has inspirations.

No, you simply do your work.

And in terms of fame, of course you do not want it,

of course you are not looking for it,

because fame, to a certain extent, will spoil you.

Van Gogh started as an artist in 1880.

He was living in the Netherlands and stayed there for the next five years.

So the first half of his career he spent in the Netherlands,

what we call the Dutch period.

He was moving around in the Netherlands.

He was living in The Hague for a while

where he took lessons with Anton Mauve,

a well-known Hague School painter

and he was also family of Van Gogh,

so it was easy to get some training with this established artist.

Van Gogh didn't take traditional schooling.

He only went for a very brief period to the Academy

when he started out as an artist

and then decided that he would learn to be an artist by himself.

He used a lot of handbooks

and he looked at other artists intensely

during these five years in Holland.

We always tend to think Van Gogh was an avant-garde artist

but, in fact, if you look at him, he was quite old-fashioned.

Drawing remains the main thing for an artist.

So he started that way; he started the traditional way

of becoming an artist in the 19th century.

You start with drawing.

And you have to do a lot before you even take up your brush.

For Van Gogh, I tend to think,

the key to understanding his art is drawing.

Van Gogh was already 27 when he decided to become an artist.

He felt it was the biggest challenge for him

to draw figures,

and also a very important challenge

because his first ambition was to become an illustrator of the press.

So if you want to become an illustrator

you need to know how to draw your figures.

So that was the first thing he was really practising on.

There were other things, like placing figures into perspective.

He wasn't the biggest natural talent you would ever meet.

He needed to learn a lot.

He knew that he needed to learn a lot, so that helped.

What strikes us most is,

although there are a lot of shortcomings in his drawings

and when you look at them rationally you can find a lot of things

that are odd or maybe crude,

there is also this very big expressiveness

that strikes us and really impresses us with this artist

even in the early years.

Vincent had very large problems with perspective.

He made use of a utensil in The Hague.

He more or less developed it himself. It was partly also known from books.

We call it a perspective frame.

"My dear Theo,

"the perpendicular and horizontal lines of the frame

"together with the diagonals and the cross,

"or otherwise a grid of squares,

"provide a clear guide to some of the principal features

"so that one can make a drawing with a firm hand,

"setting out the broad outlines and proportions,

"assuming, that is,

"that one has a feeling for perspective

"and an understanding of why and how perspective appears

"to change the direction of lines and the size of masses and planes.

"Without that the frame is little or no help

"and makes your head spin when you look through it."

Vincent kept working on his technique in The Hague,

though finding willing models was proving hard.

After setting up a studio in his lodgings,

Vincent met a prostitute called Clasina Maria Hoornik,

known as Sien,

who was pregnant and living rough with a four-year old child.

He decided to invite her to live with him.

The arrangement was kept secret from the family

as Vincent was using money sent by Theo to support them both.

Vincent cared greatly for Sien and her children.

They became part of his domestic life

and the subject of many drawings and studies.

It is an interesting question

whether Van Gogh really had the capacity to love.

He loved his brother.

But also at the same time there was this goal in life

that he was an obsessed man and he wanted to paint

and he wanted to do something.

And that isolated him

from the normal conditions of a normal life.

When the Vincent's relationship with Sien was discovered,

his family, including Theo, put pressure on him to finish,

which he did with great sadness after a long period of contemplation.

He was 30

and it was the first time he felt he had a family of his own to care for.

Vincent left The Hague

and travelled north to the flatlands of Drenthe.

Here he lived a frugal life

and captured the landscape on paper

until he eventually moved back to the family home

which was now located in the Dutch village of Nuenen.

He was considered by locals as eccentric, a loner, strange,

but nothing would deter him

from walking into the countryside with his artist's materials,

endlessly attempting to capture rural life.

It's interesting to see that he always had this crude, bold way of drawing.

In the beginning he was trying to fight against it

and then at some point he understood

that this expressiveness that kept pouring out of his chalk or his pencil

was just his strongest asset in a sense.

And he learned how to use it in a very strong way

so he could make his mark in drawing and being an artist.

I think his marks in his drawings help him also to paint

because he figures out what is his mark, what is his style.

He had a talent, you might say,

for a very broad approach of applying paint

using big brushes, wide brushes,

laying the paint on thick in general,

trying to model with paint.

In that he was quite different from many other painters at the time.

His subject matter was very close to the School of Barbizon,

so peasant life - he was in a peasant community.

He adored some of the peasant painters from the School of Barbizon

and he tried to be this peasant painter of Holland.

The Barbizon School was a school of French painters.

They lived and worked in Barbizon, just south of Paris.

They were the first generation in the 19th century

to work outdoors and to focus on nature and rural life.

They left city life behind

and their main theme became nature and peasant life.

When Van Gogh started as an artist

he admired the French landscape tradition greatly,

especially as it was painted by Daubigny

in a very personal, not sentimental but more realistic mood,

but very personal and very free in his brush work.

And this, of course, was also the ambition of Van Gogh

when he started as an artist.

So these French landscape painters,

like Daubigny, like Millet, were his great models.

One of the paintings that Van Gogh saw

was a great painting of a tree by Dupré from the Mesdag Collection

And Van Gogh describes it in one of his letters to Theo,

saying it was one of the most beautiful things he saw

at this exhibition of French landscape painting.

It is a very large tree with a very tiny figure in the background

and the whole tension between nature and human being

was something that Van Gogh also really appreciated in the painting

and he said it was like a portrait of a tree.

This sentiment, the mood of nature, of landscape,

was something that Van Gogh was trying to paint as well in his own works

at the beginning when he was still in the Netherlands.

So, looking at all these great French landscape painters,

he tried to convey the same mood

of human versus nature.

"My dear Theo,

"one would be wrong, to my mind,

"to give a peasant painting a certain conventional smoothness.

"If a peasant painting smells of bacon, smoke, potato steam,

"fine, that's not unhealthy.

"If a stable smells of manure,

"very well, that's what a stable's for.

"If the field has an odour of ripe wheat or potatoes

"or of guano and manure

"that's really healthy, particularly for city folk.

"They get something useful out of paintings like this.

"But a peasant painting mustn't become perfumed."

He was really focusing very hard on this,

reading about it, writing about it to Theo,

by making a lot of studies of peasant heads, for example,

and finally his most ambitious work, "The Potato Eaters".

The play between light and dark,

the chiaroscuro, is so important in this painting.

It makes it, technically and stylistically, a very well-achieved painting.

But also the motif, of course, for Van Gogh was really important.

He wanted to become a peasant painter, but a modern one.

He wanted to do something different than all his great models.

Every artist wants to do something new and something of his own.

This new way of presenting the peasant

in a very stark and almost expressive manner

was pretty radical.

The people that you see are not happy or sad.

They're just very tired from this intense work.

For Van Gogh it was something beautiful that people worked hard.

He worked hard himself.

And, of course, that is also something religious.

You work very hard and you will reap what you put in the ground.

So it's also this symbolic meaning of the cycle of life

and the peasant was closest to nature,

more close than the city people

or the modern man that rose in the 19th century

because of industrialisation.

He made all these different studies of the peasants in Nuenen

to finally make this painting, 'The Potato Eaters'.

It was something that he had in mind for a long time

and he worked towards it by making drawings,

making studies in colour, all kinds of things.

It was a very ambitious painting

because it's also a difficult painting to make.

To make a group composition of several figures

in a very small space

was something that was artistically very difficult to achieve

and then also put in all these details

and make sure that the perspective is correct,

that there is this relationship between the figures

around the same table.

We wanted to show the context, because it didn't come out of nothing.

It was a strong tradition of these group compositions,

especially peasant people or simple people.

One is a peasant meal by Jozef Israëls,

a painter that was called the 19th-century Rembrandt.

He was really the biggest in the 19th century

and a great example for Van Gogh as well.

The other one is by Van Rappard.

Anthon van Rappard was also a young artist

and Van Gogh met him and they became friends.

They exchanged a lot of letters

but they also worked together for a while

when they were in Nuenen and Van Rappard came to visit him.

For example, they did a campaign together of weavers in their interiors,

weaving at their looms.

So Van Rappard was really his strongest connection at the time.

Their friendship and their correspondence reveals a lot

about Van Gogh's own ambitions and ideas at that time.

Vincent believed 'The Potato Eaters' to be his greatest accomplishment so far

and showed it to both Theo and Van Rappard

but was met with an unenthusiastic response from Theo

and harsh criticism from Van Rappard.

Infuriated, he headed for Antwerp

to explore new ideas and seek academic training.

In Antwerp he went to the museums. He discovered Rubens, for instance,

the beautiful colours of Rubens and the brushwork of Rubens.

From now on when he looked at art

he would always look at how these paintings were made.

Before he was a painter he would go to a museum

and only talk about the images he saw and the sentiment it gave,

but now he would only talk about how they were made,

so he wanted to learn something there from the old masters.

Vincent enrolled at the Academy for drawing and painting classes,

but once again he failed to impress the academic staff

with his radical approach.

After a short time in Antwerp, he decided to head for Paris

to be with his brother and search out new inspiration.

"My dear Theo,

"don't be cross with me that I've come all of a sudden.

"I've thought about it so much and I think we'll save time this way.

"Will be at the Louvre from midday,

"or earlier if you like.

"A reply, please,

"to let me know when you could come to the Salle Carrée.

"We'll sort things out, you'll see,

"so get there as soon as possible.

"I shake your hand. Yours truly, Vincent."

In the late 19th century

Paris was the centre of modern art

and Montmartre was the centre of artistic freedom.

The establishment lived elsewhere

but the hill of Montmartre was the place for young artists

and radical thought.

Vincent not only moved there to be closer to Theo,

an increasingly successful art dealer,

but also to involve himself with a like-minded community

that thrived in this multitude of colourful bars,

burlesque theatres and bohemian cafés.

On arrival in Paris Vincent attended classes

at the studio of a well-known painter called Fernand Cormon.

Young artists were left to work in groups,

receiving advice once in a while from the established Cormon.

Although Vincent was disappointed with the level of tuition,

his time at the studio introduced him to other young artists

Émile Bernard, John Russell

and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec,

who introduced him to the hedonistic world of Montmartre

and engaged him in the artistic dialogue he craved so much.

And those were really young, radical artists

who wanted to change art.

They wanted to do something radically new.

The Impressionists, like Monet and Pissarro,

were already more or less established by the time that Van Gogh arrived.

Their heydays were in the 1870s

so there was this new generation of young men

who wanted to change and revolutionise the art world.

Van Gogh became one of them

and he was fighting with them

to do something radical and to do something very new.

"Because I've always worked from nature,

"I may be more daring than many others

"in dashing things off and tackling a group of things.

"But the others will most likely have more knowledge of the nude

"for which I haven't had so much opportunity.

"If I make up for that, the sooner the better,

"the more benefit I'll get from Cormon.

"Moreover, my health.

"When I paint outdoors I don't eat

"and I won't overcome it for I keep relapsing.

"My constitution is still far from strong."

Shortly after Vincent arrived in Paris

the brothers moved to a larger apartment,

54 Rue Lepic.

Van Gogh had a small room there which he used as a studio

and went outside to paint.

He would just set up his easel and paint the landscape

which was still quite rural in Montmartre.

On the hill there were mills and allotments, little gardens,

not yet as many apartment buildings as there are today.

So he was basically painting everything

street scenes, the view from his window,

but also still-lifes in his studio when he couldn't go outside to paint,

and the many self-portraits

of which we have several on view here in the museum.

'Garden with Courting Couples' is a very important painting.

It really summarises the ambitions

that Van Gogh had at that moment in Paris.

He wanted to represent a modern subject in a modern way

and he used a kind of impressionist, pointillist style

which was much freer than the Pointillists would have used.

We can see how he used complementary colours

in order to have the very forceful contrast

and how he expressed an emotional subject

because of these courting couples.

It's also this idea of representing love

as a very timeless subject

but in a completely new, modern way.

Van Gogh was very satisfied with this picture

and chose to exhibit it at the first exhibition

that he was invited to exhibit in

which was in 1888 in Paris.

He was looking at what other people did

but at the same time doing completely his own thing

and this painting is an important step in finding his own style

which we will see more in the period after Paris.

It's impossible to understand

what happened to Van Gogh's palette and technique when he moved to Paris

without seeing the context that he worked in.

It was such a great change from what he was doing in Holland.

Of course it didn't happen overnight but it went really quickly.

And in that time his colour changed dramatically.

It became very bright and very pure.

He used pure colours in his paintings. His brushstroke changed.

He was very much influenced by the Pointillists

who were painting in short stripes and dots.

The woman that we see on the portrait is Agostina Segatori.

She was the owner of a bar in Montmartre

which was called Le Tambourin,

a bar where artists frequently came.

And Van Gogh at some point had a relationship with Agostina

and he also exhibited in her bar.

He hung his own paintings on the wall

and he even organised an exhibition of Japanese prints from his collection.

She is portrayed as a free, independent woman.

She is smoking, she is drinking,

which women from the upper classes wouldn't be doing.

This was more the case with women from artistic circles.

This was also the last relationship that he would have with a woman

because afterwards there would only be visits to the brothels

and no girlfriends in his life anymore.

The portrait of Agostina Segatori

is hanging next to a portrait by Toulouse-Lautrec

painted at the same time, in the same year actually, 1887.

And we have hung those two paintings together

because they show a similar subject,

a similar composition,

of a woman sitting at a café table,

which was again a very modern subject at the time.

Vincent experimented with his own style.

He came from Nuenen and Antwerp

and in the beginning in Paris he experimented,

especially with expressionistic brushwork, laying the paint on quite thickly.

Lautrec, on the other hand, painted quite lightly

and he would dilute his paints so they became very fluid

and with very small brushes

he would work up, with small brushstrokes, his paintings.

Another important thing he discovered in Paris were Japanese prints.

There was this rage for Japanese art in Paris at that time.

Some of his artworks are direct translations of these prints.

He really copied them in colour in his own way.

But also the way that they made cropped compositions

or they used a very stark perspective

is also reflected in Van Gogh's art.

Paris was too overwhelming in the end for Van Gogh.

There was too much visual noise, too much going on.

He needed to step away from it all

and to be physically removed from this centre of the world

so he decided to leave.

He longed for a warmer climate

and he was also anxious to discover the colours of the south,

the strong light and the effect that would have on the countryside,

on the landscape such as the land that he knew from the Japanese prints.

So when he arrived in Arles he was hoping to find a new utopia.

"My dear Theo,

"during the journey I thought at least as much about you

"as about the new country I was seeing.

"But I tell myself that you'll perhaps come here as often yourself later on.

"It seems to me almost impossible to be able to work in Paris

"unless you have a refuge in which to recover

"and regain your peace of mind and self-composure.

"Without that you'd be bound to get utterly numbed.

"Arles doesn't seem any bigger than Breda or Mons to me.

"Before reaching Tarascon I noticed some magnificent scenery.

"Huge yellow rocks,

"oddly jumbled together with the most imposing shapes.

"In the small valleys between these rocks

"there were rows of little round trees

"with olive-green or grey-green foliage

"which could well be lemon trees."

He always went out early in the morning with all his painting gear

and he often painted and drew a subject

from various angles and in series of works.

I think that for me painting is all about light

and as an artist you've got to train yourself

to notice it and scrutinise it

because it shapes the world around us every day

and most of the time we don't give it a second thought.

But, depending upon whether it's an overcast day or a sunny day,

the colours and the tones and the shadows all change.

And the role of an artist, I think, anyway,

is to try and seize the moment, seize the light of that instant

and all the freshness and energy that is involved in that moment,

that moment of being alive, being illuminated,

and capture that on canvas.

And it might well be an overcast day

where everything feels a lot more muted and softer and cooler

and the shadows aren't so extreme

and you're searching for the difference between the areas of a building

that are supposedly closer to the sun than those that are away from it.

Or it might be a blazing hot Mediterranean day

when the sun is really shaping and sculpting

in combination with rich, dark shadows.

The first series of works that he was doing there

was the blossoming orchards.

The blossom started in March

and Van Gogh worked really very quickly

to get as many paintings as possible of this beautiful motif

which was obviously important also in the Japanese prints.

He felt that it was a tremendously beautiful subject to represent.

It was a very cheerful subject.

And he thought that this subject might also interest buyers

in Paris or in Holland.

So he was also thinking about how to market his own work.

"My dear Bernard,

"having promised to write to you, I want to begin by telling you

"that this part of the world seems to me as beautiful as Japan

"for the clearness of the atmosphere and the gay colour effects.

"The stretches of water make patches of a beautiful emerald

"and a rich blue in the landscapes

"as we see it in the Japanese prints.

"Pale orange sunsets make the fields look blue.

"Glorious yellow suns.

"However, so far I've hardly seen this part of the world

"in its usual summer splendour.

"The women's costume is pretty.

"Especially on the boulevard on Sunday

"you see some very naïve and well-chosen arrangements of colour.

"And that, too, will doubtless get even livelier in summer."

I think with an artist like Van Gogh

you get the impression that this is someone

who is being energised by the moment.

So when he wanders off into the outdoors

he is experiencing...

he's experiencing nature

in every instance.

He's experiencing the weather, the temperature, the wind.

He's gauging all of that.

And when you get into the zone as a painter and you're out there,

that energy becomes almost hypnotic.

You are painting and you are responding to what is happening in front of you.

You're mixing pigments on your palette.

Maybe you drop your brush and you get some earth on it

and it mixes into the colour.

You become at one with this whole experience

and you can almost get into a kind of weird trance.

More than being a landscape painter he wanted to be a painter of portraits

and this is something he started to do in a very serious way in Provence.

He asked people from the town to pose for him,

such as an old woman of Arles.

All kinds of portraits of ordinary people,

of everyday people, of everyday life,

such were the things that he wanted to paint and draw in Arles.

"My dear Theo,

"today I rented the right-hand wing of this building

"which contains four rooms

"or, more precisely, two with two little rooms.

"It's painted yellow outside, whitewashed inside,

"in the full sunshine.

"I've rented it for 15 francs a month.

"Now, what I'd like to do would be to furnish a room,

"the one on the first floor, to be able to sleep there.

"The studio, the store,

"will remain here for the whole of the campaign here in the south.

"That way I have my independence from petty squabbles over guesthouses,

"which are ruinous and depress me.

"If necessary...

"I could live at the new studio with someone else,

"and I'd very much like to.

"Perhaps Gauguin will come to the south."

When Van Gogh was living in Arles

he started to have this dream about an artist colony

and he hoped that other artists would join him

and they could work together, share their materials, discuss art

and together they would make better art and become better artists.

One of these artists was Gauguin and he came in the end.

In preparation for Gauguin's arrival

Van Gogh started a campaign of painting canvases

as a kind of decoration for his yellow house.

He made several ambitious paintings,

such as the sunflowers but also the bedroom,

which was his own bedroom in that yellow house.

And he started to make specific paintings

that would hang in Gauguin's bedroom

and it was a very beautiful series

of what are now icons of Van Gogh's work.

Gauguin and Van Gogh worked and lived together for two months in Arles.

They drank and ate together

and painted the same models side by side in the yellow house.

They experimented with the same kind of materials,

using a very coarse canvas, for example, a type of burlap,

to see what it would do with the pigments and with the oil paint.

Gauguin's beautiful portrait of Van Gogh painting the sunflowers

was made using this coarse canvas.

So in the beginning it was a very fruitful and special period of collaboration.

Unfortunately, it didn't end that well.

As most people know, it ended with the famous incident

that Van Gogh cut off part of his ear.

They had a huge argument,

probably also about art and what modern art should be about.

Their characters didn't go well together.

Gauguin left Arles.

Van Gogh was hospitalised for a long period

to recover from his ear injury.

The paintings of the sunflowers and his bedroom

were very important to Vincent.

They reflected the ambitions that he set himself while in Arles.

Critics of the day and observers of the avant-garde

recognised that 'Sunflowers' was something completely new and unique.

These paintings may have become icons after Van Gogh's death

but they had always been very important,

not only to Vincent but also to his brother Theo

and to other artists from his circle, like Gauguin.

"My dear friend Gauguin,

"in my mental or nervous fever, or madness -

"I don't know quite what to say or how to name it -

"my thoughts sailed over many seas.

"I even dreamt of the Dutch ghost ship and 'The Horla'

"and it seems that I sang,

"I who can't sing on any other occasions,

"to be precise an old wet-nurse's song

"while thinking of what the cradle-rocker sang

"as she rocked the sailors

"and whom I had sought in an arrangement of colours

"before falling ill."

Here in Arles there was reed everywhere

so he cut his own pens

and he used them to make these most wonderful ink drawings

and one of the examples you see here is probably one of the best.

When he drew this picture he was admitted there

so you have to imagine that when he drew this

he was at a very low point in his life.

It's a very ambitious drawing, as you can see,

to translate every part,

the fountain, the trees, even the other patients in the courtyard,

into this very distinct style.

That was what he was looking for. He was looking for his own style.

And I think in Arles he found it.

So there's hedges, there's little dots, there's little stripes.

And with his reed pen and ink

he just uses the whole sheet

and covers it with all these different graphic marks.

He must have seen it as an independent work of art

because there's a signature right there in the watering pot.

it's a very cute, anecdotal place to put it.

Van Gogh was an incredibly creative person

and tried out many different techniques,

experimenting with things he picked up along the way

but combining them in his own personal approach.

He often experimented with extremes,

so first painting with very dilute oil paint, for example,

and then switching just a month later

to using incredibly thick, creamy what we call impasto -

very strongly textured paint.

Although he was using basically the same materials

for these different approaches,

we do have to adjust our technique of treating paintings

according to the build-up of the layers

and the way that the paint is applied.

So this is an example of a painting that I'm restoring.

It's a view of Arles with irises in the foreground,

painted in May 1888.

As you can see, what I'm actually doing

is reversing the restoration carried out by my predecessor.

Apparently the conservator who worked on the painting in 1927

found this transition very disturbing

so he applied retouches to soften this transition

to blend it into each other,

even though, as in this case, Van Gogh did not intend

his French paintings to be varnished

because he preferred a modern matte surface.

In a way it's restoration

because I'm changing the painting back to a previous state

before it was restored and closer to what the artist intended.

We're very lucky. In this case we have a good deal of information

about how the painting was made.

To start with we have a drawing

that Van Gogh made on the spot just a couple of weeks before

which is actually signed "Vue d'Arles"

and then with his signature, "Vincent".

It's done with a reed pen and ink

in a very calligraphic, bold style.

Unfortunately, the ink has faded so it's a little less bold than it was originally

but you can see this very strong graphic, linear approach

transferred into the painting

with these blue contours that were added later.

So there's a sort of mutual influence

between his drawing and painting technique in the period.

A nice detail if you look closely is that we can see the traced contour,

the inner edge of a perspective frame which he's traced with pencil.

So this is for us very definite evidence that he was on the spot,

using the perspective frame

to help him correct what he saw in front of him

and transfer it onto the flat surface of his canvas.

After recovering from his ordeal in hospital

Vincent went back to his studio and his yellow house

and realised his dream of an artistic brotherhood

had been shattered.

The episode of the cutting of the ear

was the start of a very difficult period in his life,

blighted by seizures and bouts of illness.

"My dear Theo,

"at the end of the month I still wish to go to the mental hospital at Saint-Rémy

"or another institution of that kind which Mr Salles has told me about.

"Forgive me for not going into details

"to weigh up the pros and cons of such a course of action.

"It would strain my mind a great deal to talk about it.

"It will, I hope, suffice to say

"that I feel decidedly incapable

"of starting to take a new studio again

"and living there alone,

"here in Arles or elsewhere, it comes down to the same thing,

"for the moment.

"I have nevertheless tried to make up my mind to begin again.

"For the moment not possible.

"I'd be afraid of losing the faculty of working,

"which is coming back to me now,

"by forcing myself to have a studio

"and also having all the other responsibilities on my back."

Van Gogh stayed a little longer in Arles, in and out of hospital,

and finally he decided that he needed to get away from Arles

and he committed himself to an asylum in Saint-Rémy,

not far from Arles.

He stayed there for a long time

and he was treated for what he called his lunacy or illness,

his moments of depression.

We will never know exactly what his illness was.

The doctor wrote down that he had a type of epilepsy

so it was close to some kind of madness in the eyes of many people.

The thing about Van Gogh and the mythology which is important

is that people think that painting is easy.

They think it's just a sort of crazy rabid energy

that comes out like a dash of madness

and that's what artists are.

But painting is a difficult, troubling

and enormously frustrating activity.

As much as it can be therapeutic,

as much as you can gain solace from being outside

and painting something beautiful and getting it on canvas,

every day when I stand in front of my canvas

I will expose the gap

between what I want to achieve and what I can achieve.

The greatest artists in history have been possessed

by the need to create art

and it exhausts them.

And it's real, that bit is real.

Painting takes it out of you

if you are doing it as a conviction, as a passion.

And that's no lie, that's for real.

In Saint-Rémy, in spite of his illness,

he created a lot of works that are considered his best works.

It's amazing how he managed to recover every time

and to really continue to develop his work,

his way of painting, his way of drawing.

The irises, for example,

were done at the end of his stay in Saint-Rémy

and during this period he created an amazing amount of masterpieces.

"My dear Theo,

"I have a wheatfield, very yellow and very bright,

"perhaps the brightest canvas I've done.

"The cypresses still preoccupy me.

"I'd like to do something with them like the canvases of the sunflowers

"because it astonishes me

"that no one has yet done them as I see them.

"It's beautiful as regards lines and proportions,

"like an Egyptian obelisk.

"And the green has such a distinguished quality.

"To do nature here, as everywhere,

"one must really be here for a long time."

He made beautiful close-ups of undergrowth or butterflies,

roses in the garden.

He painted the view of his window on the fields,

the olive groves around the asylum.

But he also asked Theo to send him

several of his favourite artworks,

such as paintings by Millet, Delacroix, Rembrandt, in print.

So he received these black and white prints from Theo

and he started copying them

like he did before when he started out as an artist.

He had this beautiful series of peasants at work

by Jean-François Millet

and he made small copies, small paintings,

one to one of these prints,

but he translated it into very colourful little depictions

of these peasants at work.

Van Gogh himself believed that the only way to be cured

was to really keep on working as much as possible.

So he was forcing himself every time to start over again

and to go out to paint

or to work in the little studio that he had in the asylum.

After a year in the asylum

Van Gogh was feeling stronger and was anxious to move

to get away from the institutional atmosphere of Saint-Rémy.

It was time to move back north and be closer to Theo,

who had by this time married Jo Bonger and had a child named Vincent Willem.

"My dear brother,

"I feel I have more confidence in my work than when I left

"and it would be ungrateful of me to speak ill of the south.

"I confess that it's with great sorrow that I turn my back on it.

"If your work prevented you from coming to get me at the station

"or if it was at a difficult time or if the weather was too bad,

"don't worry, I'd certainly find my way.

"And I feel so calm

"that it would greatly astonish me if I lost my composure.

"How much I want to see you again

"and meet Jo and the baby.

"It's likely that I'll arrive in Paris around 5 o'clock in the morning."

Although Vincent was keen to be closer to his brother,

Paris was considered too much for his fragile state of mind

so he asked Theo to find him a location close to Paris

with a doctor who could keep an eye on him.

Theo made enquiries and, through the painter Camille Pissarro,

found a homeopathic doctor called Paul Gachet

in the rural village of Auvers-sur-Oise, just to the north of the capital.

Gachet was both a well-known doctor and a well-known collector

and would keep an eye on Vincent, while offering his companionship

as one who understood artists and the art world.

"My dear Theo and Jo,

"I'd hope, then, that in doing a few canvases of that really seriously

"there would be a chance of recouping some of the costs of my stay,

"for really it's gravely beautiful.

"It's in the heart of the countryside, distinctive and picturesque.

"I have seen Dr Gachet

"who gave me the impression of being rather eccentric,

"but his doctor's experience must keep him balanced himself

"while combatting the nervous ailment from which it seems to me

"he's certainly suffering at least as seriously as I am."

When Van Gogh arrived on the 20th May 1890

he found the least expensive room in the village.

It was a furnished room in the Auberge Ravoux,

on the second floor under the roof.

Normally when one goes to a hotel you ask for a room with a view.

Here there is no view. There's just a wall.

Van Gogh was only here for 70 days.

But in 70 days he did 80 paintings!

It was one of the most productive periods of his life.

When Vincent went to Auvers, in one of his first letters to Theo in Paris

quite a remarkable thing he said

is that he felt that his whole life had been a failure,

that he was a failure as a painter.

We know that Van Gogh really thought that the ambition was gone in his life.

He was still working, but he was working like a madman.

But why are you working like a madman?

You're working like a madman to push certain thoughts out of your mind

which you do not want to think about.

And that's the state he was in in the last months of his life.

"My dear brother,

"I'd like to write to you about many things but I sense the pointlessness of it.

"You didn't need to reassure me

"as to the state of peace of your household.

"I believe I've seen the good as much as the other side

"and, besides, am so much in agreement

"that raising a kid in a fourth-floor apartment is hard labour,

"as much for you as for Jo.

"Ah well,

"I risk my life for my own work

"and my reason has half foundered in it.

"Very well, but you're not one of the dealers in men.

"As far as I know and can judge, I think you really act with humanity.

"But what can you do?"

Vincent was at a very low point.

Illness, despair and an uncertain future weighed heavy on his mind.

In the afternoon of July 27 1890,

Vincent left his lodgings and disappeared into the countryside.

On his return that evening he was evidently in great pain.

He confessed to having shot himself in the chest

and Dr Gachet was called to tend the wound.

Theo arrived in haste the next day.

Vincent lay in some agony

but still managed to smoke his pipe and talk with Theo

until the following day he fell into unconsciousness

and died on 29 July in his brother's arms.

"I want to die like this."

On the following day, Theo invited friends to the funeral.

The funeral should have taken place at 2.30pm in the local church

but at the last moment the priest refused to perform the ceremony in the church

because he had committed suicide and was a protestant.

So Theo decided to pay homage to Van Gogh in the Auberge dining room.

They put Van Gogh's coffin on a table

and arranged his many recent paintings around him.

Some were still drying.

The painter Vincent van Gogh lived and died in this house on 29 July 1890

Many people have thought,

because of that fear that's being expressed in this picture

that it also was his last picture.

It's been described as such. It wasn't.

But people are right, I think, in the interpretation of the picture

that there is a kind of fear in it.

The idea that you're being overwhelmed by something

you cannot do anything about and it will threaten you,

that's the idea of the picture.

'Tree Roots' is his last picture.

That's the picture that he made in the morning before he died.

Vincent's brother Theo was heartbroken, proclaiming to his mother

that Vincent had found the rest he was longing for.

With a similar obsession to his departed brother,

Theo tirelessly sought to elevate Vincent's position in the art world

and bring to the public the hundreds of illuminating letters he had kept.

Tortured by feelings of regret and grief,

Theo's frail constitution started to give way

and he suffered paralysing fits due to syphilis

and passed away in Utrecht

just six months after the death of Vincent.

In 1914 Theo's wife Jo had his body moved to Auvers-sur-Oise

and buried next to his beloved brother, Vincent van Gogh.

Although today his works are among the most recognised

and valued of any painter,

during his lifetime Vincent van Gogh sold no more than a handful of paintings

and just a few drawings.

Vincent's art wasn't appreciated very well by the audience,

by the people during his life,

but at the end of his life his contemporaries, his peers,

considered him as one of the most important,

maybe the most important, artist of the avant-garde of that time.

To be so passionate about something.

For him it was art and he lived it.

So I think with the rich collection of paintings, drawings,

the letters too and the documents we have

you can step into Van Gogh's world and his thoughts

and you can see how he was living his art.

That's an amazing story for everyone.

Van Gogh hoped to move and touch

and inspire or console as many people as possible,

despite their background, despite their nationality.

He really strived towards an art

that would be universal so everyone could understand it.

I don't think the fact that he is so successful now,

that his paintings belong

to the most expensive paintings in the world

or that we have so many visitors at the Van Gogh Museum...

It is not the financial success.

It is really about a sincere ambition

that he wanted to make this connection

and to try to give answers

to all of our questions about our existence,

about life.

And the fact that he still is able to make that connection to so many people,

that would have pleased him the most.

"My dear Theo,

"man is not placed on the earth merely to be happy.

"Nor is he placed here merely to be honest.

"He is here to accomplish great things through society,

"to arrive at nobleness

"and to outgrow the vulgarity

"in which the existence of almost all individuals drags on.

"Art is long and life is short

"and we must wait patiently while trying to sell our skin dearly."

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