“Becoming Van Gogh”
Vincent van Gogh’s last years—which witnessed the production of such canvases as The Starry Night, 1889, and Wheatfield with Crows, 1890; the ear episode; and his untimely demise—exert an inexorable pull, often serving to define the Post-Impressionist’s career as a whole. In some ways, this isn’t surprising, considering the relative brevity of van Gogh’s active period (barely ten years) and the lurid fascination with his decline, at least in the popular imagination. But it isn’t the public alone who have privileged van Gogh’s late period: In the catalogue for a 1984 show at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, for example, curator Ronald Pickvance described the artist’s time in Arles, France (in 1888 and 1889) as “the zenith, the climax, the greatest flowering of van Gogh’s decade of artistic activity.” Recently, however, a number of exhibitions have broken with this tendency by focusing on a particular facet of the artist’s output, such as his penchant for up-close viewing or his interest in depictions of nighttime and twilight. The curators of “Becoming Van Gogh,” Timothy J. Standring and Louis van Tilborgh, took the opposite tack, zooming out to survey the full arc of his oeuvre, from early to late, inclusive of his very emergence and training as an artist.
The salutary effect of this broader scope allowed for a shift in focus from some putative quality of “mastery” to the artist’s process of development (hence the “becoming” of the show’s title). In turn, a good portion of the exhibition was devoted to works created in the early and mid-1880s, following van Gogh’s decision to devote himself to artmaking. Among these earlier pieces were items highlighting his training in drawing—both by his own devices (copying from drawing manuals of the time) and through his relatively brief formal instruction (such as his time in the Paris atelier of Fernand Cormon). Of particular interest was the 1882 Road Workers, which van Gogh executed while in The Hague. Some have taken this drawing’s seeming lapses in scale and crowding of figures as evidence of van Gogh’s lack of technical ability at this early stage. But such features might just as well be taken as an index of the artist’s engagement with the visual devices then employed by graphic illustrators, underscoring the impact of popular forms on his evolving artistic approach. The drawing also speaks to van Gogh’s desire to create a major figural composition, one indebted to painters (such as Gustave Courbet and Ford Madox Brown) concerned with building major modern pictures around the subject of labor.
The curators’ ambition to offer a broader view was likewise demonstrated by their refusal to mount a strictly monographic show, hanging the Dutch artist’s pictures alongside works by his predecessors and his contemporaries. Some of these inclusions (Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Émile Bernard, and Paul Signac) put van Gogh in dialogue with art of the French avant-garde, while others, such as Hubert von Herkomer, a British artist whose work was widely reproduced in The Graphic, a London periodical, again underscored van Gogh’s affinity for illustration and, more broadly, the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. One of the more surprising groupings came early on, with the pairing of van Gogh’s 1882 drawing Sorrow with a roughly contemporaneous mythological scene by the academic painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau. This unexpected comparison with an emblematic salon artist helped to highlight van Gogh’s assimilation of the artistic conventions of his time (both artists here tackling allegorical or mythological subjects), while simultaneously emphasizing his early inclination toward anti-idealizing depiction. In creating such moments, the exhibition gave the viewer pause, defamiliarizing van Gogh by pushing his work out of the realm of the individual and illuminating the longer historical trajectory of his art.