VAN GOGH
ART Lesson 15: The aim of the lesson is to teach you to explain what the individuality of a painter consists in.
1. Sum up the information in a nutshell yet adding whatever you consider is necessary:
Where Vincent Van Gogh was born, there was nothing to satisfy his generous heart: the bleak, inhospitable country, the rigid middle-class society, and his cold, austere home. There is no other way of explaining his difficult temperament and his love of solitude, apparent even when he was a child.
Wherever Van Gogh was, wherever he went, he carried the earth of Holland with him, sticking to the soles of his boots, an earth that was soaked with water, swept by the winds, whose only wealth was the toil of its hard-working and taciturn people. His rejected love soon drove him towards an obsessive mystical humanitarianism. He shared the fellow feeling of humble people, the peasants, field workers, spinners and weavers, whom he had so often drawn and painted. Van Gogh lingered over the details of the peasants’ horny hands, twisted by hard work in the fields. He also liked painting still-life’s because everything he saw was an excuse for painting or drawing. He wanted to train his hand in all his craft and its various genres might demand of it. So that he would be familiar with every medium, he turned from oil-painting to water-colour, from water-colour to gouache; he drew with lead pencils, charcoal, ink, coloured crayons, chalk; and used brushes, pens and even sharpened reed, as in the “Peasant Digging.”
If we now look back over the whole of his dark period, from 1881 to 1885, we can see why his biographers call it “the dark period” in contrast to “the light period” at Paris and Arles. It was certainly dark in every respect. Van Gogh himself was dark. The men around him, their condition, thoughts, and way of life were dark; consequently, the painter’s models and subjects were dark too, because at that point he could not conceive any other art than a naturalistic art. Yet he was already treating reality with a certain amount of freedom by eliminating detail, diminishing a form here and exaggerating elsewhere to the verge of a caricature.
Describe a picture belonging to Van Gogh’s dark period. Teacher’s Choice.
Do either Task 3 or 4 YOUR CHOICE!
3. When Van Gogh arrived in Paris in 1886, he was already prepared to surrender to the fascination of the French Impressionists. The place where he lived was near the small gardens, waste ground and windmills of Montmartre. These were all subjects which he treated with little light touches of bright colour. Following the example of the Impressionists, he soon acquired a more concise, flickering brushstroke, with subtler, brighter colours.
Describe a Van Gogh belonging to the Impressionistic phase your choice. You may use the model description below:
‘The painting was done at Saint-Remy, under the impact of the Southern sunlight, which had such a liberating effect on Van Gogh’s art. To his Brother Theo he had written upon his first contact with the South: “Behold the kingdom of light! How wonderful is the golden sun!” The South inspired countless landscapes, none more rhapsodic than this one. Van Gogh’s lyrical brush sweeps up nature in the rhythm of his own powerful emotion, until field, trees, mountains and clouds become almost abstract, free-flowing forms.’
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4. … But soon Paris had nothing more to offer Van Gogh. He had exhausted all his resources and was aware of its futility, its egoism, its conflicting interests and shabby rivalries between artists. Then Toulouse-Lautrec talked to him about the South of France. The South was the sun, almost the East, “as good as Japan”. So there he went on a cold and dreary winter morning in 1888. He arrived in Arles, where the most productive period of his career began. He had only two and a half years to live…
If in Paris Van Gogh learned from the Impressionists to brighten his palette, in Arles his style becomes more expressive. He dreamed of Japan, for which he hoped to find an equivalent in Provence, at Arles. He recreated an idyllic Provence of blossoming orchards, vast flaming expanses with their square fields, rows of olive trees and reed hedges. He used yellow, pale sulphur yellow, pale lemon gold to render the sun. He painted his interiors out of nothing, in flat but crudely laid on tints with thick impasto. The problem of painting night scenes and the night itself interested him enormously. In his self-portraits, he contrasts between the yellow houses in the sun and the incomparable freshness of the blue sky. Some of his pictures become real symphonies in blue and yellow. His later landscape may be called really romantic. He painted a night sky with a wan moon emerging from the dense shadow of the earth, next to it - a star of exaggerated brightness, and the soft brightness of pink and green in the ultramarine sky, with clouds moving fast across it…