Van Gogh:
His Sources, Genius and Influence
National Gallery of Victoria

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

It is not only in Aprill with his shoures soote. Even on the twelfth day of Christmas are folk likely to climb on night buses and goon on pilgrimages. But sacred journeys have always been a bit of a punt. Will the weather hold and the travel be safe ? Will the pitch be in good order after the Madonna concert ? Will the blisful martir heal my mastercard ? Will I be able to buy a saint’s fingerbone in a snowdome ? Will the Van Gogh exhibition live up to the feverish expectations of everyone including the Victorian Tourist Board ?

If ever there was genius on a microchip it is Van Gogh. It’s all there- the colour, the delirium, the commercial tragedy, the brother his keeper, the asylum doctors, that bloodied ear, the suicide by society, as Artaud put it. Then, the posthumous frenzy. Even by 1920 Van Gogh had been set in the aspic of legend. By the 1980s he was synonymous with Sotheby’s hyperbole. Twenty four mill for Sunflowers wasn’t it, and Bondy gored for sixty odd on Irises. And, when we weren’t contemplating paintings selling for the price of a frigate or the rehabilitation of Poland, we were telling ourselves that he was not made for our harsh world. That icky song by Don McLean- Vincent. Starry Starry Night may yet be judged the cultural crime of the 1970s.

So it is with a jangled mix of vulgar sentiment, half-gleaned history and a fascination with the commodification of art that we approach the Van Gogh exhibition. Unfortunately even there paradoxes abound. Vincent is covered in corporate logos. Like a tennis player or a Formula One driver he endorses everything from petroleum to airline companies. One wonders whether viewing the paintings is just a gavotte before the real adventure, the step into Santa’s Cave, that shrine of relics and simulacra -the merchandising shop.

The show itself is carefully adumbrated in the subtitle – sources, genius and influences. The sources include British narrative artists such as Frank Holl and Frederick Walker whose work for the Graphic and Illustrated London News was known to Van Gogh. Examples from the National Gallery’s own collection line the first wall preceded by the Australian John Peter Russell’s warmly lit, if conventional, portrait of Van Gogh from 1886. The sources continue – Rousseau, Daubigny, and Anton Mauve, Willem and Jacob Maris of the Hague School. Then a cluster of Millets garnered from Australian collections and a Vincent imitation -The Sower: Facing Right, one of thirty four versions he made from Millet sources. On display from the National’s own collection is Jules Bastian Lepage’s Season of October: The Potato Gatherers, another painting known to Van Gogh. So much for the sources- introduced, alas, with laboured emphasis and prosaic comparison.

Time for the genius perhaps. The Old Church Tower at Nuenen ? Not half as interesting as, say, The Church at Auvers five years later. The small study Head of a Peasant has more vitality, even if it is familiar to visitors to the permanent collection at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Then a group of colleagues interrupt the genius with some of their own. Monet’s Vetheuil and works from Signac and Pissaro- all handily from the National Gallery’s own collection or from down the road in Sydney.

After some transitional works- Le Moulin de la Galette and Windmills on Montmartre- we get to the core pieces in the show. The vitality in Trees in a Field on a Sunny Day is equalled by the impressionist and pointillist verve of Restaurant de la Sirene. The Self Portrait of 1887 is a discomforting study, the hair bristling as if with electrodes, the smeary pallor of the cheeks and brow, the harsh red gash of a mouth bleeding into the dewlaps of the beard. Item thirty four and at last we have hit the real stuff. Next comes the lush colour and topographical precision of View of Sainte-Maries, where Van Gogh had his first glimpse of the Mediterranean. It has all the freshness of a new world.

The Arles paintings are disappointing. Neither the Stevedores, The Ploughed Field or The Green Vineyard bespeak the splendour of the period. It’s not just that there isn’t a cypress to be seen. We are taken to the brink and the offerings are uncharacteristic and second order. The Chair and the Pipe (on loan from the Tate) compensates, partly by pleasing us with its familiarity and alarming us with its originality. Even more the Portrait of the Postman Joseph Roulin. One of very few treasures from the Netherlands collections represented, the snap of the postie with his bifurcate beard curling in harmony with the tendrils of the floral wallpaper, is one of the lovely after-images of the show. Especially as the genius section falls away into Millet studies- The Sheaf-binder, Night-the Watch and -chosen especially for souvenir bookmarks- the sentimental family sketch, First Steps.

The influences include some excellent Gauguins -including Breton Girls Dancing – works by Derain, Braque, Heckel and Nolde. Max Pechstein’s Bridge Over the Seine from the National Gallery in Canberra is a splendid example of Vincent’s explosion of colour as is Kandinsky’s Bedroom in Ainmillerstrasse from the Lenbachhaus in Munich. When Vincent’s bedroom interiors were first shown in Munich in 1909 they became quite the thing. Within a month fourteen artists had immortalised their own yellow chairs and knobbly bedsteads.

We often recall exhibitions by the paintings we sneak back to, the ones that demand one last look before you head for home. This time the temptations were few. For me -the Self-Portrait and View of Saintes-Maries, the Chair and the Postie, the Breton Girls and the Kandinsky. And then off to the postcards, bookmarks, Mambo sweaters, keyrings, Vincent mugs, sox, paperweights and paraphernalia. Everything except a Blue Velvet ear and a Don McLean cassette. Yet I can hear him crooning to it now. Starry, starry night…

The Adelaide Review, January, 1994. p.27.