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The choice of Van Gogh is not accidental, but rather a debt with a mix of sentiment for Vincent van Gogh's art, which triggered in me an awareness that has never left me since. It's a common thing as far as I've noticed that people who do art, very often are exposing in their recollections, as I call it the "Mozart Syndrome", the "profound" memories of an early "genius". As funny as it is to me, I am not going to argue that it might be as well my case, nevertheless this story is very authentic without pressure to make it more colorful. I was five or six years old (like in E.E Cumming's poem) living with my parents in their Warsaw apartment. Life was a sweet and secure adventure on my playground and with kindergarten companions. Our bonds were strong and we visited each others houses almost everyday to play and eat together. In the apartment of one of my childhood friends there were a few reproductions on the walls like in every other house. It's the time of life, when the earliest memories start. In this context those reproductions formed a part of my "subconscious prehistory" hanged there probably long before my visits. In this living room in a modest frame was a copy of Vincent van Gogh's painting Boats on the Beach at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. The copy, which I must have seen many times before, but never the way I saw it on this particular day. I had abandoned the game, which we were playing on the floor and as if driven by some magical force or some invisible gesture, I stood before the painting completely mesmerized. As a child, reality was a given for me. A landscape was a copy of the real world. A new perception and calmness opened in my heart and, to my sheer surprise, enveloped me for a timeless moment. The boats, the sky, and the sea - my eyes were wondering without a goal, but with the feeling of unlimited freedom, as if looking at a picture of infinity never realized before. It was simple, striking and profound. I didn't know the concept of art; it was long before any conceptualization could occur. The pleasure of vivid colors, the firm contours of the lines, the freshness of the whole scene - a forgotten dream, which could be experienced as well as reality. I had to wait years to find the words and concepts to understand it. Since I am describing the experience of a rather small child, all intellectualization belongs to the retrospective adult, who recreates the feeling from the past.
Vincent van Gogh's life over time has become a symbol of artistic purity and genius in its most intense form. His paintings are hot shots and are market driven items massaging the billionaire's soft hearts. Nevertheless, the art of van Gogh has a special place for me even today, not only because of that initial feeling in which I had to intuitively recognize maybe the most significant point of human existence - its subjectivity, but also for its honesty and intensity, which so adequately express his life. A hundred years later his work still has the same freshness and gospel of authenticity. I have to admit that from all of the artists that I like and know, I feel the closest to Vincent's essence and struggle. In my later years I could more consciously appreciate his contribution to humankind and my life. His work carries an innocent, almost child-like, intensive vision of reality as seen in its purest form. The vibration of his choppy brush strokes, where complementary colors coexist in harmonious unity in small rainy patterns, has arresting quality and purifying effect. A magical vision of the lost world of innocence suddenly presented with a such force, honesty and authenticity that has no equals. These thoughts came to me years later when I met with art and artists from mental institutions. In the seventies when I was living in Warsaw, I organized with my friends gallery shows in the Warsaw Student Club "Stodoła". For the openings artists would give a lecture to the public. One of the shows was dedicated to people with mental disorders from the local institution. Artists were invited along with their doctors and the lecture became an unusual exchange between the public and the talented patients. I remember, to my astonishment, the unusual atmosphere which slowly filled the meeting. One of the characteristics of the encounter was an almost painful, unguarded honesty on the side of the artists and they didn't have any protective social mask to hide behind very intimate aspects of their lives and suffering. Their work was an additional aspect amplifying an intensive feeling. The most characteristic thing about it was the emotional charge that in some cases unified the unskillful handling of the medium and the subject. This intensity recalled to me the work of Vincent van Gogh. His art has ability to highlight the freshness of the common scene. In his letters feelings of empathy, compassion, concerns and suffering are expressed in very human terms. My next revelation about Vincent occurred during my travels in Southern France; Provence and Central Massive and particularly, over one year of living in Ardèche. The deep feeling of nostalgia which penetrated my soul at that time was sometimes mixing with the southern light and unpretentious beauty of lavender fields, cypress, olives, chestnut, cherry and pine trees, infusing with the monotonous, omnipresent and contemplative sound of cicadas. I thought about Bruegel in the fall and wintertime looking at a village landscape full of snow and old ruins and I thought about van Gogh in spring and summer time, when the colors were vibrating in the sunlight.
Vincent's life was charged with deep compassion and authentic struggle - an account of real passion for art. His harsh character and uncompromising nature alienated him from people to further only his inner turmoil that in the end triggered the ultimate solution for his tired soul - a suicide. Van Gogh from the very beginning of his days was an eccentric in the way he looked and behaved. People in their recollection of him, very often pointed his unattractiveness and awkwardness. They also could observed in him traces of melancholy, sadness, peculiar mannerisms and nervous patterns. His introverted nature showed already up during his school days. He would often wander alone in the fields collecting natural wonders or studying birds in their habitat. He never belonged to a crowd. This unusual split of apparent harshness and deep empathy for others kept him at a distance from other people and created over time the gap between him and the world. He crossed this gap with his art, but never the same way personally when he was alive. Of course considering the amount of time that van Gogh devoted to reading, studies, correspondence as well as painting, it was difficult to find time to socialize. It would be unjust to say that he was antisocial; he just developed a different way of being in and with the world.
Another unusual aspect of his life is his relation with his brother Theo van Gogh which was filled with unusual feeling of love and commitment. As the artist Vincent left us not only paintings, but also an eloquent description of his inner life in the form of letters to many different people - mainly to Theo. Preservation and translation of them as well as the exposition of Vincent van Gogh's work to the world was an outcome of the hard work of the wife of Theo van Gogh - Johanna Gesina Gogh-Bonger. She and her husband were the first to recognize the value and the genius of Vincent. Once she wrote, that "of all Theo did for his brother, there is perhaps nothing that proved greater sacrifice than having endured living with him for two years." 2 Vincent's irritable character and sometimes intensely opinionated remarks about art and art dealing were difficult to handle even by someone as close to and patient with him as Theo. Out of the many people that Vincent knew, Theo was the only one who could understand him and would sacrifice his own comfort to provide Vincent with financial support throughout his life.
In his letters to Theo, besides ideas and explanations about his art, Vincent provides intelligent and sensitive descriptions of his emotional states as well as intimate notes about his inner struggle with the mental illness which was slowly consuming his creative impulse. His letters are the best documents in the history of art, that lets us to analyze the creative process. Through them we can see intentions behind his work as well as his character and strength in his fight for sanity. Besides literary value, although not intentional (he didn't think about himself as a writer) they stand as a document of the development of his illness, perhaps schizophrenia. Some aspects of it are the amplification of our normal feelings of joy and sadness to unbearable size, which confuse the affected mind and interfere with the casual experience of everyday life. Pretty early his father had noticed that Vincent was prone to depressive moods :
It grieves us so when we see that he literally knows no joy of life, but always walks with bent head, whilst we did all in our power to bring him to an honorable position! It seems as if he deliberately chose the most difficult path.3
Indeed it seems as if some people are fated to follow difficult paths, although I would argue with his father about question of the choice. His apparent harshness and roughness was hiding a big compassionate heart, an unusually and ethically aware human being. This apparent split was only adding to conflicts targeting Vincent's life. He was treated for epilepsy but the more accurate diagnosis could had been schizophrenia. This is not a simple mental disorder with particularly well-defined symptoms, but a complex pathology which creates individualistic world and can be recognized if it manifests through extreme and consistent patterns. In his case it's hard to be certain, since the diagnosis given by his contemporaries can be rather misleading. He was diagnosed with epilepsy, though he didn't have any epileptic seizures. The most violent and repeating attacks of psychosis occurred at the end of his life between 1888 -1890. During this period of time which ended with van Gogh's suicide, his struggle intensified moods of up-and-downs. His hopes and hopelessness are well preserved in his letters.
It's difficult to estimate with assurance the background of Vincent's suffering. For me the most interesting fact about him and his work is the spiritual strength that emanates from his canvases. His work attracts generation after generation of new admirers and it seems, that regardless of the changing times and technology, his work awakens the same feeling of intense longing. Vincent (this is the way he likes to be identified as an artist) was a deep and authentic thinker. In the letters to his younger brother Theo and other artists like Emile Bernard or Paul Gauguin he detailed his concerns with human existence and an aesthetic vocabulary. It was his deepest dream to communicate changes in a way that would be truthful and contemporary to his time.
Van Gogh's transformations during his lifetime belonged to the unusual phenomena of the soul alchemy where the often-rational logic has no application and can be only misleading. He could not compromise with the old interpretation of the Bible and academic treatment of the most fundamental questions about salvation and God. In December of 1881 Vincent quarreled with his father about the interpretation of the Bible and was ordered out of the house. In 1885 after his father's death he painted a still life with his father's Bible and the soft-cover book of Emile Zola's "La Joie de Vivre". His art was an extension of his inner dialogue with others and himself. As the American art critic, Meyer Shapiro, said: "His career as an artist is a high religious-moral drama and not only rapid development of a style and new possibilities of art." 4 Van Gogh's love for art and literature, his passionate look at human possibilities and excitement mixed with his personal conviction of his mystical mission. His devotion to the poor and dispossessed when he was an evangelist in Borinage - Belgian mining district - opened him even more to the needs of others and the feverish quest to fulfill a useful destiny. For him his art became a tool for expression and purification, but not a means in itself. Meaning for van Gogh was the most important element in all his activities, and at the same time, lack of it the most torturous thorn that provoked his depressions.
The fate of van Gogh becomes a cliché in the modern world's often-cold commercial calculations. During his lifetime only one of his paintings was sold. Today they are priceless and objects of high and competitive investment. Part of it, of course, is the inherent value of his work, but not without obvious irony - again, we pay homage to the dead forgetting the living, as it was during van Gogh's time. "The good artist is a dead artist".The irony of life makes out of van Gogh a symbol of the cursed genius unrecognized by his contemporaries. The fact that he died so early made him an immortal avant-garde artist. Contemporary avant-garde artists are longing for his fame; they want to enjoy the recognition, but often hesitate to shoulder the struggle and for sure they are not going to commit suicide. I don't know if van Gogh will be for us the same van Gogh, if not for his premature death. In stark contrast to contemporary avant-garde, people like him or Paul Cézanne were avant-garde without intention to become one. Vincent work is an outcome of his broad knowledge about art in the service of his inner search for eternal truths. His work is the spirit of religious art, though through entirely secular subjects. His aim was deep spirituality, an omnipresence of emotion. It was his genius to express it through art.
Vincent van Gogh's unique style was in reaction to his times. In Paris he was exposed to past and contemporary visual traditions, a springboard to his vibrant brush stroke and vivid palate of colors, so far away from his early and dark The Potato Eaters. Furthermore, in Paris " he drew from it the teaching that was to alter the appearance - though not the substance - of his art, in such a fundamental way." 5
The evolution of Impressionism, starting from Manet (an intelligent Master of synthesis) through Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, Renoir and Cézanne (the father of modern art and cubism in particular) was laying the groundwork for van Gogh. Nevertheless, his more direct stylistic influence was derived from Seurat and Signiac - both artists that took Impressionism to its limits.
In his letters to Emile Bernard, Vincent was at odds with the Symbolists' approach toward religious subjects. He did not want to repeat biblical stories through cliché subjects, but rather, paint impressions of the spirit through his interpretation of natural landscape. Vincent's fascination with Japanese art is well preserved in his letters and strongly felt in his art. He was well aware of the Japanese art and contemporary criticism of it as in Le Japan Artistique. He was interested particularly in a colorful aesthetic of "uhiyo-e" - a Buddhist term for "floating world". It was in opposition to an early black and white sumi-ink Zen paintings, which enchanted more directly Vincent's sensibility for nature. "Uhiyo-e" aesthetic conveyed a simple and profound spiritual statement that "samsara is nirvana" or otherwise to say, liberation can be present, if life is perceived by the "undiscriminating eye".6 Vincent was familiar with the work of Hokusai, Hiroshige, Kaigetsugo and Maronabu, as well as the criticism of the art dealer, S. Bing, who once wrote:
... the constant guide whose indications he follows is called "Nature"; she is his sole, his revered teacher, and her precepts form the inexhaustible source of his inspiration. To Nature he surrenders himself with a frank fervor which express itself in all his works, and invests them with touching sincerity. The Japanese is drawn toward this pure ideal by a twofold characteristic of his temperament. He is at once an enthusiastic poet, moved by the spectacles of Nature, and an attentive and minute observer of the intricate mysteries which lurk in the infinitely little....in word, he is convinced that Nature contains the primordial elements of all things, and, according to him, nothing exists in creation, be it only a blade of grass, that is not worth of a place in the loftiest conceptions of Art.7
This "new look" on art, like a perfect synthesis of the European and Japanese oriental philosophy, was a characteristic mark of van Gogh's work. Vincent's paintings are the modern interpretation of biblical subjects without reference to the traditional narrative stories. His landscapes, still-lives and portraits emanate an unique spiritual force. He is an absolutist in his approach toward art and life. His passion, intensity, introspection and struggle created a feeling of closeness and human brotherhood which is uniquely his and also universal. In van Gogh's clash with his father and the church I can see my own aspirations to go beyond dogmatic understanding. It's a thirst for my own revelations, which the outside world can only confirm, but never provide.
Today, going back to my childhood memories and the Boats on the Beach at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, I feel it was not just a blind accident, but also the manifestation of real energy and the triumph of visual art - a direct transmission of unspoken feeling. Today I can read much symbolism and meaning in that simple landscape with fisherman's' boats, flying birds, sky and sea. His statement about love and companionship is depicted in that seascape. He wrote to Theo from his trip to the Mediterranean Sea: "one night I strolled by the sea on the deserted beach. It was not gay, but neither was it sad - it was beautiful." and also: "what strikes me here, and what makes painting so attractive is the clearness of the air. I don't need Japanese pictures here, for I am always telling myself that here I am in Japan which means that I have only to open my eyes and paint what is right in front of me." 8 It is painting done mainly in primary colors: blue, red and yellow with a bit of green and it hides small messages of human relations. The boats were painted in pairs with the focus on details and clear outline. One of them has the name "Amitie" which means, "Friendship" and amplifies the pairing motif. The masts of the first group of boats are introducing through their general movement another group of sailboats in the open sea, giving some oriental, diagonal dynamism into a rather peaceful and contemplative seascape. Painted white birds, underlie the lightness of the summer spirit. Two wooden boxes on the beach separated by distance are two brothers painted in Vincent's color of love - yellow. One of them, the closest to the viewer, has van Gogh's signature - a small accent of longing in this otherwise open and airy space. Striking simplicity, on the edge of summer boredom, and aimless wandering on the beach are a metaphor for life's journey. Through his unpretentious art, unusual and unguarded honesty, this lonely and rejected man made friends in generations to come, warming up the hearts of other wanderers, as myself, to the simplicity and mystery of life as seen through the eyes of a five or six years old child.
© written by Adam Rupniewski.
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