Van Gogh at the Royal Academy - get it while you can

Van Gogh at the Royal Academy: Illuminating and Shocking
This new exhibition of letters, drawings and paintings strips away the myth to reveal what really made Van Gogh special – his art

Adrian Searle
guardian.co.uk
Wednesday 20 January 2010 09.41 GMT

Occasioned by the recent publication of his letters, The Real Van Gogh is bound to be a blockbuster. The artist groans under the weight of scholarship, popular biography and biopics, innumerable cartoons and gags. There have been pop songs and cakes decorated to look like his starry, starry night. Kirk Douglas wrestled manfully to depict him as troubled, over-sensitive artist, the disturbed and self-destructive hero. Retrieving the real Van Gogh – whoever he might be – from his place in the popular imagination becomes a more difficult task the more he is buried beneath the characterisations.

The story of his life is worth retelling. Van Gogh was a late starter, mostly self-taught, uneven, smitten with mental illness, dead at 37. His trajectory as an artist – from sodden Dutch landscapes under heavy skies, toiling peasants and weavers, to the flaring, sometimes hallucinogenic landscapes of Provence, all of which ended after he shot himself one afternoon in a southern French cornfield in 1890, an unfinished letter still in his pocket – is a luminous and shocking arc.

I am much more fascinated and affected by the artist's drawings than his paintings. Drawing and writing are closely allied, and the first leads to the latter in the same way that a cry, a laugh or a groan leads to speech. However Van Gogh painted, the quickness of drawing and writing – pouring things onto the blank page, unmediated – is different to painting. For a start there's all that paraphernalia painting involves: easel, canvas, brushes, painting knives, oil and turps, a palette, tubes of paint. The cost and availability of these materials vexed Van Gogh and became the subject of many of his letters to his brother Theo, some of which are on display in this exhibition. He was at times driven to use tea-towels for canvas, and cheaper paints whose colour was impermanent. Some of the flowers in his still lives have faded almost to white, their pinks and magentas deteriorated, destroying the carefully gauged colour and tonal values he thought and wrote about so much.

You don't need much to draw – though to begin with, when Van Gogh struggling to teach himself the mysteries of perspective drawing, he even set up a small rectangular frame strung with wires to look through. He was also much concerned and delighted by different types of pencils, English handmade papers of various weights and finishes, inks and nibs. He could even rhapsodise about a lump of black chalk. His writing as well as his art shows him as far from impetuous or lacking in control, however compulsively he worked. The poet and theatre director Antonin Artaud called him a 'quiet convulsive' and it's the quiet that counts, the deliberated calm in Van Gogh's purpose. Often the artist drew with a pen that he cut himself from the reeds that grew at the margins of Dutch waterways and roadside ditches in Province. He noted that the reeds in the south were better for drawing. For finer work, he also picked up feathers for the quills he cut to make nibs.

It's more than coincidental that reeds and birds also appear in Van Gogh's drawings. I wonder if he ever used river water to dilute his inks, and for the somewhat less successful watercolours that he made. Even the charcoal he used in his early drawings have a connection to the earth itself. Those pollarded willows that appear in his work time and again also provide the charcoal that he used. Such connectedness would have suited his pantheist view of the world. His early, magnificently blunt sketches of peasants at their labours, make your own back ache just to look at them. The lines are stiff, their curves strain. The figures seem to come out of the mud that sucks at their feet. You imagine the artist bending, too – to his drawing board and his canvas, on those long walks he took, carrying all his gear.

Van Gogh knew when to stop and to let the whiteness of the paper work for him; the same whiteness could be bright sky, a road, the earth, water, a face turned to the sun. And he animated this blankness with a great variety of touches: thin parallel strokes; fatty, thick curlicues and whorls; dashes, impatient scribbles and hatchings; various kinds of dots, both emphatic and tender; radiating lines; a bony and marvellously awkward searching line that could bring tree-trunks and knotty vines to characterful life. For all his heavily laden brushwork, his paintings rely as much on drawing as on painterly modelling, however strong and brusque and bruised the colour. The paintings are drawings made thick. Van Gogh was never an impressionist.

Having various of Van Gogh's letters displayed here is instructive, but their small size makes them hard to look at – let alone read. They too are a kind of drawing. The artist's handwriting is vigorous, economical, urgent, and there are few crossings-out. The words race across the page at an even, quick pace, in Dutch, French and English. His writing gives little hint of a troubled mind, and he writes about his difficulties with surprising objectivity. He was lucid and reflective. You want to know Van Gogh, however obstreperous and difficult companion and he might have been. He pauses mid-flow to sketch the kinds of brushes he wants his brother Theo to send him, and makes drawings of the things he's been hard at work at. Sometimes the drawings in his letters seem more lively and better than the paintings they refer to. They have a casual intensity.

The letters are fragile and intimate scraps. But it is the drawings that do most for me: monumental peasants in black chalk and charcoal, quiet rooftops, country roads and endless fields, fishing boats at sea, writhing cypresses, olive trees and grasses and rock-strewn landscapes that heave with his own inescapable undertow.

The achievement of the paintings is harder won: a reaper at sunrise in the surging corn, a corner of the unkempt asylum garden, stoic and sometimes melancholic portraits, those chairs which await their sitters or memorialise their departures. Had Van Gogh lived, what would he have done? His early suicide made the myth as much as completed his art. At times it seems to compete with it.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/jan/20/van-gogh-royal-academy
http://www.vangoghletters.org/vg/
The Van Gogh Letters: http://www.vangoghletters.org/vg/