Vincent van Gogh’s maverick talent has put him at the center of European culture for more than a century. His works make headlines when they sell, from the record-breaking moment his Irises went for £27 million (US$35.9 million) at Sotheby’s in 1987, right up to this month’s predicted hoopla in Hong Kong, where Christie’s are to auction his riverside scene, Moored Boats, painted two years earlier, for an estimated US$30 million to US$50 million — likely to set a record for works from his later, Parisian period.
The Dutch artist’s dramatic renderings of simple things — plants, trees, furniture and faces — are international emblems of the way we value art. So much so that London’s National Gallery’s renowned 1888 sunflower painting was deliberately targeted last year by Just Stop Oil climate activists, who lobbed the contents of a soup tin at it.
The yellow flowers, happily protected by glass, bloom on regardless and this weekend take up their rightful place alongside two other Van Goghs: a portrait of a mother figure, La Berceuse, and another 1889 vase of sunflowers, lent by the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The painter had always intended them to be shown together and now, courtesy of the National Gallery’s new bumper show, Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers, they are reunited for the first time since they were created in the artist’s studio in southern France. This time though, as Van Gogh expert Martin Bailey points out, they appear in “fancy frames.”
Photo: AFP
“The curators have done fantastically well to get all these loans, which include major masterpieces, such as The Bedroom and The Yellow House. They will have had to fight for every single one,” says Bailey, who blogs for the Art Newspaper.
“Exhibitions often take things chronologically, following an artist’s development, but here the paintings from Arles and from Van Gogh’s time in a nearby asylum at Saint-Remy are mixed together.
“They want us to focus on the painting and to put the myths to one side.”
Photo: AP
The show, marking both 200 years of the National Gallery and 100 years since the arrival of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, opens to the public pre-labeled a “blockbuster’” the sort of must-see attraction museum directors dream of. It is also a term with a few unfortunate connotations, including the taint of safe commercial thinking.
But guest curator Cornelia Homburg, a renowned Van Gogh specialist, is confidently armored against this criticism. She is clear about the purpose of the show, which features 61 spectacular works, including some of the most revered and rarely, if ever, loaned.
“We want to show the artist rather than the tortured soul,” she says. “Of course, our interest is intensified by what we understand of his difficult life.”
Homburg concedes there is some relationship between Van Gogh’s suffering and his art, but stresses they are not the same thing. The key justification for the “blockbuster” she has been working on with Christopher Riopelle since early 2019 is its “solid premise.”
“We needed an angle that means something,” she says, “and the time Van Gogh spent in the south of France is the moment of creative maturity when he really thought about how to be a modern artist.”
So the exhibition challenges what we know, but not what we love about the painter. It updates the common idea that he was unappreciated in his time and that he strove, almost therapeutically, to express his troubled psyche on canvas.
As Homburg points out, while it is certainly true the artist was both poor and mentally ill, he did enjoy the respect of other artists and clung to a strong faith in his future audience.
“He thought about his public and the impact he would have. Everything was deliberate and planned,” she says.
“He knew he might not be widely understood in his day but believed that in 100 years he would be. He changed what he saw when he painted to make it more expressive, but not to express his own feelings. It was totally intentional.”
So if we sense trauma and melancholy in his twisted grove of olive trees trunks, or in a swirling skyscape, then it is because Van Gogh wanted us to, Homburg argues, and not because he felt that way himself.
Bailey agrees: “It is tempting to read meanings into the paintings but it is a mistake. There are a few from the asylum where you could say you see the effect of a mental struggle. This show has deliberately avoided those paintings.”
The gallery’s chosen title, Poets and Lovers, refers to the cast of characters and changing backdrops Van Gogh creates, playing with color to alter real faces and landscapes. Visitors first encounter two portraits, one of a dashing uniformed lover, and then one of a poet, imagined from the face of a painter friend, and bedecked with the firmament of stars that represent dreams for Van Gogh.
In the original painting of the artist’s bedroom in Arles, both these portraits can be spotted hanging above his bed. But in a second version, the one on display in London, Van Gogh romantically supplants these works with the 1889 Self-portrait, also in the show, and a painting of a mystery woman.
Later in the show, visitors meet a less familiar member of the Van Gogh dramatis personae in the 1888 Portrait of a Peasant, which reinvents an old gardener as a rural archetype. The work has never before been loaned to a UK institution by the Norton Simon Collection in Pasadena.
This is a show that leaves the clear impression that Van Gogh was always talking to his public — and even entertaining them.
Common sense is not that common: a recent study from the University of Pennsylvania concludes the concept is “somewhat illusory.” Researchers collected statements from various sources that had been described as “common sense” and put them to test subjects. The mixed bag of results suggested there was “little evidence that more than a small fraction of beliefs is common to more than a small fraction of people.” It’s no surprise that there are few universally shared notions of what stands to reason. People took a horse worming drug to cure COVID! They think low-traffic neighborhoods are a communist plot and call
It is barely 10am and the queue outside Onigiri Bongo already stretches around the block. Some of the 30 or so early-bird diners sit on stools, sipping green tea and poring over laminated menus. Further back it is standing-room only. “It’s always like this,” says Yumiko Ukon, who has run this modest rice ball shop and restaurant in the Otsuka neighbourhood of Tokyo for almost half a century. “But we never run out of rice,” she adds, seated in her office near a wall clock in the shape of a rice ball with a bite taken out. Bongo, opened in 1960 by
Over the years, whole libraries of pro-People’s Republic of China (PRC) texts have been issued by commentators on “the Taiwan problem,” or the PRC’s desire to annex Taiwan. These documents have a number of features in common. They isolate Taiwan from other areas and issues of PRC expansion. They blame Taiwan’s rhetoric or behavior for PRC actions, particularly pro-Taiwan leadership and behavior. They present the brutal authoritarian state across the Taiwan Strait as conciliatory and rational. Even their historical frames are PRC propaganda. All of this, and more, colors the latest “analysis” and recommendations from the International Crisis Group, “The Widening
From a nadir following the 2020 national elections, two successive chairs of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), Johnny Chiang (江啟臣) and Eric Chu (朱立倫), tried to reform and reinvigorate the old-fashioned Leninist-structured party to revive their fortunes electorally. As examined in “Donovan’s Deep Dives: How Eric Chu revived the KMT,” Chu in particular made some savvy moves that made the party viable electorally again, if not to their full powerhouse status prior to the 2014 Sunflower movement. However, while Chu has made some progress, there remain two truly enormous problems facing the KMT: the party is in financial ruin and