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Beacon for Modern Art
The image of Vincent van Gogh as misunderstood genius isn’t necessarily the whole truth. Vincent’s paintings hardly sold during his lifetime, but his fellow artists certainly appreciated them, and journalists likewise began to take an interest in 1888. French and Dutch modernist painters were inspired by his work.
Who were they? And what precisely did they see in Vincent?
How could we explain The Sower without considering the idea of the necessary advent of a man, a messiah, a sower of truth, who would regenerate the decrepitude of our art...?
The art critic Albert Aurier in 'Mercure de France', January 1890
The French art critic Albert Aurier was one of the first to praise Vincent’s work. He admired the expressive colour and brushwork, but above all Van Gogh’s symbolic force.
It was these same elements – symbolism, colour and brushwork – that drew the attention of young artists.
The art critic Albert Aurier (1865–1892)
‘Skies resembling the molten outpourings of metal and crystal, which every so often are irradiated by torrid solar discs.’
And: ‘Blackened cypresses, lining up in nightmarish, flaming silhouettes.’
Such were the associations Aurier says were evoked in him by the ‘the strange, intense and feverish work of Vincent van Gogh’.
Cypresses with Two Figures, 1889–1890, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo
Vincent was surprised by Aurier’s enthusiastic notice: he was grateful, but also felt a little awkward, writing in response:
‘I shall add a study of cypresses for you to the next consignment I send to my brother, if you will do me the pleasure of accepting it as a memento of your article.’
In March 1888, Vincent showed three paintings at the Salon des Indépendants – the annual exhibition of innovative art held ‘independently’ of the traditional academic Salon. His work drew a first, somewhat cursory review:
‘Mr van Gogh paints large landscapes with a vigorous brush, paying little attention to the value and precision of his tones.’
Gustave Kahn, in La Revue Indépendante, April 1888
Vincent van Gogh, Irises, 1889, J. Paul Getty Museum
Vincent selected two works with stronger colour contrasts for the next Salon des Indépendants in 1889. His brother Theo substituted one of them for Irises, ‘which strikes you from a long way off’.
Just before the following year’s deadline for submissions, Vincent suffered a mental crisis. Theo supplemented his brother’s selection with colourful works of the kind he hoped would sell well.
Vincent’s fellow exhibitor Paul Gauguin thought Van Gogh’s paintings were ‘the most remarkable’ in the whole show. The older painter Claude Monet was likewise inspired by Vincent’s work, or that at least is how it seems when we look at the painting The Four Trees, which Monet painted the following year.
Cover 'La Vogue'
The press response was also positive. ‘Mr van Gogh is a diverting colourist’, Félix Fénéon wrote in La Vogue, while another art critic added that ‘his works in particular drew the attention of the public.’
In 1889 Vincent was invited to show his work at the progressive Belgian artists’ group Les XX (’The Twenty’).
Vincent picked out six paintings – matched by colour – on the theme of the seasons, to achieve a ‘rather varied colour effect’. ‘As for the Vingtistes, here’s what I’d like to exhibit’, he instructed his brother Theo from southern France.
The painter Anna Boch bought 'Red Vineyard: Montmajour' at Les XX. Contrary to popular belief, this was neither the first nor the only work purchased during Vincent’s lifetime. He had previously sold a portrait and a self-portrait, produced drawings and paintings on commission, and exchanged work with fellow artists.
Shortly after Vincent’s death in July 1890, the devastated Theo organised a memorial exhibition in Paris. He was obliged to hold the event in his own home.
Around a hundred paintings hung in the various rooms for months, virtually unseen by the general public. Other artists came to see them, however, and – fortunately – a number of journalists too.
The artist’s friend Paul Signac also organised a posthumous tribute to Vincent in the spring of 1891, featuring works like The Pink Orchard.
Unlike the exhibition in Theo’s apartment, this one was seen by numerous visitors and was praised in the press.
The Dutch author and psychiatrist Frederik van Eeden came to Paris to treat Theo’s depression. After seeing Vincent’s paintings in the apartment, he wrote enthusiastically in the literary magazine De Nieuwe Gids:
‘Van Gogh takes things to extremes. He sometimes paints blood-red trees, grass-green skies and saffron-yellow faces. Though I had never seen such things, still I understood him.’
Johan de Meester, a reporter for the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Handelsblad, was impressed by the colourful paintings he found ‘in the dark rooms of an unoccupied apartment in Montmartre’.
He hoped that Vincent’s native country would be quick to recognise ‘one of her greatest sons’.
Following the painter’s death, one Van Gogh retrospective after another was held in Paris and Brussels.
The Netherlands, however, remained largely unaware of his work. It was only when a few Dutch artists returned home from abroad, full of praise and admiration, that Vincent’s paintings and drawings gradually began to be exhibited in the country of his birth.
Richard Roland-Holst, Vincent, cover of the Kunstzaal Panorama catalogue, Amsterdam 1892
The artist Richard Roland-Holst used this wilted sunflower for the cover of the catalogue for a Van Gogh exhibition in Amsterdam to symbolise the misunderstood and now deceased painter.
He warned, however, that Vincent’s work ought not to be viewed as an ‘illustration of his life’s tragic drama’, but as the manifestation of ‘the powerful urge toward rugged expression’.
Jan Toorop, Self-Portrait, 1883
The painter and draughtsman Jan Toorop contacted Theo’s widow Jo, who was overseeing Vincent’s legacy. Jo lent him around ninety paintings and drawings for an exhibition in The Hague, which was enthusiastically received by both critics and public.
‘No sign of mockery,’ a student wrote: ‘And quite right too: my God, what sublime art this is! What colours; what fire; what a sun!’
Label of Kunstzalen Oldenzeel, Rotterdam
The Rotterdam art dealers Oldenzeel held several sale exhibitions in 1892, including one featuring Vincent’s drawings.
The journalist Johan de Meester was on hand and predicted that Vincent would be recognised in the future more as a draughtsman than a painter.
Some artists struggled to accept Vincent’s colourful work – particularly members of the Hague School, known for its greyish palette.
One reviewer spoke of ‘our artists who feel no affinity with Vincent. Van Gogh’s art is diametrically opposed to the Dutch character.’
If artists in the Netherlands were far from united in their admiration for Vincent van Gogh, in Paris the situation was different.
Some adopted his work as their direct visual model, while others were drawn more to his symbolism. Bonnard and Vuillard, for instance, simplified their forms – as did Vincent – in the manner of a Japanese print, whereas Denis and Redon set out to paint an ‘idea’.
Pierre Bonnard, Montmartre in the Rain, 1897 (c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2017)
Pierre Bonnard, like Vincent, was inspired by Japanese woodcuts. His paintings include this view from the window of his Montmartre studio.
The unusual viewpoint, the way the planes are arranged, and the silhouettes in the illuminated street all resemble a woodcut.
Vincent searched in Arles for subjects ‘as beautiful as Japan’. He wrote to his brother Theo that he had painted The Bedroom in a deliberately ‘flat’ way and had omitted all the shadows, so that the painting would resemble Japanese prints as much as possible.
Édouard Vuillard and his friend Bonnard saw Vincent’s work at the art and paint seller Julien Tanguy, who also sold Japanese prints – Vuillard‘s other source of inspiration.
Unlike Vincent, Vuillard mainly painted interiors, which he often based on photographs.
Augustine Roulin (La berceuse), 1889, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
Vincent painted his friend Madame Roulin in Arles in a flat style reminiscent of a Japanese print, with areas of solid colour alternating with floral patterns. Stripped of depth effects, colour and form take on a relationship of their own, separate from reality.
Edouard Vuillard, The Mumps, 1892-1893
The woman in this room is Vuillard’s sister Marie, with whom the painter and his mother shared an apartment in Paris. The bandage around Marie’s head tells us she is suffering from mumps.
Vuillard created a decorative image with areas of colour and patterns: an effect he himself admired in Vincent’s work.
Vuillard’s mother in the apartment
This photograph shows Vuillard’s mother in the same room and from a similar angle as Marie in the painting.
Vuillard frequently found inspiration from unexpected details in the snapshots he took with his Kodak Brownie, which his mother developed for him on a soup plate in a window.
Although Maurice Denis was a great admirer of Van Gogh, we find little direct influence in his work. Denis simplified nature to give shape to an idea, while Vincent heightened nature with emotion.
Denis’s artist friend Odilon Redon also had a great deal of respect for Vincent’s work, although he also concentrated on the supernatural aspect.
Is it just coincidence? Or did Redon have Vincent’s Almond Blossom in mind when he painted this tree? Redon likewise drew from nature, but with a more explicitly spiritual dimension than Van Gogh: there is a Buddha figure here beneath the blossoming tree.
True art lies in a reality that is felt.
Odilon Redon
In 1901 the artist friends André Derain and Maurice De Vlaminck met their older colleague Henri Matisse in a Paris gallery full of paintings by Van Gogh.
All three were inspired by Vincent’s late style – that of sunny southern France, with larger than life colours and coarse brushstrokes.
An unusual viewpoint and abrupt cropping were among the elements De Vlaminck recognised in Vincent's paintings. ‘I found things in his work that I was looking for myself... an almost religious way of interpreting nature.’
Where Vincent wanted to use colour to express emotion, the colours in the work of Derain and his friends increasingly took on a life of their own. The focus in this case was on interrelationships and composition.
In the autumn of 1905, Derain, De Vlaminck and Matisse exhibited at the Salon d’automne in Paris together with the Dutch artist Kees van Dongen.
The room was mockingly nicknamed ‘La cage aux fauves’ (wild animal cage), due to the artists’ intense use of colour and materials. From that moment on, they were known as the ‘Fauvists’.
Matisse experimented with the different styles he found in Vincent’s work, from loose touches to areas of outlined colour. It was precisely the interaction between graphic and painterly elements that drew Matisse to Van Gogh. Both painted like draughtsmen and drew like painters.
Kees van Dongen moved to Paris in 1899. Inspired by Vincent and by his own painter friends, he began to use strongly contrasting colours. Unlike his fellow Fauvists, however, Van Dongen also gave his colours an emotional value, just as Vincent had done. He sought with his vivid palette to capture ‘the intensity of life’.
I loved Van Gogh that day more than I did my own father.
Maurice de Vlaminck, 1901
Jan Sluijters and Leo Gestel trained together at the Amsterdam Art Academy, where the teachers were not overly impressed by Van Gogh.
Fortunately, the two friends fell under Vincent’s spell through other avenues. They were drawn first and foremost to his Parisian painting style, with its bright colours and short brushstrokes.
Jan Sluijters headed to Paris in 1905, funded by an academy prize. He arrived in time to see both Vincent’s retrospective and work by the Fauvists. Sluijters threw himself enthusiastically into the feast of colour and the modern styles he discovered in the French capital.
This ‘false pursuit of wild new colour schemes’ led the academy to withdraw his allowance.
The colour contrasts we find in Sluijters’s portrait of Salomon Wolff Beffie, painted around 1912, are far more intense than when he had just arrived in the French capital. Vincent’s palette, meanwhile, remained rather cautious in Paris: it was only in southern France that he began to use strong contrasts.
When Vincent arrived in Paris in 1886, he must have had a similar experience to Sluijters twenty years later, each artist bringing his understated Dutch palette to a new world of colour.
Leo Gestel was introduced to Vincent’s work at an early age through an uncle in Nuenen who had once worked with him.
Gestel’s stylistic evolution followed Van Gogh’s: having worked initially in dark tones, he later sought to capture the light in loose brushstrokes. The use of colour gradually became more spiritual in his work too.
Can you paint sunlight? These landscapes suggest that you can. Gestel, for instance, has broken the light down into countless flecks of dancing colour. Vincent did something similar years earlier in Undergrowth, although his tones remained closer to nature.
The art critic Albert Aurier’s prediction proved correct. Vincent did indeed transform western art. He gave something of himself to many of those who followed, whether it was the symbolism of his forms, the intensity of his colours, or his expressive brushwork.
Without Vincent, modern art would undoubtedly have looked different.
...a messiah, a sower of truth, who would regenerate the decrepitude of our art...
Albert Aurier, Mercure de France, January 1890
