{"id":241,"date":"2011-07-15T14:51:24","date_gmt":"2011-07-15T14:51:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=241"},"modified":"2011-09-13T00:28:14","modified_gmt":"2011-09-13T00:28:14","slug":"van-goghs-hope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=241","title":{"rendered":"Van Gogh’s hope"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

The World of Van Gogh<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

When I was in my teens, my parents subscribed to a series of middlebrow art books, published by Time-Life, each one devoted to a different artist. I still have all of them, nearly thirty volumes, from Giotto to Marcel Duchamp. The one that made me a painter when it arrived, was The World of Van Gogh.<\/em>\u00a0 I remember the rich scent of ink and glue of these monographs as they emerged from their slipcases for the first time. From the story of Van Gogh’s life, it was clear he had all the requisite characteristics for artistic beatitude\u2014eccentric, mentally unstable, poor, volatile, brutally honest, hungry, drunken, suicidal\u2014a persona that now, the way art has become a professional career with its own paths to money and notoriety for the lucky elite, seem a tired and worn-out cliche. We’ve outgrown all that misbehavior haven’t we? We’re professionals. Hasn\u2019t the art world become too postmodern and money-crazed to believe in Van Gogh\u2019s sincerity, his dysfunctional devotion to a truth that would be seen as economically and culturally determined? Skimming through the text of this book again, after all these years, I realize that Van Gogh’s life and work remains for me, at least, part of the paradigm of why art matters. He never stopped addressing common people in his work with images that speak to everyone in a universal way.<\/p>\n

I find this passage:<\/p>\n

He seemed to have developed \u201calmost mystical ideas about color that are reflected in his late art. He sensed that color has meaning that transcends mere visual impression. Yellow, red, blue\u2014indeed any color\u2014can connote something that lies beyond the reach of rationality. . . . (and) before he left Holland, he went so far as to relate colors and music\u2014and even took a few piano lessons. \u2018Prussian blue!\u2019 or \u2018Chrome yellow!\u2019 he would cry as he struck a chord.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0I keep reading, turning pages, still looking for the paragraph I know is here somewhere. I find yet another:<\/p>\n

It was the brilliant color and clear outline of the (Japanese) prints that most strongly caught his eye as he emerged from the dark tonalities of his Dutch period. But his constant regard for the social function of art was involved too. The prints, even after the cost of transporting them halfway around the earth, could still be sold in Paris for only one or two francs and thus were within the reach of people to whom he addressed his own work. \u2018I do my best to paint in such a way that my work will show up to advantage in a kitchen,\u2019 he wrote, \u2018and then I may happen to discover that it shows up well in a parlor too, but this is something I never bother my head about.\u2019 He had long since sketched out an idea for an association of artists who might, through lithography, make copies of fine works of art available to workingmen at low cost.<\/p>\n

Not only was painting a spiritual pursuit, a meditative pursuit in search of mystical color harmonies that could bring the peace of contemplation, it was also a way of offering this gift to even the most common, uneducated people. To anyone, in other words\u2014painting was a language that spoke to all people, with the immediacy of its music. So that it would make sense to hang the greatest art in an ordinary kitchen. I keep turning pages and find yet another passage I didn\u2019t remember but seems just as fundamental to what oil painting has come to mean: Van Gogh worked the way a classic Chinese artist worked, or a Japanese master of sumi e, <\/em>where every brushstroke counts, the painting executed rapidly and the work expressing the inner life<\/em> of the subject, not simply it\u2019s appearance. To paint in this way is about channeling the life force, not simply creating a reproduction of how the world looks\u2014so that, in the yin\/yang terms of Chinese cosmology and artistic practice, earth inhabits the brush and the power of heaven moves it:\u00a0 \u201cIf the emotions are so strong that one works without knowing one works, when sometimes the strokes come with a continuity and coherence like words in a speech or a letter, then one must remember that it has not always been so, and that in time to come there will be hard days, empty of inspiration. So one must strike while the iron is hot.\u201d<\/p>\n

A few pages later, at last, I find what I\u2019m seeking, the passage that serves as a major part of the answer to the question, why paint<\/em>? It\u2019s Van Gogh\u2019s testimony of faith:<\/p>\n

He repeatedly spoke of his purpose in using strong color, which was the same one that had long ago inspired him to enter the ministry \u201cto give hope to poor creatures.\u201d It was his belief that \u2018it is actually one\u2019s duty to paint the rich and magnificent aspects of nature. We are in need of . . . happiness, hope and love. The more ugly, old, vicious, poor I get, the more I want to take my revenge by producing a brilliant color, well-arranged, resplendent.\u2019 He spoke of wanting \u2018to say something comforting, as music is comforting,\u2019 and of his longing to \u2018express hope by some star, the eagerness of a soul by a sunset radiance . . .i isn\u2019t it something that actually exists?\u2019 In making his portrait of Madame Roulin, the postman\u2019s wife, he imagined the painting of her hung in the cabin of a fishing boat, to comfort storm-tossed sailors with reminders of their childhood.<\/p>\n

Are we too cynical and sophisticated for this now? For me, Van Gogh is the figure who most represents the passion that drives a genuine visual artist, which is to work from common human experience and express the inner spirit of the most ordinary moments of life. At the very least, a painter tries to produce something that opens his own eyes, awakens him or her to the power of color and form and light and paint, and therefore will do the same for other people\u2014and therefore reconnect the viewer with life itself. Yet so much of what has been considered great art in the past half century is no longer rooted in this passion. As Donald Kuspit puts it in The End of Art<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\u00a0Art is no longer the path to salvation it was for (van Gogh), but rather confirms that life is damned because it is meaningless, which is ultimately why art is meaningless, since it can do nothing to rescue life from itself. Today\u2019s post-art seduces us to death not life.. . The artist is no longer \u2018the model of human greatness\u2019 he once was, and it is no longer self-evident that \u2018man\u2019s loftiest mode of expression is art. The artist\u2019s vision is no better than anyone else\u2019s in a multicultural world. Indeed, the claim to a universal artistic vision, that is, the belief that art can convey universal experience, seems absurd and meaningless in a world where there are no universal experiences, only a variety of culturally determined ones.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t believe Kuspit is expressing his own views here about life and art, but rather characterizing the prevailing academic outlook when he wrote this book. The End of Art<\/em> is, in part, a reflection\u00a0 on how Van Gogh\u2019s vision of art has been discarded, mostly as a result of postmodern relativism, in favor of the ironies and self-conscious contrivances which lie at the foundation of so much art over the past century–some of which, in all fairness, I actually love. Kuspit goes on: \u201cTo be an artist was to take a vow of poverty and to suffer, which is why van Gogh was ready to share his life with people whom society seemed to have destined for poverty and suffering from the beginning of their lives.\u201d And finally, \u201cUnlike the academicians, van Gogh wanted \u2018to accomplish something with heart and love in it.\u2019 ”<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  When I was in my teens, my parents subscribed to a series of middlebrow art books, published by Time-Life, each one devoted to a different artist. I still have all of them, nearly thirty volumes, from Giotto to Marcel Duchamp. 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