My thoughts in words

It was an ad hoc decision to go to this exhibition. I must confess here that if it was not for my wife and child, I would be missing out on many of these events. I happen to read about events when they are gone from town…

The experience of this one will remain for while and I wanted to capture the displays with commentary about the artist’s life and works. It took some time to get these photos to be straight while shooting them and then in post.

April 22, 2023 | DLF Parking 5, Gurugram | 9PM Slot

The slot really meant nothing as folks had planted themselves for ever in the super chilled exhibition space.

The Body of Work

There are few artists since humanity began brushing paint on surfaces who are as universally known and loved as Vincent Van Gogh. His paintings fetch astronomical amounts at auction; copies of his most iconic works, such as the magical The Starry Night or his haunting self-portraits, grace everything from mouse pads to car wraps. He has inspired books, popular music and animated films and inspired artists for over a century – especially those facing mental health challenges.

One would think that such an intense and emotional impact on the art world and popular culture would be the result of someone’s lifelong artistic output. But Van Gogh’s massive canon – an estimated 2,100 paintings and drawings – was created over just a 10-year period. This brilliant creative solar flare included in the neighbourhood of 860 paintings, most of which were painted in the last two years of his life.

At the time he cut his ear off, his mental health had reached such a low point that he committed himself to a psychiatric hospital in Saint-Remy. While confined to the hospital, he continued to paint whatever came before him – real or imagined – including the asylum, its gardens and immediate countryside. It was here at Saint-Remy, amidst the madness and loneliness, that he painted the iconic, hopeful and transcendent heavens of The Starry Night.

The Peasant Life

Degas painted voyeuristic images of lithe ballerinas. Seurat painted the middle class relaxing in the fine parks of suburban Paris. Toulouse-Lautrec painted the lantern-lit and absinthe-fuelled gaiety of the Moulin Rouge. But their fellow post-impressionist Vincent Van Gogh is remembered for his passionately painted scenes of French and Dutch peasants bent to their physical labours or living out a grinding life with few simple pleasures.

Despite his sympathetic portrayal of the hard lives of European peasantry, Van Gogh himself was born in 1853 into an upper-middle class family in the Netherlands, the son of a protestant minister. After a number of failed careers in other lines of work he began, in 1880, to paint and draw – something he loved to do as a boy.

The early period of his very short 10-year artistic career was spent at his parents’ home, where he had returned penniless after a failed attempt at missionary work. It was here in the Dutch countryside that many of his works depicting the hardships endured by the bottom strata of European society would be painted. He saw inspiration for “paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners.” He mused to his brother Theo that his mission would be to bring comfort and empathy to the hard-bitten through his works of art.

The Self Portraits

There are 35 self-portraits by Vincent Van Gogh known to exist, making him one of the most prolific self-portraitists among the great modern artists. The majority of these were painted during a two-year period (1886-1888) while he was living in Paris.

They were not painted out of vanity or self-absorption, but simply because he was broke and could not afford to pay a model to sit for him while he practiced portraiture. They are painted with fearless and rhythmic strokes, yet they depict a solemn, phlegmatic and almost humourless man who seems reluctant to look the artist in the eve.

At the end of his stay in Paris, Van Gogh’s mental health had declined drastically. He later would write “I have put my heart and soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process.”

After a disturbed confrontation with his mentor Paul Gauguin in December 1888, he sliced off the lower portion of his ear with a razor. The self-portraits he painted afterwards revealed a different man – one who was clearly troubled. It was his hope that painting himself would lead to his recovery. It was not to be.

Flower Power

For a man who painted flowers because he lacked the funds for paying models to sit for him or to travel for plein air painting, Van Gogh’s floral still life paintings are some of his best known, most loved and most valuable today.

His earliest paintings of flowers, done while he was in Paris, were often on dark backgrounds and perhaps a bit gloomy, but once he moved to Arles in the south of France, these paintings came alive with that free-wheeling vibrancy and abandon we have all come to know. It was here in the forever sunny south that he painted his famous sunflower paintings, meant as a gift for his friend and mentor Paul Gauguin. He envisioned them as a series to be hung on the walls of the famed “Yellow House” he and Gauguin were planning to live in together.

He was also clearly enamoured of the springtime apricot, plum, peach, pear and almond orchards that abounded in the region, and completed at least 20 paintings on the subject. One can sense his fragile happiness in the spring of 1888 as he paints en plein air in these sunny orchards bursting with new life, buzzing with honeybees and fragrant with the mingled scents of fruit blossoms, winter’s decay and new grass.

After his hospitalization in Arles, he checked himself into the psychiatric hospital at Saint-Remy. For the next few months he was not allowed to roam too far from the facility, so he took to painting in the hospital garden and surrounding countryside. The paintings of the garden’s purple irises and a very Japanese-influenced flowering almond bush (seen here) are some of his most famous pieces.

Years later Claude Monet, in a conversation with writer Octave Mirbeau, who owned The Irises, said, “How did a man who loved flowers and light to such an extent, and who rendered them so well, how, then did he still manage to be so unhappy?”

His Mental Health

Van Gogh was tormented by psychiatric illness over much of his life, and at the age of 37 it drove him to take his own life. Evidence from his actions and writings suggests that he suffered from bipolar disorder, a chronic mental illness that today is treatable with therapies and medicines. There is also evidence that bipolar disorder has a strong association with creativity. Van Gogh certainly used his art to deal with his disconnection with the world around him.

During his year-long stay at a psychiatric facility in Saint-Rémy, Van Gogh was likely administered digitalis, a drug obtained from the dried leaves of the common foxglove plant, as part of his treatment. After his time at Saint-Rémy, Van Gogh became friends with a physician named Dr. Paul-Fernand Gachet who, it seems, continued treating him with digitalis. Van Gogh painted a pair of portraits of Gachet, in both of which he is holding a stem of foxglove.

What is so interesting about that obscure point is that people who are administered large and repeated doses of digitalis often see the world with a green-yellow tint. They also complain of seeing yellow spots surrounded by coronas very similar to those Van Gogh painted in his tour-de force The Starry Night, which was done while he was at Saint-Rémy.

It is now known that overuse of digitalis can lead to additional mental abnormalities. Gachet continued to support and treat Van Gogh until his suicide a few months later. In one of his last letters to his brother Theo, Van Gogh would write, “If I could have worked without this accursed disease, what things I might have done.“

Painting people

Van Gogh painted any subject that came into his life – landscapes, structures, flowers, animals, working life, night life and still life. He was especially fond of portraiture and painted the likenesses of people over the entire length of his extraordinarily prolific and tragically short artistic career. His numerous self-portraits were in fact done as exercises to improve his skill and technique. From his

1882 Old Man with Top Hat to Portrait of Dr. Gachet, painted with only weeks to live, Van Gogh attempted to portray his own feelings about and involvement with his subject.

These paintings were not commissioned works but were often painted as a gift to express Van Gogh’s gratitude for what the subject may have done for him. His very graphic and colourful portrait of Dr. Félix Rey is a poignant and humorous case in point.

After he was admitted to the hospital in Arles following the psychotic incident that resulted in him cutting off a portion of his ear, he was attended to by an intern named Dr. Félix Rey. The young physician was both attentive and kind to Van Gogh who painted the now famous portrait as a gift to show his gratitude. Though Rey accepted it, he never liked the painting, commenting in an interview in 1929 that, “When I saw that he outlined my head entirely in green, that he painted my hair and my mustache, I really did not have red hair, in blazing red on a biting green background, I was simply horrified.“

The painting was kept in his mother’s attic and for a while was used to patch a hole in her chicken coop. For a decade, her chickens enjoyed fine art until it was tracked down by another artist and purchased for… well, chicken feed. Today, on display at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, its estimated value is over $50 million.

Those Starry Nights

Of all Van Gogh’s paintings, perhaps the best known and arguably most loved are those depicting star-studded night views of landscapes and urban nightlife. There is no doubt that much of this modern-day popularity stems from singer-songwriter Don McLean’s 1971 ode to Van Gogh entitled “Starry, Starry Night“, a song that addresses the contrast between his collapsing mental health and his sense of wonder at the beauty of the world around him.

While most artists might have painted stars as simple white points of light, Van Gogh saw them as mystical orbs that rival the moon. In doing so, he allows us to feel the power and poetry of the universe.

Van Gogh, for whom “the night was more alive and richly coloured than the day“, once said that “There is no blue without yellow and without orange.” This understanding allowed his nighttime paintings to carry the magic in his heart on a warm summer night in France with the clouds sailing on the wind, the moon glowing maternally and the stars reaching out across time and space.

But the magic could not hold him to this world and, as McLean would write 80 years later, “when no hope was left inside on that starry starry night you took your life as lovers often do.”

The Last Months

After Van Gogh’s year at the psychiatric facility at Saint-Rémy, he moved in May 1890 to Auvers-sur-Oise, a rural village near Paris favoured by artists. Here he would find the solitude and silence he needed while remaining close to Paris and the home of his cherished brother Theo.

At Auvers, thanks to the recommendation of fellow post-impressionist artist Camille Pissarro, he took up residence with a Dr. Paul Gachet, a sympathetic homeopathic physician and amateur artist. Gachet was also suffering from some mental health issues, with Van Gogh remarking that he was “like another brother, so much do we resemble each other physically and also mentally.”

It appears Gachet continued Van Gogh’s treatment with digitalis, for during that time Van Gogh painted his portrait at least twice with a foxglove cutting in his hand. As problematic as digitalis toxicity could be to one’s mental health, Gachet gave to him a very modern and empathetic piece of advice – to surrender himself completely to his art. This Van Gogh did with a monastic determination, painting at a staggering pace that amounted to one painting a day during his last two and a half months.

During this brief but furious period at Auvers, he painted some of his most iconic works including a series of paintings of local wheat fields – “the immense plain against the hills, boundless as the sea, delicate yellow,” which for him symbolized “sadness and extreme loneliness.”

One of his last paintings was Wheatfield with Crows, which, for many who view it, conveys a sort of ominous foreshadowing of Van Gogh’s imminent suicide in a wheat field, though the artist likely had no intention to do so.

My Dear Theo

Through all of Vincent Van Gogh’s tumultuous and fractured life there was but one constant – his younger brother Theo. He was Vincent’s closest, most-trusted friend and confidant, his financial backer, his artistic muse, his father confessor, and the one who witnessed and understood the fragility of his brother’s mental health.

Much of what we know about Vincent’s life – his work, his worries, his finances, his delusions – come to us through more than 600 letters he wrote to Theo over the ears. The two-year period about which we know the least about Van Gogh was when they lived together in Montmartre and the letters stopped. It was the sketches that Vincent included in these letters that led Theo to suggest he focus on his art. A failed missionary in the coal fields of Belgium, Vincent now saw art as a means to serve God.

Though he now spent all of his time developing his techniques and his fertile imagination, Vincent had no way of paying for any of it. He pared his life down to the basics, but it was Theo’s unfailing response to Vincent’s financial woes coupled with his unflinching emotional solace that enabled Vincent to survive and create the extraordinary and visionary oeuvre that changed the world of art. It’s quite possible that without Theo, there may never have been the Vincent we know today.

Theo was a respected Parisian art dealer and he introduced Vincent to the pantheon of the post-impressionists – Cézanne, Lautrec, Gauguin, Rousseau. Pissarro and Seurat. Within a decade he would eclipse them all.

Vincent and Theo bore a striking familial resemblance. There is but one portrait in Van Gogh’s body of work that some say could be of Theo. Because it cannot be confirmed the painting carries a uniquely ambiguous title: Self-Portrait or Portrait of Theo van Gogh (seen here).

Theo was at Vincent’s side when he took his last breath and would die himself in just six months. Later his wife would have his body exhumed and buried with Vincent in Auvers-sur-Oise so that the brothers could “lie together eternally.”

The End

There were many things that were happening to Van Gogh in the last weeks at Auvers-sur-Oise, On the one hand, his painting had become a boundless, energetic frenzy of absolute creativity the likes of which the art world rarely sees. On the other, his mental state was on a knife’s edge, caught between the visceral thrill of his creative expression and the darkness that crowded in on all sides.

He had hoped that the pastoral quiet and natural beauty of the French village might be restorative as well as conducive to creativity. For a while, he began to feel better. After a short visit to his brother in Paris in July, he learned that Theo was considering a business opportunity that would mean he would have to quit the art dealership he had managed for many years. Theo’s worry over an uncertain financial future infected his brother Vincent who, over the past 10 years, had relied heavily on Theo’s financial and emotional support.

In one of his last letters to Theo he wrote, “I feel – a failure. I feel that that’s the fate I am accepting and which won’t change any more.”

On the evening of July 7, 1890, he walked into a wheat field where he had been painting, took out a pistol and shot himself in the chest. At 9 p.m. that evening a bloodied Van Gogh staggered into the inn where he was residing and struggled to his room. There the innkeepers found him and called Dr. Gachet, who dressed the wound but little else. Theo was telegraphed first thing in the morning and was at his bedside by the afternoon, staying there until Vincent died the following day.

In a letter to his wife Johanna, Theo wrote, “One of his last words was, ‘I wish I could pass away like this,’ and his wish was fulfilled. A few moments and all was over. He had found the rest he could not find on earth…“