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WD_350/ 2007
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Works on paper: Drawings 4 | | Medium: | oilstick on paper | | Size (inches): | 25.6 x 17.7 | | Size (mm): | 650 x 450 | | Catalog #: | WD_0350 | | Description: | Signed, date and copyright in pencil on the reverse.
Letter from Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh -
Nuenen, 2nd half October 1885.
Dear Theo,
Today I received your letter with enclosure. I was very pleased with your letter, because I noticed a few things in it which I want to talk over. To begin at the beginning; what you write about a certain study of a basket with apples is very well observed, but does this observation come from yourself??? because I fancy, I should almost say I am sure, that you used not to see that kind of thing: However this may be, here we are on our way to agreeing more about the colours.
Go more deeply into those questions, for that will be useful to you, and those are the things that Burger and Mantz and Silvestre knew.
Just to explain how that study was painted - simply this: green and red are complementary colours. Now in the apples there is a red which is very vulgar in itself; further, next to it some greenish things. But there are also one or two apples of another colour, of a certain pink which makes the whole thing right.
That pink is the broken colour, got by mixing the above-mentioned red and the above-mentioned green. That's why there is harmony between the colours.
Added to this is a second contrast, the background forms a contrast to the foreground, the one is a neutral colour, got by mixing blue with orange; the other, the same neutral colour simply changed by adding some yellow.
But I am awfully glad that you notice a combination of colour, be it through direct or indirect personal perception. Further, that one of the studies seemed to you a variation on the brown-grey theme, well, that certainly is the case, but all three potato studies are like that, with this difference, that one is a study in terre de Sienne, the second in terre de Sienne brûlée, the third in yellow ochre and red ochre.
The latter - that is the largest one - is in my opinion the best - notwithstanding the dull black background which I purposely left dull because the ochres are also naturally non-transparent colours. As to that study, the largest one of the potatoes, it is made by changing, by breaking, those untransparent ochres with a transparent blue. As red ochre with yellow ochre gives orange, their combination with blue is more neutral, and against that neutralized colour, they become either more red or more yellow.
The highest light in that whole picture is simply some pure yellow ochre. The reason why this dull yellow stands out so is because it is put in a wide field of, be it neutral, violet; because... red ochre with blue gives violet tones.
Well, the birds' nests were also purposely painted against a black background, because I want it to be obvious in these studies that the objects do not appear in their natural surroundings, but against a conventional background. A living nest in nature is quite different - one hardly sees the nest itself, one sees the birds.
But when one wants to paint nests from one's collection of nests, one cannot express strongly enough the fact that the background and the surroundings in nature are quite different, therefore I simply painted the background black. But it is a fact that in a still life a coloured background can be beautiful - in Amsterdam I saw still lifes by Miss Vos that were excellent, much more beautiful than those by Blaisse Desgoffe [a French still-life painter of the mid-nineteenth century] - really like Van Beyeren. I couldn't help thinking that those simple still lifes of hers had far more artistic value than many pretentious pictures by other Amsterdam painters.
They struck me as very well done. Especially one with a golden vase, a few empty oyster shells, a broken coconut shell and a crust of bread. I will send you the book by Blanc; I hope soon to get L'art auXVIIIme Siècle; I am especially longing to hear something from de Goncourt about Chardin. Lacaze's Rembrandt is really also in the sentiment of Rembrandt's last period; it is about twelve years since I saw it, but I still remember it because it struck me, just like that head by Fabritius in Rotterdam. If I remember correctly, that nude woman in the Lacaze Collection is also very beautiful, also of a later period. The fragment, Rembrandt's “Lesson in Anatomy,” yes, I was absolutely staggered by that too. Do you remember those flesh colours - it is - de la terre - especially the feet.
You know, Frans Hals's flesh colours are also earthy, used here in the sense that you know. Often at least. Sometimes, I almost dare say always, there is also a relation of contrast between the tone of the costume and the tone of the face. Red and green are opposites; “The Singer” (Dupper Collection), who has tones of carmine in the flesh colour, has tones of green in his black sleeves, and ribbons on those sleeves of a red other than that carmine. The orange-white-blue fellow I wrote about has a relatively neutral complexion, earthy-pink, violetish, in contrast with his Frans-Hals-yellow leather suit.
The yellow fellow, citron amorti, decidedly has dull violet in his mug. Well - the darker the costume, the lighter the face is sometimes - not accidentally - at least his portrait and that of his wife in the garden contain two blackish violets (blue-violet and reddish-violet) and a plain black (yellow-black?). I repeat, reddish-violet and blue-violet, black and black, the three gloomiest things, as it were; well, the faces are very fair, extremely fair, even for Hals.
Well. Frans Hals is a colourist among colourists, a colourist like Veronese, like Rubens, like Delacroix, like Velásquez.
Of Millet, Rembrandt and, for instance, Israëls, it has truly been said that they are more harmonists than colourists. But tell me, black and white, may they be used or may they not, are they forbidden fruit?
I don't think so; Frans Hals has no less than twenty-seven blacks. White - but you know yourself what striking pictures some modern colourists make of white on white. What is the meaning of that phrase: one must not? Delacroix called them rests, used them as such. You must not have a prejudice against them, for if used only in their places, and in harmony with the rest, one may of course use all tones.
I can tell you that I often think the things by Apol, for instance, white on white, very well done. His sunset in The Hague Wood, for instance, which is in Amsterdam. That thing is damn good indeed.
No - black and white have their reason and significance, and when one tries to suppress them, it turns out wrong; to consider both neutral is certainly the most logical thing to do, white - the highest combination of the lightest red, blue, yellow; black - the highest combination of the darkest red, blue, yellow. I have nothing to say against that theory, I find it perfectly true. Well, light and brown, the tone in its value stands in direct relation to that 4th color scale from white to black. For one finds there:
Scale
I from yellow to violet
2 red " green
3 blue orange
Sum
a fourth scale
(that of the neutral tones, that of red +blue + yellow)
from White
(red +blue + yellow, extreme light)
to
Black
(red +blue + yellow, deepest black)
That is how I understand the blacks and the whites.
When I mix red with green to a red-green or green-red, by mixing it with white, I then get pink-green or green-pink. And if you like, by adding black, I get brown-green or green-brown. Isn't that clear? When I mix yellow with violet to a violet-yellow or yellow-violet, in other terms a neutralized yellow or a neutralized violet, by adding white and black, I get greys.
Well, greys and browns, there is especially question of them when one makes colours lighter or darker, whatever their nature and their gradation of red, yellow or blue may be.
It is quite correct to speak of light and dark grays and browns, I think. But how beautiful what Silvestre says about Delacroix is - that he put a fortuitous tone on his palette, une nuance innommable violacée, that he put that one tone down somewhere, either for highest light or for deepest shadow, but that of this mud he made something which either sparkled like light or was gloomily silent like a deep shadow.
So I have heard of an experiment with a sheet of neutral coloured paper - which became greenish against a red background, reddish on a green one, bluish on orange, orange on blue, yellowish on violet, and violetish on yellow.
Just listen, suppose one wants such a muddy tone or drab colour to become light in the picture, like Delacroix said of Veronese, that he could paint a blonde nude woman with a colour like mud in such a way that she comes out fair and blonde in the picture - then the question arises - how is this possible, unless by contrast of great forces in bluish-blacks or violets, or reddish-browns?
You - who are looking for dark shadows somewhere, and think that when the shadows are dark, aye, black, that it is all wrong then, is this right? I don't think so. For then, for instance, the “Dante” by Delacroix, the “Fisherman of Zandvoort,” for instance, would be wrong. For indeed, they contain the most vigorous blue-black or violet-black values. Rembrandt and Hals, didn't they use black? and Velásquez???
Not only one, but twenty-seven blacks, I assure you. So as to “one must not use black,” are you yourself quite sure that you know what you mean by it? and do you know what you want with it? Really, think it over carefully, for you might come to the conclusion - I think this very probable - that you have learned and understood that question of tones quite wrongly, or rather have learned it vaguely and understood it vaguely. Many people do, most of them do. But in the long run Delacroix and others of his time will teach you better.
Tell me - have you noticed that those studies of mine that have black backgrounds have their highest light put in a low colour scale??? And when in this way I put my study in a lower colour scale than nature, I yet keep the harmony of tones because I become darker, not only in my shadows, but also in the same degree in my lights.
I painted my studies just as a kind of gymnastics, to rise and fall in tone, so - don't forget that I painted my white and gray moss literally with a mud colour and yet it looks light in the study.
Good-by,
Ever yours, Vincent
These things concerning complementary colours, simultaneous contrast, and the neutralizing of complementals, this question is the first and principal one; the second is the mutual influence of two kindred colours, for instance, carmine on vermilion, a pink-violet on a blue-violet. The third question is a light blue against the same dark blue, a pink against a brown-red, a citron yellow against a chamois yellow, etc. But the first question is the most important.
If you come across some good book on colour theories, mind you send it to me, for I too am far from knowing everything about it, and am searching for more every day.
At this time, Vincent was 32 year old.
Source:
Vincent van Gogh. Letter to Theo van Gogh. Written 2nd half October 1885 in Nuenen. Translated by Mrs. Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, edited by Robert Harrison, published in The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh, Publisher: Bulfinch, 1991, number 428.
This letter may be freely used, in accordance with the Creative Commons license).
-webexhibits.org/vangogh/letter/15/428.htm
The Letters of Van Gogh
What makes a good letter writer? Interesting letters. What makes letters interesting? Simplicity, directness, topicality, insight into oneself and others, spontaneity, and in most cases, genuine intimacy. Letters written for publication may be good literature for other reasons, but they are really just a special form of essay. What we want in a collection of letters is unconscious autobiography. If the writer is a great artist or a profound thinker or an important historical figure, so much the better. Van Gogh certainly fits all these desiderata. He is the ideal letter writer, and his Collected Letters is almost as important as his collected paintings would be and much more easily domesticated. They are not only intimate, revealing, beautifully written, but they have a special sort of sweet profundity about them that is unmatched by anyone else. What other letters could provide a popular actor with an extremely successful concert repertory? Yet there is nothing theatrical about them. They are as quiet as a conversation by the fireside in a Dutch parsonage. We think of Van Gogh as a fierce, rabid sort of personality. Perhaps this is all legend. The letters are so gentle, modest — I guess the word is endearing. And every letter is haunted by the pathos of Van Gogh’s life.
The correspondence of the great artists and idealists in the history of Western Man is mostly about money. The more unworldly they were, the more it is about money. They found it scarce. They worried about it all the time. They nagged and cajoled and begged to get it. The personal correspondence of millionaires is never about money. In fact, it is considered excessively bad form ever to mention money among the rich, except in a place of business between the hours of ten and three.
It isn’t just capitalism. We don’t have the real letters, but the set pieces, the verse letters of Horace and Catullus, are at least implicitly about money. And it isn’t even just Western Man — the Chinese poet Tu Fu is every bit as bad. The poets and artists who did not write letters about money are unknown to history — they did not survive. Everybody knows why this is. Unless the artist is in league with magic, miracle, mystery and authority, as Dostoevski put it, he may even get rich — like Rubens — but he never has what nowadays is known as security. And so he frets and schemes and begs. Blake, Baudelaire, Rembrandt, Michelangelo — Van Gogh is no exception. But if not an exception, he at least differs in several interesting ways.
In the first place, he was not a very revolutionary artist. In fact, his early painting was the conventional “proletarian art” of the period. Sculptors like Meunier and painters like Millet were already rich from doing the same sort of thing. Then he changed to a kind of painting that was becoming quite chic, and which has remained, if not chic, at least extremely fashionable among the more conservative, and which has become fabulously expensive — the brightly colored, highly decorative painting produced on the border or transition zone of Neo- and Post-Impressionism. This is the last period in Western art to be genuinely popular and Van Gogh is the most popular of all. Large color prints of The Sunflowers, The Postman, The Arlésienne, The Chair, The Poolroom, The Bedroom and the others can be found decorating the over-mantel space, not in the homes of intellectuals, or even the educated, but in the homes of Negro janitors, Filipino bus boys, in the parlors of Polish auto workers in Hamtramck and Hungarian steel workers in Gary.
When the first big Van Gogh comprehensive show came to San Francisco before the Second World War, the Southern Pacific ran a “Sunflower Special,” with a blow-up of the picture at the tail of the observation car, on each of its routes into town. The Palace of the Legion of Honor was accessible only after an hour’s wait. This went on for weeks and broke all records for art exhibitions anywhere in the world. The intellectuals thought it was simply dreadful and did nothing but bitch. It was back in the salad days of the John Reed Clubs when all the really au courant young minds were busy debating the theses of Leopold Auerbach on Proletarian Culture.
The ordinary people who buy reproductions of Van Gogh’s paintings and hang them on the wall think they are pretty. They make the sitting room more cheery. It killed Van Gogh to paint them. Did it? Is this true? Is Van Gogh some sort of Rimbaud or Dylan Thomas, burned alive in the fire of his own vision? Everybody assumes so, and the assumption is implicit in almost all the immense number of books written about him. I think it is false.
Van Gogh may have been a lay saint, but he was a simple kind of saint, like Brother Lawrence or St. Theresa of Lisieux, not a tormented one, like St. Theresa of Avila or St. John of the Cross or the characters of Dostoevski and Bernanos. Nobody can read these eighteen hundred pages of ingenuous communication and believe anything else unless he is totally blinded by presuppositions. If you believe that everybody must carry around an abysm in his heart, as Baudelaire said of Pascal; if you are like the French Catholic intellectuals who write articles for Esprit — “De Sade Belongs to Us!” — if you believe that every notorious evil-liver was seeking illumination and every disastrous life was really a clandestine career of piety; in other words, if you hold the presently fashionable apocalyptic view of human destiny; you can find it in Van Gogh if you are bigoted and persistent enough.
Van Gogh had visions, but of miners and potato-peelers at first and then of sunflowers and chairs, never of angels or demons. They excited him, but they did not trouble him the way Ivan Karamazov’s visions of similar simple things troubled him. In his young days he was a lay preacher, not a very successful one, to be sure. He never thought of himself as bringing a torch to the countryside and the slums. His favorite episodes of the Gospel were incidents like the supper at Emmaus, the widow’s mite, the marriage at Cana. He thought of Jesus not as coming to bring a sword to the heart of an intellectual like Paul, but to bring just a little peace and dignity and rest to exhausted and brutalized human beings in slums and hovels. There is something profoundly Dutch about this kind of unpretentious evangelism. It is in Rembrandt, of course, but it goes back to late medieval Pietism, the Beguines and Beghards, Blessed Jan Ruysbroeck, Thomas à Kempis — a movement which involved the whole society of the Lowlands for centuries and which survives today in sects like the Mennonites. Nothing less like Baudelaire exciting himself with a Black Mass in his mistress’s boudoir can be imagined.
What was wrong with Van Gogh then? Why did he do all those crazy things that make such successful movies of his life? Something physical. There is a bit by a psychiatrist in the documents appended to these letters. It is amusing because it is in the jabberwocky of an only recently abandoned school of psychiatry and makes you realize what jabberwocky our own psychiatry will be in another fifty years. And it says absolutely nothing. Van Gogh, on the other hand, had a pretty good idea: “I have been a bit beat the way I used to be in the past, when I had that venereal trouble in the Hague and got myself looked after in the hospital.” His friends had a good idea, too — the most obvious explanation. He lived a bachelor life. Artists need somebody to see that they eat. He used to paint all day in the fields without eating, come home and try to satisfy his hunger with some burned beans he had left on the stove and instead go out and quiet the demands of his stomach with liquor — pastis, probably, the little absinthe of Provence. By night he was drunk. Still excited by the day’s painting and with no place else to go, he went to the whorehouses and raised Cain.
Now you can raise all the Cain you want in a whorehouse if you pay for it, but Van Gogh didn’t have the money. This made him very unpopular in Arles and seems to have been one of the chief complaints of the neighbors. Such habits are annoying, but there is nothing apocalyptic about them, nothing even existentialist or eschatological. I have known dozens of the most mundane overworked commercial artists who behaved in exactly the same fashion every night. It didn’t make them immortal. The snippet Van Gogh took off his ear may have made him familiar to the readers of the movie magazines; it is irrelevant to his immortality. But normal people eat, marry by the time they are his age, don’t go around dressed in filthy shirt and pants covered by a ragged overcoat which has been used all winter as a paint rag. Van Gogh was abnormal; as Hokusai said of himself, he was an old man crazy about painting. He was too busy to bother, and then one day it was too late. A lot of simple things like alcohol, pellagra, spirochetes, possibly slight brain damage dating from his birth (he seems to have had mild epileptiform attacks all his life) converged on him and struck him down. Like people who make the cover of Time, he died of overwork.
Much has been made of his relations with his family. It is certainly true — to use our own jabberwocky — that the key to a psychosis is to be sought in the family constellation. I see nothing wrong with Van Gogh’s and I have read all these eighteen hundred pages, mostly of very affectionate correspondence with, of course, his brother Theo, but also with all his family. Given the late nineteenth century, a Dutchman, a painter, a large family, a father who is a small-town parson, genteel poverty, the results seem to me, not just exemplary, to use Van Gogh’s own estimate of his family, but positively ideal. It won’t do to identify Van Gogh with the great revolts of his period. Oedipus Complex, Mother Fixation, Sibling Rivalry. If every twentieth-century American family had as few of these bogeys haunting them as the Van Goghs did, we’d all be a lot better off. Van Gogh is not a kind of self-taught Strindberg in paint, and the attempt to make him such is a sort of historical proselytism.
Of course, most of the letters begin “Dear Theo,” and there are those who have made much of this, as they have made much of his last days with Gauguin before the breakdown. In the first place, Theo kept all his letters; they are the ones which survive. In the second place, those who find “a struggle with suppressed homosexuality” in the love of men, brothers or not, united in work to which they are passionately devoted, need to stop reading books and go to work. Gauguin is a worse than worthless witness; the Van Gogh family have disdainfully omitted only his letters from the documents of this collection — and rightly so. Gauguin was that most despicable sort of Bohemian, the artist who sponges on other artists because he hasn’t the courage to attempt the rich. Even professional panhandlers and pickpockets would rather starve than prey on their own kind. So such a person is always rotten with guilt, always backbiting and boasting, always trying to kick himself free from his benefactors. Van Gogh’s kindly, wistful letters about Gauguin at Arles are far saner than Gauguin’s own sickening self-justifications, which are, in fact, quite paranoiac and add up to the claim that he “taught Van Gogh to paint and it was too much for his simple brain to take.”
We try to fit Van Gogh’s objectives into our own, we try to assimilate his art to our own Post-Surrealist, Post-Existentialist aesthetics. It won’t fit. He knew very well what he was doing, step by step. He is still a boy and at home, and has been writing Theo about the Barbizon peasant painters, Millet, Breton and the rest, and the Dutch painters of the working class:
Uncle Cor asked me today if I didn’t like “Phryne” by Gérome. I told him I would rather see a homely woman by Israels or Millet, or an old woman by Edouard Frère: for what’s the use of a beautiful body such as Phryne’s?
Eventually, he was to discover that his evangelism was on the wrong track. He realized when he saw the brilliance of Impressionist painting that this was what he wanted. He wanted to do certain things with it and use it for certain purposes. At the height of his achievement during the last days at Arles he speaks again and again of carrying on the work of Monticelli and Brias, the painters of the Midi. Now what Monticelli, like Raffaelli and even Redon did, was to use the broken color of Impressionism for decorative rather than representational ends. Van Gogh knew exactly what he was doing. And for what ends? In a curious unconscious way he seems to have had a premonition of modern color reproduction. (As everybody knows, he was devoted to Japanese prints.) Although he and Theo had to think of selling the paintings to “rich Americans” (for a maximum of $125!), he always writes about them as if they were going straight from his easel to the walls of the simple people who sat for his portraits. And he had discovered that what these people wanted was not a somber, gnarled painting of a starving woman peeling rotten potatoes:
I have just said to Gauguin about this picture [La Berceuse] that when he and I were talking about the fishermen of Iceland and of their mournful isolation, exposed to all dangers, alone on the sad sea — I have just said to Gauguin that following those intimate talks of ours came the idea to paint a picture in such a way that sailors, who are at once children and martyrs, seeing it in the cabin of their Icelandic fishing boat, would feel the old sense of being rocked come over them and remember their own lullabies. Now it may be that it is like a chromolithograph from a cheap shop. A woman in green with orange hair standing out against a background of green with pink flowers. Now these discordant sharps of crude pink, crude orange and crude green are softened by flats of red and green.
Overworked, undernourished, alcoholic — in those days at Arles, Van Gogh had exalted visions, but they were visions of the utter substantiality of the real. “This, Sir,” said Sam Johnson to Boswell as he kicked the rock and solved once for all the Epistemological Dilemma, “is the ineluctable modality of the visible!” Chairs, tables, beds, pool tables, people, fields, trees, flowers, caught up in the simplest decorative patterns, naïve, gaudy, but designed to bring a little peace and dignity and rest and even glory to people with the most ordinary tastes — like the marriage at Cana and the supper at Emmaus. Dutch, pietistic, evangelical — the lay evangelism of ordinary reality.
An age that prides itself on its self-consciousness and “alienation” may judge Van Gogh to be a minor painter, a decorator, who produced glorified pin-ups for sailors’ cabins, but there is no question about the letters. He was indisputably one of the very greatest letter writers who ever lived. You can’t get so refined that you cannot recognize his collected letters as one of the major classics of the world’s literature, another of the Hundred Best Books the man forgot to put on that list.
KENNETH REXROTH
1958
This review of The Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh originally appeared in The Nation (13 December 1958) and was reprinted in Assays (New Directions, 1961). Copyright 1961.
-www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/essays/art/van-gogh.htm
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