Vincent Van Gogh wrote that he wanted “to paint men and women with that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolise, and which we seek to convey by the actual radiance and vibration of our colouring.”
This introduces a new means by which the spiritual is to be encountered in modern art. Those aspects of emotion, spirit and soul that previously had been conveyed by symbol are now to be found in colour and line alone. Van Gogh continues in this letter to his brother Theo:
“I am always in hope of making a discovery there [in the study of colour], to express the love of two lovers by the wedding of two complementary colours, the mingling and their opposition, the mysterious vibration of kindred tones. To express the thought of a brow by the radiance of a light tone against a sombre background.
To express hope by some star, the eagerness of a soul by a sunset radiance. Certainly there is no delusive realism in that, but isn’t it something that actually exists?”
Alan Bowness sums this up in Post-Impressionism when he writes that:
“... for Van Gogh deeper and more universal meanings emerged from his study of reality, by a process of association. In his colour and brushwork, he harnessed the effects which he found in his subjects to expressive ends, using certain colour relationships and patterns of natural forms as metaphors for emotional and religious experience, as in the Night Café, whose red-green contrasts were meant to express the ‘terrible passions of humanity’, and in his canvasses of the asylum garden and olive orchards of Saint Rémy.”
Robert Rosenblum in Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition sees Van Gogh as being engaged in “a Romantic search for a new kind of religion in the scrutiny of nature” and “perpetuating in his own art many metaphors of divinity that were first invented in the visionary landscapes of [Caspar David] Friedrich, [Philipp Otto] Runge, and [Samuel] Palmer.”
He notes, for instance:
“Van Gogh’s recurrent image of the sun as something almost sacred, a connotation that can often become explicit. Even in a thoroughly secular scene like that painted in Arles in June 1888 of a sower in a wheat field, the sun, blazing on the horizon, has an almost supernatural power. Its location, in exact centre and just over a high horizon, is that which, in earlier art, one might have associated with a symbolic representation of an omnipotent deity; and its form and colour, a pure disc of golden yellow from whose clearly incised circular periphery radiate symmetrically ordered spokes of golden light, suggest that this is, in effect, the pantheist’s equivalent of a golden halo.”
Contemporary visionary artist John Reilly frequently bases his works on a central circle (often, the sun) from which facets of colour emanate, like ripples on the surface of a stream. The painting’s imagery is then set within these facets, each figure or object being embedded in the overall patterning of the painting and related to the environmental whole that Reilly creates. By these means fragments of form and colour (the facets of the painting’s patterning) and the images that they contain are united to circle harmoniously around and within God, the central life and intelligence which is the light of the world. Reilly’s use of the sun as a central organising symbol in his work may well reflect the influence of Van Gogh.
Van Gogh wrote of needing something greater in his life, although he is clear that this is not God:
“Oh, my dear brother, sometimes I know so well what I want. I can do very well without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, ill as I am, do without something which is greater than I, which is my life – the power to create.
And if, frustrated in the physical power, a man tries to create thoughts instead of children, he is still part of humanity.”
Such comments reveal a need for transcendence of or in ordinary life, even when standing outside of the framework of institutional Christian faith. So, Rosenblum writes that Van Gogh’s:
“... complaint about Émile Bernard’s Christ in the Garden of Olives – that it would be better simply to paint real olive trees – is a clear avowal not only of Van Gogh’s personal dilemma but of that of so many artists who inherited the problems of those Northern Romantics who tried to create, consciously or unconsciously, a religious sentiment in things observed that would be far more truthful to their personal experience of the supernatural than the perpetuation of traditional Christian iconography.”
James Elkins in On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art suggests five categories for contemporary religious art, one of which is art that sets out to create a new faith. Van Gogh could be an early example of such artists.
Although Van Gogh lost the ardent Christian faith of his youth, he nevertheless retained a love of Christ. To Émile Bernard he wrote:
“But the consolation of that saddening Bible which arouses our despair and our indignation – which distresses us once and for all because we are outraged by its pettiness and contagious folly – the consolation which is contained in it, like a kernel in a hard shell, in a bitter pulp, is Christ ... Christ alone – of all the philosophers, Magi, etc. – has affirmed, as a principal certainty, eternal life, the infinity of time, the nothingness of death, the necessity and the raison d’être of serenity and devotion. He lived serenely, as a greater artist than all artists, despising marble and clay as well as colour, working in living flesh. That is to say, this matchless artist, hardly to be conceived of by the obtuse instrument of our modern, nervous, stupefied brain, made neither statues nor pictures nor books, he loudly proclaimed that he made ... living men, immortals.”
Here Van Gogh connects himself to Christ through the work of creation; he brings thoughts to birth while Christ brings “living men, immortals” to birth. While Christ is so much greater - “a greater artist than all artists” – all artists are, therefore, connected with him through the act of creation.
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Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers - Vincent Van Gogh.
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