Van Gogh and David Hockney

Some people might think that Van Gogh and David Hockney would be an unlikely duo. Others think that art makes strange bedfellows. In any case, I was doing some online reading this morning after waking up early, 3 am to be precise. A quick google search found a rather in-depth article on Van Gogh's letters. They've already all been translated so what is new. Well the new appears to be a complete translation as opposed to the one previously authorized by Van Gogh's family. Vincent it would seem had a few racy moments. Some letters were withheld and others translated with fewer phrases from the vernacular. The project has taken three men many years to complete. It is being published in six volumes that will weigh in fairly close to Mike Tyson's fighting weight. Here is one tidbit from Waldemar Januszczak's article...

I did, though, enjoy an exchange between Vincent and the painter Emile Bernard, preserved now in one of the reworked letters from Arles.

“Why do you say that Degas has trouble getting a hard-on?” thunders Vincent. “Degas lives like a little lawyer, and he doesn’t like women, knowing that if he liked them and f***ed them a lot he would become hopeless at painting… Rubens, ah, there you have it, he was a handsome man and a good f***er, Courbet too; their health allowed them to drink, eat, f***.” Vincent himself believed that refraining from sex was good for his art. It made his paintings “spunkier”.

The article by Januszczak is quite a fascinating read. Included with it is the usual listing of optional reads including one on David Hockney. The art work shown above is not Van Gogh's but Hockney's. It's used as the promo to a very funny interview with him while he has been most recently in England. Hockney, in addition to everything else he has tried, has chosen to start doing art on his iPhone. He's not the first but is perhaps the most famous artist to have made images with the Apple creation. The article is not only interesting but will make you laugh. Hockney is a very funny man. Thinking about this passage from the interview, I do wonder if Van Gogh would be using an iPhone. I'm thinking he would.

There are several drawings of Hockney’s brother, Paul, and his sister, Margaret; and in each picture the subjects seem mesmerised by a small gadget in their hands, which turns out to be an iPhone — Hockney’s latest enthusiasm: “Yes, my brother and sister sat there for three or four hours, totally engrossed.” Hockney is thrilled that he has finally persuaded Celia Birtwell to buy one so that he can send her pictures: “I draw flowers on them and send them out every morning to a group of people.”

He demonstrates, tracing his finger over the tiny screen with such absorption that I worry he will stop talking altogether. “Who would have thought the telephone would bring back drawing?” he exclaims with glee.

“It’s such a great little device, it has every Shakespeare play in it and the Oxford English dictionary. In your pocket! But it’s also amusing, look at this.” He blows into it and his new toy becomes a harmonica.

Van Gogh ~ Appropriations by Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Colescott

At least two of the artists we have featured here in Fifty Two Pieces have painted appropriations of Van Gogh's work. Roy Lichtenstein from Week 37 made this print of Bedroom at Arles with Drawing on the verso in 1992. Evidently, Vogue Hommes, Paris, published a special hand signed catalogue, portfolio in a limited edition of 50. The illustration on the reverse (shown here on the left) was made when Roy Lichtenstein spilled coffee on the print during the signing. In addition to this print, Lichtenstein also painted an oil of Van Gogh's Bedroom at Arles. It is shown below on the left as well as Van Gogh's original version of his Bedroom at Arles.












Robert Colescott from Week 20 was another artist famous for his appropriations of work by fellow artists. His versions became riffs and parodies. One of his most famous was of Van Gogh's Potato Eaters. Both images are shown below and it's fairly clear which artist was responsible for which painting.

Brothers

I found this poem by Keats. It reminded me of Vincent and Theo.

To My Brother George

Many the wonders I this day have seen:
The sun, when first he kist away the tears
That fill'd the eyes of morn;-the laurell'd peers
Who from the feathery gold of evening lean;-
The ocean with its vastness, its blue green,
Its ships, its rocks, its caves, its hopes, its fears-
Its voice mysterious, which whoso hears
Must think on what will be, and what has been.
E'en now, dear George, while this for you I write,
Cynthia is from her silken curtains peeping
So scantly, that it seems her bridal night,
And she her half-discover'd revels keeping.
But what, without the social thought of thee,
Would be the wonders of the sky and sea?

In 1889 Van Gogh painted The Bedroom, he said he enormously enjoyed doing this "interior of nothing at all." It has been suggested that he was trying to express his desire for simplicity and familial security. He said "The broad lines of the furniture must again express inviolable rest." Yet, the perspective suggests that the security, the hope for rest, is in a room of anxiety, where one is waiting and confined. The bird's eye view of empty chairs and Van Gogh's own self portrait on the wall suggest how lonely it must have been. The hundreds of pages to Theo are agonizing and brilliant. It is for the Van Gogh brothers as Keats wrote:
But what, without the thought of thee, would be the wonders of the sky and sea?

Van Gogh ~ The Ox Cart, Fog

Position yourself in the gallery at the Portland Art Museum near Van Gogh's The Ox Cart and you'll usually hear someone comment on what a gray morning it seems to be. The grayness stands out now as it did for Van Gogh in 1884. He had moved to Neunens to live with his parents after a failed attempt at being a minister. He wrote to his brother Theo in Paris of his life in this northern part of The Netherlands.

Out of doors everything is mournful. In fact the fields consist entirely of patches of black earth and snow; on some days one seems to see nothing but fog and mud; in the evening the red sun, in the morning crows.

There are a number of works of poetry about fog but this one by Giovanni Pascoli seems to capture the grayness of Van Gogh's Neunens.

In the Fog

I stared into the valley: it was gone—
wholly submerged! A vast flat sea remained,
gray, with no waves, no beaches; all was one.

And here and there I noticed, when I strained,
the alien clamoring of small, wild voices:
birds that had lost their way in that vain land.

And high above, the skeletons of beeches,
as if suspended, and the reveries
of ruins and of the hermit’s hidden reaches.

And a dog yelped and yelped, as if in fear,
I knew not where nor why. Perhaps he heard
strange footsteps, neither far away nor near—

echoing footsteps, neither slow nor quick,
alternating, eternal. Down I stared,
but I saw nothing, no one, looking back.

The reveries of ruins asked: “Will no
one come?” The skeletons of trees inquired:
“And who are you, forever on the go?”

I may have seen a shadow then, an errant
shadow, bearing a bundle on its head.
I saw—and no more saw, in the same instant.

All I could hear were the uneasy screeches
of the lost birds, the yelping of the stray,
and, on that sea that lacked both waves and beaches,

the footsteps, neither near nor far away.

--Giovanni Pascoli

Van Gogh on NPR

In her December 3rd article for NPR Susan Stanberg called Portland's Ox Cart, "dark as coffee grounds". I appreciate the lyricism of a good journalist. She ended that article by stating that this work is one of the last before "sunshine broke on Van Gogh's canvas and changed everything". Stanberg's article described the relationship between the Sohn family, donors of the Ox Cart, and PAM curator Bruce Guenther. Included are some good photos of Guenther examining the painting and the family over whom the painting hung for 40 plus years.

In 2003 NPR's Michele Norris did a piece on Van Gogh's painting Moonrise. By examining San Remi's moon cycle from May to Sept of 1889 (May,when Van Gogh got to Provence and Sept. when he mailed the painting to his brother, Theo) scientists were able to track the exact day and time the painting was made. The golden wheat piled in stacks assured the scientists that the field was not painted in May, but during the harvest, which would have taken place in July. Because of the full moon they knew it was the 13th of July. Because of the placement of the moon in the sky, they knew it was 9:13 p.m. Norris' interview puts the listener in that field at that moment, with Van Gogh. NPR chose this story shortly before July 13th 2003 when, in the Northern Hemisphere, the sun would set and the moon would rise exactly the same way as they did for Van Gogh over a century before.

I remember listening to Norris' report, as well as the one in 2007 about Portland's acquisition. Thank goodness for good news.

Van Gogh ~ The Ox Cart

Here again is Van Gogh's The Ox Cart, the piece of the week at Fifty Two Pieces. Van Gogh completed at least two other works involving oxen, one oil and one drawing. Cart with Red and White Ox(below) also painted in 1884 is at the Kroller-Muller Museum in the Netherlands. The ox stands alone in the Dutch version, not surrounded by crows. Perhaps that's because the cart is empty, the manure already taken to the fields. The overall lighting is a bit brighter in "Red and White" also suggesting later in the day when more of the sun might have broken through the fog. Van Gogh seems to have used similar brushstrokes to build up the ox as he had done in The Ox Cart – sculpting the legs with the paint and his brush to paraphrase Bruce Guenther, Chief Curator at the Portland Art Museum. Having the two ox paintings in the same gallery would be a great way to experience these early oils by Van Gogh.



During the same time frame Van Gogh also did at least one drawing of an ox cart. Oxcart in the Snow (below) is a pen drawing and is in a private collection somewhere. For anyone interested in astrology, 2009 is the Year of the Ox.

Ox Cart

My first memory of the Ox Cart takes place from the driver's seat of a black 1986 Jeep Cherokee pick up -- the one I used to drive when I had my own gardening business, Amy Gray Gardens. I was probably hauling landscape debris to the corner of town where I could dump it on the huge pile of leaves and branches every other landscaper had visited that morning. It was the point of rest in my day, to climb in the dusty old truck, spider webs in my hair. In dirt crusted jeans I'd roll down the windows and drive the tarped load of pruned branches or fallen leaves away from the pristine garden behind me. On the way I would crank the local NPR station KLCC in Eugene and hear local news or Fresh Tracks, the three hours of new music the station played daily. Van Gogh's Ox Cart would be donated to the Portland Art Museum from a nice family in Roseburg Oregon, the announcer said. Roseburg, just an hour south on the I-5 from Eugene, where the Van Gogh had been for all these years, Roseburg of all places. And in that moment the world didn't seem so small and history didn't seem so far away, even if I did recognize all the other landscapers at the debris station, even if I did wave to the same recognizable road workers who'd been paving Hwy 99 for the last two weeks. I was in that instant connected to Van Gogh, just one hour north of the Ox Cart on the old I-5.