Van Gogh: A Power Seething (Icons) by Julian Bell

Author:Julian Bell [Bell, Julian]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: New Harvest
Published: 2015-01-05T17:00:00+00:00

Towards the end of his busy summer tangling with pointillism in Asnières, Vincent had met up again with Émile Bernard, whose parents had a house there.36 The brainy ex-Cormon student — still only nineteen — was seeking a new stance in Paris’s art-political infighting. Signac, pointillism’s most vocal exponent, had somehow managed to annoy both Bernard and his older friend Anquetin in the spring of 1887, and in the summer the latter came up with a way to outflank the voguish style Signac epitomized, with its air of mechanistic, scientistic certitude. Tinted glass: that gave the clue. Once you looked through it at what you were painting, all the visual effects became more intense, more unified in a psychological rush — more spiritualized, one might say. And of course, tinted glass had a mighty art tradition of its own in cathedral windows, the black-wired compartments of which suggested an alternative way for oil painters to set line apart from color. Bernard and Anquetin also linked these compartments, or cloisons (hence cloisonnism, the name their approach would soon receive), with the flat patches of color in Japanese prints. A searingly yellow harvest scene by Anquetin demonstrated the new doctrine’s appeal,37 while the idealistic Bernard argued that it could liberate art from banal, mechanical “realistic imitation.”

There was much in this to attract the Monticelli enthusiast who even back in Nuenen had proclaimed that “COLOUR EXPRESSES SOMETHING IN ITSELF.”38 Yet as with the Signac-Seurat manner that he had interrogated over the summer and that Bernard was now claiming to revile, Vincent translated the concept of a unified visual rush into his own distinctive pictorial diction. The still life he inscribed to Theo, Quinces, Lemons, Pears and Grapes, is a single resounding chord of yellow played out on various vegetal instruments, almost entirely freed up from perspective and chiaroscuro. (It may be no coincidence that around this season, Vincent joined Theo in enjoying some Wagner productions.) The canvas even sports a frame hand-painted by the artist, the further to concentrate its impact. At the same time, rather than using stained-glass compartments to generate complexity within this unity, Vincent created an all-over crackle of visual electricity through the emphatic, polyrhythmic hatching that was his and his alone. Progress in painting, canvases to change the world — or, at least, to start that task by transforming the homes they hung in; face-to-face with such a propulsive blast, such concepts might begin to make sense.

What Vincent couldn’t stand was the bickering. Why, God damn it, wouldn’t Bernard hang his pictures in the same gallery as Signac’s? (After all, from a longer perspective, cloisonnism and pointillism had a very substantial overlap of aims.) The question mattered because his new advisory capacity in Theo’s business life led Vincent to think as a curator. Over there, down in the center of town, you could go and see the painters of le grand boulevard, the old guys — Monet, Pissarro, Degas and the rest. They weren’t his immediate concern. No, what

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