Modern Art and Visual Culture 1660-1900

FRAMING FRANCE The representation of landscape in France, 1870‐1914

EDITED B Y R I C H A R D THOMSON

Manchester University Press MANCHESTER A N D NEW Y O R K

Contents

"may be tl d . ,m an List of figures page Vi

List of contributors x Acknowledgements xii

Introduction RICHARD THOMSON 1

I Authority versus independence: the position of French landscape in the 18705 JOHN HOUSE 15

2 Frenchliterary landscapes JOY NEWTON 35 3 Cézanne’s blur, approximating Cézanne RICHARD SHIFF 59 4 On n o t seeing Provence: Van Gogh and the landscape of consolation, 1888‐9 GRISELDA POLLOCK 81

5 Maurice Denis: four stages in the history of French landscape, 1889‐1914 JEAN-PAUL B O U I L L O N 119

6 Henri Martin atToulouse: terre natale andjuste milieu RICHARD THOMSON 147

7 Reconsiderations of Matisse and Derain in the classical landscape JAMES D. HERBERT 173

8 ‘Ce beau pays del’avenir’: Cubism, nationalism and the landscape of modernity in France DAVID COTTINGTON I 94

GRISELDA P O L L O C K

l 4 On n o t seeing Provence: Van Gogh and E

the landscape of consolation, 1888‐9

N 1975, three of us, including one budding art historian, went on holiday to the South of France.Weeach had our own agenda for the

success of the trip. We politely indulged each other’s whims. Sowe swam and sunbathed on the C6te d’Azur. We froze and cursed aswe climbed the still chilly slopes of the Alpes Maritimes. The art historian dragged her companions around several Provencal towns, Arles and St. Rémy, to fulfil an unsuppressable art‐historical obligation, even while onholiday, to visit the ‘Van Gogh’ sites. We did n o t see Provence.We had brought anidea of what we wanted

to find with us. Sowe searched for, and sometimes caught glimpses of, motifs of paintings and drawings by Van Gogh, then the Ph.D.research topic for the art historian. She even found herselfusingacamera to help her to see ‘Van Goghs’ in the landscape, following in the footsteps of John Rewaldwho had made famous photographs of the motifs painted ‘ by another painter of the Provencal landscape, Paul Cézanne [27].1But I

27] La Crau from Montmajour, 1975 1

I

that was amistake. Van Gogh was n o t Cézanne. Van Gogh was n o t at homein this landscape andhedid n o t paint its sites simply asthemselves. Reg. Provence was aprop for aversion of modernism soradically different In t from Cézanne’s intense battle with sensation,place and form that it may ‘regi in t u r n lead usto question Van Gogh’s place in modernism itself. Eur(

plex Artistic tourism and the late nineteenth-century avant-garde 12; This anecdote exemplifies the placewhere art history meets tourism. We . est v are all tourists now. Tourism is, according to MacCannell, the paradig‐ C638! matic moderncondition.2 Astypically urbantravellers in periodic search soug of the exotic, of difference, of utopia, of somewhere from the past or ‘unt< even o u t of time, what we see is what we expect to experience. Vision and is pre-packaged. Images of far‐off places in glossy travel features in vied Sunday supplements vie with alluring photographs of ecstatic holiday‐ zeal makers in travel companies’ brochures,andwith the picturesqueviews of - mos major landmarks andfolklorique customs in the promotional literature ' geni: of the tourist board. These fantasies fill our heads so that we bring our notir o w n dreams with us when we travel. They promise the pleasures we of d1 paid for; and wejudge our holiday asuccess according to the degree of T1 match between what we encounter and what we imagined. pher Perhaps Vincent van Gogh was atourist in this modernist sense, too. Thr<

Obviously hewas n o t on atwo‐week break from the routines of urban all a work. On Monday 20February I888 Van Gogharrived in the Provencal acro t o w n of Arles, where hestayed until 8May 1889 when hemoved to a and hospital on the outskirts of the smaller t o w n of St. Rémy where he villa; remained until 16May 1890. He left Paris at a moment when being a in G tourist became asignificant factor in the making and shaping of modern for 1 art. In the mid‐18805, the possibility of maintaining the metropolis as rura' the paradigmatic site for advanced culture’s encounter with modernity Fr ‐ its founding project since the 1860s ‐ fell into a crisis. A number of was artists, identifyingwith the independent movement, the legacy of Manet artis andworkingwith the example of the group’s current pre‐eminentfigure, artis‑ Georges Seurat, left the city to explore another site for modern art: the ‐ an regions. Modern art went on the tourist trail.3 (pla( Van Gogh’s relation to this avant‐garde experiment is somewhat spe‐ 142)

cial if n o t deviant. Weneed to ask: what is the difference between being he a aDutchman abroad, being an expatriate like the American artist Mary t w o Cassatt who lived andworked in Paris,and being atourist? How are we city t o read bothwhat Van Gogh made and what h e w r o t e i n the light o f his tried peculiar conjunctionof all three: anartist, leavingthe city,who hadchosen took to live abroad and tried to found an artistic colony in Provence, which fam( was n o t at all an‘unspoilt region’ but ahighly modernising, politically eartl volatile, aggressively left‐wingandindustrialisingarea ofmodernFrance?4 that

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Regionality and the artists’ colony: Van Gogh and Drenthe, 1883 In the late nineteenth century a certain kind of consciousness of ‘regionality’ had emerged within the economic and political forces for Europeanconvergence and nationalcentralisation.Regionality is acom‑ plex ideologicaleffect of the latter: ascapitalismpenetratedand imposed anexpanding uniformity upon hitherto disparate and segregated com‑ munities,economies and traditions, soabelated, almost nostalgic, inter‑ est was generated in that which, in the new economic logic, must soon cease to,bedifferent. Artists asmuchastourists paradoxically,therefore, sought out regions,villages, landscapes that appeared to be‘unspoiled’, ‘untouched’,‘undeveloped’.A drive for integrationof disparate linguistic and cultural communities into anational economy and apoliticalunity vied with acultural romanticism that travelled with ananthropologist’s zeal for diversity anddifference into those regions and areas that seemed most to resist the pressures of economic progress and national homo‑ genisation. This desired difference could no longer besignified by the notionof the country asopposed to the city and increasingly the object of desire was called ‘Nature’.5 The extent to which artists were part of this contradictory trend is a

phenomenon that is only just being properly researched and analysed. Throughout the nineteenth century, but massively at its end, artists of all aesthetic persuasions moved out of the cities and set up ‘colonies’ across the face of Europe,with certain areas muchprivileged:PontAven and the northern coasts of Brittany were popular; sowere the fishing villages of Holland,Cornwall and Scandinavia. Worpswede and Dachau in Germany were also well settled. Various explanations can be offered for this artistic colonisation of the picturesque remnants of traditional rural economies and cultures which cannot be entered in here.6 From the very inception of his belated career asanartist, Van Gogh

was apart of this tendency. His letters show hewas already aware of the artistic colonies. In 1881hewrote of his plans to paint in well-known artistic sites in Holland:Katwijk,Heyst,Calmphout,Etten,Scheveningen ‐ any ‘plaats waar kans is in aanraking te komen met andere schilders’ (placewhere there is achance of cominginto contact withpainters) (LT 142).7After working in Etten (where his parents were living),however, he actually settled in the city of The Hague in December 1881. After t w o years of struggling to come to terms with representing the modern city and its rapidly changing environs,he abandoned that project and tried another possible artistic strategy: being a painter of Nature.8 This took him'onthe railway into the relatively remote province of Drenthe, famous for its peat-rich soil and spectacular landscapes of deep brown earth stretching for miles, flat, regular, punctuated only by the canals that transported its almost slave‐produced peat, and interrupted by the

fascinating shapes of very large farmhouses and barns whose enormous thatched roofs almost touched the ground.

Significantly, Van Gogh got this wrong. The growing colony of urban artist‐tourists from Holland and Germany (Max Liebermann for instance) settled in the attractive little village of Zweeloo, a short carriage ride from the railway terminus at Hoogeveen. Van Gogh did n o t go there, but found a room in an inn, one of the very few buildings for miles, at the intersection of one of the main canal networks. Wherever y o u look from this point is limitless, featureless flatness. However char‑ acteristic of the region, and its economy, this does n o t furnish much by way of interest for a landscape painter, and the limited company pro‑ vided by an inn at an otherwise virtually uninhabited crossroads could n o t provide the very sociality that Nina Lubbren has identified as a defining aspect of the ‘artists’ colony’.9 Van Gogh struggled with the problem, taking canal trips and trying to draw and paint some of the sights that make this region spectacular in its v a s t vistas of chocolate‑ brown earth. But from the few drawings and oils that survive, we can see that the relations between what he was trying to draw and paint and the still unconquered vocabulary of landscape painting remained unresolved however much, in his letters, he tried to convince his brother that hewas living in ‘nature’, in the restorative healthiness of the countryside and in someplace comparable to what the village of Barbizon in France had been forty years before, or even akin to the rural world painted by Ruysdael and De Koninck in the seventeenth century.

I have introduced the brief Drenthe episode ‐ it lasted a m e r e three months ‐ of Van Gogh aslandscape painter because it differs from what happened in Provence in 1888 and y e t corresponds in crucial ways. Per‑ haps I could say that in Drenthe, Van Gogh, still taking the artistic trope of ‘being t r u e to Nature’ t o o literally, actually tried to see Drenthe and thus missed the artistic boat. He had studied a lot m o r e a r t by the time he once again set a canvas before an outdoor rural scene in France. He had learnt that art, n o t Nature ‐ in the r a w ‐ makes a r t . Nature is arhet‑ orical figure for an aesthetic renovation. Van Gogh learnt through c o n t a c t with this painting revolution that the ‘Nature’ heneeded to master was the rhetoric already coded into the history of a r t by those painting schools claimed asm o r e t r u e to n a t u r e by contemporary critics: namely landscape painting practised at Barbizon and to befound in the museums’ holdings of seventeenth‐century Dutch a r t which,"in direct c o n t r a s t to allegorical interpretations in the later twentieth century, was read as‘naturalist’.

Dreams, memories and the problem of place What Van Gogh produced in the South of France has to some e x t e n t become the defining, popular image of ‘Van Gogh’: brilliant, intensely

color and : thick and e durin PI‘OVt gest 1

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84 j 85 VAN GOGH, 1888‐9

[01.18 j coloured imagesof aperpetualsummer, anagriculturally fertile,worked and animated territory associated with, the sun ‐ present either as a

r of l thickly impasted and visible disc, or reflected indirectly in sunflowers .for and embodied in the recurrent motif of the golden wheatfields before, iage ' duringor after harvest.This ‘Van Gogh’ is identifiedwith France,with t go Provence and with his engagement with Parisianmodernism.But I sug‑ for gest that weneed to rethink allthree. ever Van Gogh did n o t ‘see’ ProVence.His great dream of ‘the South’ and har- a‘studio of the Tropics’ has beenwell rehearsedin Van Goghliterature. 1by Hisreferences toDelacroix’s trips toMorocco,to PierreLoti’sJapanese aro- l novelMadame Cbrysantbéme (1887) and to Japanese woodcuts clearly )uld frame his arrival in what hecalled ‘the South’ asaromantic orientalism, asa which, aswe know, stayed the course of the nineteenth century and the shiftedfromacademic to avant-garde circles, culminatingin the work of the Matisse in the first two decades of the twentieth century.10 The images ate- which filled my portable mmée imaginaire when I toured Provence in _see 1975were shaped by Van Gogh’s imaginary collection of artistic proto‑ the types and literary tropes: orientalism, romanticism and what I shall call _ved art historicism. The concrete economy and culture of Provence was was n o t the object of his adventure, which was ajourney asmuch in time and asin space. had Van Gogh left Paris, like Gauguin and Bernard. But, as before in by Drenthe,his selected location,Arles, was ‘off-beam’.A growing indus‑

trial town of 23,000 people, with major railway yards that had cleared me most of Arles’ historic cemetry dating from Roman times (Les Aly‑ rhat scamps), anindustrial economy with huge gasworks, and apicturesque ?er‐ site with a selection of Roman and medieval Catholic monuments to ope develop its place in the burgeoning tourist industry, Arles was a con‑ and fusing andcontradictory choice. What did or could any of this meanto ime A VanGogh? In the endvery little,for the locationwas n o t in andof itself He 1,important. Hewas another kind of tourist entirely. v aet- ‘ :- The letters written from Arles betweenFebruary 1888 and his depar‑ tact ture in the followingyear involveusin aconstant displacement, aweav‑ the ingof fantasy,forwhichselectedlocalmotifscouldprovidethe skeleton, )015 butonly by beingturned through the prismof animaginary conception tape of where andwhen Van Gogh was working. Out of that moment came ngs yet another attempt to create amodern art ‘in’ the South’,but it was n o t ical amodern art of the Midi.VanGogh’sprojectostensibly involvedtrying

to paint the landscape of thefmodern, but not asMonet had tried in Argenteuil or Pissarroin Pontoisein the 1870s.These artists took onthe problematic of landscapepaintingwith its nationalist and romantic con‑ notations, and modernised it by their attempt.»to negotiate, within the

zent frame of their canvases, the signs of modernity transforming the rural ;ely economy by industry, transport and above all leisure." In his project,

F R A M I N G F R A N C E

Van Gogh realigned the modern and the countryside by using the art‑ istic gambits that were the signature of various members of the avant‑ garde faction in Paris, and remoulding them via borrowings from Barbizonlandscape in the 1850s and 1860s,andbeyondthat group’s o w n historical inspiration, from seventeenth‐century Dutch landscape paint‑ ing. Through this confection, the modern was fashioned asasurrogate, even animaginary world, alandscape of consolation,what hecalled in a letter of June 1889, ‘la peinture plus consolante’ (the painting of greater consolation) (LT 595). It is the purpose of this chapter to explore that concept and profound paradoxes of Van Gogh’s work that rest upon it.

Hollandin Provence: luminous or coloured? Daudet, Goncourt, the Bible fired his Dutch brain. At Arles, the quays, the bridges, the boats, in fact the whole Midi took the place of Holland to him.12

11n’y adans cepays que deblanc. La lumiere refletée partout mange toutes les couleurs locales, et grise les ombres . . . les tableaux deVan Gogh, faits aArles,

- sont merveilleuxdefurie etd’intensité,mais nerendentpas dutout la‘luminosité’ du Midi. Sous prétexte qu’ils sont dans le Midi, les gens s’attendent avoir du rouge,debleu,du vert, dujaune . . . Or,aucontraire, c’est leNord‐ laHollande par exemple ‐ qui est coloré (couleurs locales),tandi que leMidiest ‘lumineux’.” (There is nothingbut white in this country. The reflected light seems to eat up the local colour, and turns the shadows gray The paintings of Van Gogh, made in Arles, are wonderful in their fury and intensity, but they do n o t atall capture the ‘luminosity’ of the Midi. On the pretext that they are in the South, people expect to see red,blue, green, yellow . . . However, on the contrary, it is the North, Holland for example, that is coloured (that is, has local colour), while the South is ‘luminous’.) From his arrival in Paris in March 1886 until his death in July 1890,

Van Gogh worked in France. He was acknowledged as a Dutchman in both obvious and more subtle ways by his new Frenchcolleagues, as the above quotations suggest. Both Gauguin and Signac imply that Van Gogh projected his northern, Dutch experiences on tothe sights and colours of Provence. This Dutchness is n o t only geographical, but cul‑ tural. As Gauguin’s remarkreveals,Dutchnessimpliedreligious ‐ aDutch brain afire with the Bible ‐ aswell associal and historical affiliations. Van Gogh himself acknowledged that he perceived Provence through his memories of his o w n country. To his sister Wilhelmina, hewrote from Arles in July 1888, Ik vind het hier ‘s zomers magtig mooi, het groen is zeer diep en rijk, de lucht ijl enverbazend helder. En toch, de uitgestrekte vlakte zou dikwijls heel veel

dekleur verschilde.

86 87 V A N GOGH, 1888‐9

art- (I think it is exquisitely beautiful here in summer; the green is very deep and 1 ant- rich; and the air is thin and astonishingly clear. But for all that the wide plain Irom ‘ might oftenremind one very strongly of Holland‐ herewhere there are hardly own any mountains or rocks ‐ if the colour were n o t sodifferent.) (LW 5) tint- But Signac described the South as luminous, and n o t coloured. Van gate, Gogh’s preoccupations with the colours of the South indicate the point . in 3- l of View from which Van Gogh imagined the South. He was atourist ’ zater i from the North. What hesaw in the Midi was n o t only the result of that _ what he expected to see, expectations shaped by literature and art, as 41it- ’ well asby railway companies’ travel posters and travellers’ tales, but l

1 they were also conditioned by the ideological framework for his own practice that emerged in this period. E

the . That Van Gogh compared selected aspects of the countryside around I L12 f, Arles to the flat landscapes of Hollandwas n o t very remarkable.He was ' | aDutchman,with his ‘roots in Dutchsoil’ (onzewortel in Hollandsche asles aarde zit), ashe had once roundly declared to the painter Anton van a irles, Rappard on 15October 1881 (LR 2). Nostalgia for his own familiar i DSité’ landscape could certainly make him want to see a similarity between | if d“ -' La Crau and the flat expanses of certain parts of Holland, or between and? 1 the boats at Stes. Maries de la Mer and the seaside leisure places of his u x . ! own country like Katwijk and Scheveningen, the thatched cottages in ‘ it 11P F that Camargue village and those he had tried to paint in Drenthe and 1‘ fogh, 5 Nuenen.The famous drawbridge near Arles, LePont deLanglois,built ; atall by Dutchengineers,hadobvious Dutchconnections whichwould'bring l 39d,“ to mindbothrealbridges of Hollandand those hehaddrawnin his own l ’01:1}; works [28]. I

s ; - “ 5.15- ‘r' - - f " f ; _-, M m e - m u g .- - - . E 890, - . ' ' ' ' man I as, as | Van , l and cul‑ utch ions. )ugh 'rote

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Memory, nostalgia, association, these signs of being unrooted as a Dutchman abroad, may have played a p a r t in the emergence of an aes‑ thetic ideology of disengagement. In the period 1880‐5 Van Gogh had always worked i n places whose social, economic and cultural s t r u c t u r e had formed him, and of which he was a part. By contrast, after 1886, Van Gogh’s practice was neither rooted in n o r involved with either the social geography or the social structures of France. His few direct c o m‑ m e n t s on the region around Arles show little concern with its agricultural system or the rural workers of that region, and even less understanding of its specific social character and the economic conditions of that region of France. Instead, his statements rehearse the touristic clichés‘ about picturesque rural costume, the beauty of the w o m e n of Arles and the laziness of the local workers.14

But even as I argue this, I m u s t qualify it. Van Gogh’s responses to his own country had n o t necessarily been any better informed. Indeed they t o o were mediated by memory and nostalgia. Van Gogh called Brabant, the province in which he had been born and later worked, ‘the Brabant of my dreams’, and he compared Drenthe, where he worked for several months in 1883, to the village and region around Barbizon in the time of the painter Corot’s youth, namely the 18205. He looked at the peas‑ ants and the countryside around Nuenen asthough through the lens of paintings and drawings by Jean-Francois Millet (1814‐75). While I might suggest, therefore, that a genuine nostalgia contributed to Van Gogh’s misrecognition of Provence, this problem has to beunderstood at amore structural level. Provence was n o t only recast in the image of a Holland, itself misperceived, transmuted by ‘memory’ of the past, but a past that was n o t his; it was the prehistory of present, anearlier premodernist dis‑ course on modernity mediated by nineteenth-century critical writings and the politically infused ideological terrain onwhich French a r t history was formed in the middle of the century. This other notion of modernity was, therefore, derived from art‐historicist representations and reinterpreta‑ tions, in the 18605 and 1870s, of paintings by Dutch artists of the seven‑ teenth century. These, in t u r n , had been produced, each with its o w n ideological agenda, by the republican exile Théophile Thoré (also known asWillem Burger), cataloguer and archivist aswell asnaturalist advocate and rediscoverer of Hals and Vermeer; Charles Blanc, author of the influential academic textbook Gmmmnire des arts du dessin (1867), founder of the Gazette des Beatrix‐Arts in 1858 and editor of the compendious project for an a r t history of Les Peintres de toutes les écoles (1861‐76) for which he w r o t e the volumes on the Dutch School with its star, the humanitarian religious painter Rembrandt; Eugéne Fromentin, painter, orientalist and travel writer, author of Les Maine: d’autrefo£s (I 876). All of these writers were n o t only well known to Van Gogh, who read them

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88 | 89 - VA N GOGH, 1888‐9 ',_ _________________ asa _ avidly and quoted them extensively in 1888,but they were highly influ- l aes- - ential on his project after 1885.The key point of all these writers was ' had l their inventionfor the DutchSchool of anart history that placed it as ture the modelfor contemporary modern art.15 Thoré roundly stated that in 886, relationto the transformationof Europeanart the newprincipleofmod‑ the em art was to be the realist and democratic principles of Dutch art. om‐ i Comparing Raphael and Rembrandt asrepresentatives of t w o possible ural trends in European art, hedeclaimed: iing

Ra hael re arde enarriére; Rembrandt re deenavant. L’unavu l’humanitég gargion >out abstraite .. . l’autre directement et de ses propres yeux, une humanité réelle et the vivante. L’un est le passé; l’autre l’avenir.16 . (Raphaellooksbackwards.Rembrandtlooksforward.The onesaw humanity in

t1118 anabstract manner, . .. the other saw humanity directly,andwithhisown eyes, :hey i aliving, real humanity.The one is the past and the other is the future.) rant, . . _ . ; Jam The ideologicalfield of Van Gogh’s work in Provence in 1888-9 was I“ eral yet another facetof anideathat hadbeenformulatedin the earliest letter i :ime that declared his intentionto become anartist: the idea of a‘homeland |; eas- l of pictures’‐ ‘paysdetableaux’ ‐ first mentionedin LT 13} in 1880.The ,i _Sof imaginary ‘homeland’ ‐ ‘patrie’ ‐ for the future of art was framed asan ; ight imaginary past, signified by the repeated use of the term memory. In a i gh’s letter of 1890 to his sister Wilhelmina, who had been in Paris visiting a 10re ‘l _ their brotherTheo,Van Gogh discussed the difficulties of living in the ' and, ? city,especially acity ‘tropgrande ettrop embrouillée’ (too largeandt o o i that i confusmg). l

dlsci J On abeaudirepour les peintres: ontravaille mieux alacampagne, tout yparles , an i nettement, tout s’ teint, tout 5’ ex li ue. Or, dans une de ville lorsqu’on. y Y P q gran was 7 est fatigué on necomprend rien et sesent comme perdu. was, ‘ eta- , (One couldsay for painters:one works better in the countryside,where every‑ ICI l - 1 thing ismuchclearer,holds together and isexplicable. In alargecity,however, ) w n _i once one is tired, one ceases to understandanything and feels lost.) (LW r9)

) w n Then Van Gogh restated his notion of arural art made for the consola‑ cate ii tion of those who live in the city, such asthe painter Jean-Francois (tihe f Milletprovided. ; 1 er ‘J r ious i Ah parlantdeladifference entre la grandeville etles champs,quelmaitreque ce ‘ .for i Millet.Celui-la,sisage,siému, fair lacampagne detelle faeonque mé‘meenville the 5 on continue ala sentir. iter, (Ah! speaking of the difference between the big city and the country, what a All master Millet is.He, that Wise andsensitive man,paints the countryside in such J e m g away that you goon feeling it even in the city.)

»‐ . - - . . ~ . ‐ - - ‐ . + w ‐ - fi w m w ~ ‐ fl ‐ ’ m ‐ v W m fi ‐ W ‐ m ‐ W . -4 - 7 - - ‐ - ‐ - ‐ v ‐ - m m “ W i r v - w v - fl ' I ‐ I - r . “ fl?\ fi . - ‐ ‑

F R A M I N G F R A N C E 9 0 9 1 _ = ‐ ‐ = = = _ g _

Then comes the crucial statement,

A présent mieux que dans le commencement, je vois la vraie campagne de Provence ‐ et c’est tellement, tellement la meme chose que chez nous dans les gens alors que cela se manifeste t o u t e autrement, alors que la culture et les t r a v a u x des champs ne s o n t pas les memes que dans n o s bruyéres et champs du nord. Je pense beaucoup a la Hollande et a n o t r e jeunesse d’autrefois ‑ précisément parce que je me sens bien en pleine campagne. ( A t present, much m o r e than at the beginning, I see the real countryside of Pro‑ vence ‐ and it is absolutely the same thing asat home even though it appears quite different, and although the culture and the labours of the fields are n o t the same asin o u r misty fields of the north. I think alot about Holland and about o u r youth in the past ‐ precisely because here I feel entirely in the countryside.) ( LW 19)

This letter was in fact written during Van Gogh’s residence in the hos‑ pital St. Paul de Mausole at St. Rémy, fifteen miles from Arles. He was then certainly in a m o r e countrified place than the populous industrial t o w n of Arles, with its major gasworks and railway yards. But even so, he was hardly living in the countryside. Protected by incarceration in an institution, far from both city and actual rural life, he imagined himself fully in a space called ‘the countryside’ - ‘en pleine campagne’. That countryside was asmuch atime asaplace. It was the rural setting of his childhood in Holland.” In the months following the letter to his sis‑ t e r ( LW 19), Van Gogh produced a series of paintings and drawings which he collectively titled ‘Memories of the North’ ( LT 629, 629a). One of these, Winter landscape: memory of the North (March‐April 1890; Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh), is areworking of asketch made in the province of Drenthe in the a u t u m n of 1883, and s e n t to his brother in aletter ( LT 330). In addition, Van Gogh began to rework The potato eaters (1885; Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh) and produce copies of a series labelled Travaax des champs based on wood‑ engravings by Adrian Lavieille after drawings by Millet.18

In practice, therefore, Van Gogh’s ‘thinking about Holland and the past’ focused on images, his o w n aswell asthose by others that formed his musée imaginaire. Through his working o v e r such images asmotifs, h e could t r a v e r s e a temporal gulf between present and past, here and there, and recapture the imaginary past ‐ that is to say a past that was itself composed of, and indeed embedded in, representations, used ini‑ tially by the artist to situate himself as a citizen of the ‘homeland of pictures’ between 1880 and 1885, and subsequently used to provide a displaced Dutchman with ameans to be ‘at home’ with the French mod‑ ernists at the point at which they were themselves losing their specific geographical, urban bearings. The real paradox lies in understanding how what was represented in those images from and of ‘the other place’

)0 91 V A N G O G H , 1888‐9 _ W

and ‘another time’ ‐ seventeenth‐century Holland ‐ could function as both a mode of painting and a subject‐matter with which a self‑ consciously modern a r t could be forged while living in Arles.

One of the critical m o m e n t s at which that inversion was being developed was the summer of 1888. In addition to comparing the plains outside the t o w n of Arles to the flat landscapes of Holland, Van Gogh translated the Provencal landscape into landscape painting, particularly from the seventeenth‐century Dutch School. These c o m m e n t s o c c u r in letters from this period. Si tu voyais la Camargue et bien d’autres endroits, tu serais c o m m e moi tres surpris de voir que cela a un caractere absolument a la Ruysdael. (If you w e r e to see the Camargue and many other spots around here y o u would be just asI am, extremely surprised to recognise that they are absolutely of the character of a Ruysdael.) (LT 496)

Pourtant la n a t u r e ici doit étre trés différente de Bordighera . . . ou il y a moins de mistral . . . Ici, sauf u n e couleur plus intense, cela rappelle la Hollande, t o u t est plat, seulement on pense s u r t o u t a la Hollande de Ruysdael et de Hobbema et d’Ostade, plutét qu’a la Hollande actuelle. (However, n a t u r e around here is very different from the area around Bordighera . . . where there is less mistral . . . Here, except for the colour that is much m o r e intense, it calls to mind Holland, everything is flat, only that o n e thinks above all of the Holland of Ruysdael and Hobbema and of Ostade, rather than of Holland asit is today.) (LT 502)

Involontairement, est‐ce que l’effet de la n a t u r e si Ruysdaelesque d’ici ‐ je pense assez s o u v e n t de la Hollande, et a travers le double éloignement de la distance et du temps écoulé, ces souvenirs o n t un certain n a v r a n t . (Involuntarily, is it the effect of a c o u n t r y that is so reminiscent of Ruysdael, here I think so often of Holland and across the twofold remoteness of distance and time gone by these memories have a kind of heartbreak in them.) ( LT 512)

We are n o t merely discussing a superficial visual resemblance. Pro‑ vence becomes the screen for a Holland that is itself already a spatially distanced and temporally dislocated representation. This Holland is that of adifferent epoch, ‘l’antique Hollande’, which through the coded semi‑ otic systems of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting repres‑ ented apre-modern rural/urban hierarchy, apatriciate geopolitical order that makes social order and its authority appear clear and intelligible, easy to situate oneself in, for it can bevisually laid o u t before the view‑ ing subject through aparticular use of perspective, viewing distance and the spatial division of the canvas. This imaged/imagined past offers the possibility of being clearly situated, and its difference from the confus‑ ing, modernising, chaotic present of both Holland and Provence in the

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29] Vincent v a n Gogh, Landscape near Montmajoar with train from Arles to Orgon, 1888

18805 engenders a kind of nostalgia because it seems doubly removed through both time and space. Thus it becomes a highly political vision precisely at the point at which this nostalgia, and its recourse to cultural memory, appears to make it totally depoliticised.

In LT 509 (written about 13 July 1888) Van Gogh described to his brother t w o drawings he had recently made and s e n t . They have been identified ast w o of aseries of highly worked drawings of the wheatfields outside the t o w n of Arles (known as La Crau), La Cram seen from Montmajoar (July 1888; Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum Vincent v a n Gogh) and Landscape near Montmajow with train from Arles to Organ, 10‐13 July 1888 [29]. These drawings represent a panoramic View of an e x t e n s‑ ive plain, seen from a high vantage point so that the viewer is made to look down and across fields, each differentiated by the system of graphic marks used to indicate varying textures of the crops, punctuated by clumps of trees and cottages.19 This construction of a complex, hierar‑ chical pictorial space reworks that type of seventeenth‐century Dutch landscape painting, the panorama, typified either by the grandiose large‑ scale paintings of De Koninck or by the m o r e intimate scale of Ruysdael’s many views of the bleaching fields n e a r Haarlem, known asthe Haar‑ lemtjes, for instance View of Haarlem with view of the bleaching fields

.2 93 VA N GOGH, 1888‐9

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at Overeen [30]. In the letter already quoted that refers directly to the Ruysdael character of the landscape near Arles, Van Gogh wrote: J’ai un nouveau motif en train, des champs a perte de vue verts et jaunes, que j’ai déja deux fois dessiné et que je recommence en tableau, absolument comme Salomon de Koninck, tu sais l’éleve de Rembrandt, qui faisait les immenses campagnes plates. (I have anew motif in hand, fields green and yellow asfar asthe eye can see, which I have twice drawn and which I ambeginning asapainting, absolutely like SalomondeKoninck,you know the pupilof Rembrandtwho made the vast levelplains.) (LT 496)20

The crucial problem is how to match the division of the flat canvas into aseries of horizontal bands with the three‐dimensional space of the pictured world that m u s t be initially translated by perspective systems into planes and then coloured to achieve the necessary sense of recession and hence depth. The key question for landscape painting is the han‑ dling of the middle ground. In contrast to classical Italianate landscape formulae ‐ with staffage in the foreground and repomsoir trees opening on to aluminous middle ground, often with the device of aretreating river suggestingrecession,culminatingin ablue‐tinteddistance‐ Ruysdael enlarged the sky, tipped up the foreground, filled it with agricultural activities and took the middle ground to the horizon where he set the silhouette of at o w n ‐ houses,municipalbuildings and church signifying its political and economic order. Enormous subtlety in colour and sug‑ gestion of weather and atmosphere pictorially sustained alandscape that was, in fact, an image of a social system. In the case of De Koninck’s panoramic landscape, the sense of recession was created by ahigh fore‑ groundviewpoint and avast sweep of landdissolvingunder strong light into its infinite distances. In the paintings of Drenthe,Van Goghpaintedbands of greenery, and

sky, with acottage or afigure piercing the division between them. He was unable to grasp how this horizontal emphasis necessary to‘the con‑ struction of landscape would become atmospheric and thus perspec‑ tival because he could n o t create amiddle distance or understand how seventeenth‐century Dutchpainters hadmanagedtheirs through the radical foreshortening and enlarged skies. By 1888,through Impressionistuse of indexicalbrushwork ‐ each type of stroke suggesting the growthpattern and shape of the thing painted ‐ and sharp colour contrasts, Van Gogh had found away round these impossible pictorial models and seemed able to apply anew system to produce aschematised representationof a worked and inhabited landscape that could correspond n o t to its own socio-economic order, but to the aestheticised and idealised vision of patriciate Holland. To accomplish this, however, hehad had to do abit of mixingand matching. Insteadof the lowviewpoint usedby Ruysdael, Van Goghhas sat himselfonthe hills above the plainbeneaththe walls of Montmajour like aDe Koninck ‐ one of the places I did photograph on my 1975 trip. He combined elements from the contents of his musée imaginaire ‐ Ruysdael and De Koninck and Hobbema ‐ with Monet, Pissarroand even Cézanne (hard‐edged,red‐roofedProvencalfarmhouses).21 An Arlesian street scene, like that shown in The yellow house, could

just about beaccommodated to the mode of seventeenth-century t o w n ‑ scapes. Arles was asmallish but growing t o w n with some industry, yet lying snugly in the surrounding wheatfields. It is tempting to compare the relation of this t o w n to its agricultural environs to the kinds of

31]

185

95 VA N GOGH, 1888‐9

1888

juxtaposition that occur in other Dutchpaintings, for instance the views aCross the fields to Haarlem,sooftenpaintedby Ruysdael. Indeedsuch a landscape formula and the relations it represents do come to mind when looking at Van Gogh’s paintings and drawings of Arles seen from outside in the fields. Despite the signs of modernindustry and the railway line in apainting like Arles seen from the wheatfields [31], the placingof the harvestingactivities in the foreground and the towers and buildings of the t o w n on ahigher plane in the background reworks the sequence of country and t o w n in their relative places in the pictorial space typical in the Haarlemtjes of Ruysdael.22 From the viewing posi‑ tion Van Gogh chose to draw this scene, the uneasy edge where t o w n meets country, which had been so difficult and confused when he lived in the expanding city of The Hague, is here simply elided. The railway line provides aclear boundary and the pictorial ordering to which Van Gogh has subjected the t o w n of Arles and its surrounding countryside locates the t o w n in aposition of dominance and guardianship over the fertile fields soactively harvested beneath its spires and chimneys.

Van Gogh’s use of the genres and modes of seventeenth‐century Dutch art in 1888‐9 has been recognised by other scholars, though differently interpreted. In his article ‘Van Gogh en de zeventiende eeuw’, Hans Jaffé has accounted for the instances of comparison in landscape, t o w n ‑ scape, portrait and seascape by arguing that both Van Gogh and the seventeenth‐century Dutch School can be labelled realist.23 His essay concluded: ‘Vincent never abandoned the realism that sprang from the same r o o t as that of the masters of the seventeenth century. Instead he gave it added meaning.’24 In support of his argument Jaffé quotes extensively from Van Gogh’s correspondence with EmileBernardin the summer of 1888. In these letters we find Van Gogh exhorting Bernard to study seventeenth‐century Dutch art and follow its example in his current work. V Or, les Hollandais, nous les voyons peindre des choses telles quelles, apparem‑ m e n t sans raisonner, comme Courbet peignait ses belles femmes nues. Ils font les portraits, paysages, natures‐mortes. On peut étre plus béte que cela et faire de plus grandes folies. Sinous nesavons que faire, m o n cher copain Bernard, alors nous faisons comme eux, si cen’était que pour ne pas laisser s’évaporer notre rare force cérébrale en de stériles meditations métaphysiques qui ne sauraient mettre en bocal le chaos, lequel est chaotique . . . Nous pouvons ‐ et voila ce que faisaient les Hollandais désespérémment malins pour les gens a systeme ‑ nous pouvons peindre un atome dechaos, un cheval, un portrait, ta grand’mere, les pommes, un paysage.

(Now we see that the Dutch paint things just asthey are, apparently without reasoning about it, just like Courbet painted his beautiful female nudes. They did portraits, landscapes, still‐lives. Well, one can be stupider than that and commit greater follies. If wedon’t know what to do, my dear comrade Bernard, then let’s do asthey did, if only n o t to let our rare intellectualpower evaporate in sterile metaphysical meditations which cannot possibly put the chaos into a goblet, aschaos is chaotic. . .. We can ‐ and this was done by the Dutcl ‑ men who are sodesperately naughty in the eyes of the people with asystem ‑ we can paint anatom of chaos, ahorse, aportrait, your grandmother, apples, a landscape.) (LB 14)

It seems that we have a clear statement in this passage of what the seventeenth‐century Dutchrepresentedfor Van Gogh.They are painters of things,places and peoplethrough still lives,portraits and landscapes.25 They paint from models and motifs through certain pictorial formulae. As such they can becalled naturalists in oppositionto other, more alleg‑ oricalor symbolic,modes.Van Goghpresents the example offered bythe seventeenth‐century Dutch(for himself and Bernard in 1888) in opposi‑ tion to metaphysical mediations and ‘les gens asysteme’. These phrases refer to the debates and competingpositions current in Parisianart circles, the rationalist Synthetic systems of Seurat, the religious speculations and

97 VA N G O G H , 1888‐9

interest in Italian primitives of Bernard, the Baudelairian fantasies of Degas.This poses acrucial question. How could Van Gogh accommod‑ ate seventeenth‐century Dutch art asamodel for modern artists within the current vanguard’s debates andpractices? Perhaps they offered avalid model for apractice based on models and motifs from life, asopposed to amore ‘abstracted’ approach.26 This would suggest Van Gogh was re‑ asserting a‘realist’ stance. Seventeenth-century Dutch art offered away for painters to approach the chaos of the changing world, provided a means through art of ordering one’s perceptions of it,situatingoneself in relations to people, things and places. But, asI have argued, in 1888‐9 Van Gogh was functioning in profoundly displaced and imaginary rela‑ tions to people, things and places in away which radically undermines any such claim for him asa realist. He was, I would suggest, an art historicist atthis point,working with aborrowed world, asecond‐hand grasp on arhetorical ‘reality’ mediated by painting d’autrefois ‐ from another time. The Van Gogh‐Bernard correspondence of 1888‐9 provides us with

the most lengthy and extensive discussions of this difficult paradox. It was from the Bernard letters and conversations with that artist that, in I890, Albert Aurier was to draw ‐ in preparationof his critical account of Van Gogh’s work ‐ his ideas about Van Gogh’s eccentric modernity and his relationto his seventeenth‐century Dutchpredecessors.Aurier wrote of Van Gogh as‘ce compatriote et non indigne descendant des vieux maitres deHollande’” (this compatriot and n o t unworthy descendant of the Old Masters of Holland). This comment echoes what Gauguin, cited above, also clearly stated.

Withdrawal and consolidation in the homeland of art: towards ‘a purer Nature’ When hemovedto Arles Van Gogh attempted to produce aprogramme for his o w n modernart practice by forging asynthesis betweenthe ideas and procedures he had brought with him from Holland and acareful, selective reworkingof materials and theories hehadencountered during his t w o years in the French capital. In aletter of August 1888, to his brother, hemade the following statement of his position: Il y a seulement que je trouve que ce que j’ai appris a Paris s’en W, et que je reviens a mes idées qui m’étaient venues a la campagne, avant de connaitre les impressionistes. Et je serais peu étonné, si sous peu les impressionnistes trouveraient aredire sur mafagon defaire, qui aplutot été fécondée par les idées deDelacroix, que par les leurs. Car aulieu dechercher arendre exactement ce que j’ai devant mes yeux, je me sers de la couleur plus arbitrairement pour m’exprimer fortement.

(It isonly that what I learnt in Paris isleavingme, and I amreturningto the idea I have in the country before I knew the impressionists. And I should n o t be surprised if the impressionists soon find fault with my way of working, because it has been fertilised by Delacroix’s ideas rather than by theirs. Because instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes, I use colour more arbitrarily, in order to express myself more forcibly.) (LT 520)

By the summer of 1888, therefore, Van Gogh claimed that he had retrieved many of the elements of the position he had adopted in his final months in Holland. He recalled his adherence to the work of both Millet and Delacroix, reasserted his ideas about the relative autonomy of art over the motifs from life or Nature which, none the less, still remained the point of departure -‐ the source of representation ‐ and rehearsed his convictions that colour was the significant means for pro‑ ducing an effective artistic statement.28 The reappearance of these ideas did n o t constitute aregression. He was proposing them asone possible solution to the crisis in the new art centred in Paris. In another letter datable to about 18 September 1888, Van Gogh returned to the issues raised in LT 520, but he n o w made clear his relationship to contem‑ porary French painting, explaining why heremained aligned with the painters despite the fact that contact with them had neither effaced nor replaced the models and conceptual framework for his practice which had been established prior to 1886.

Que fait Seurat?Jen’oserais pas lui montrer les études déja envoyées, mais celles detournesols et des cabarets et des jardins, je voudrais qu’il les voie; je réfléchis souvent a son systeme et toutefois je ne le suivrai pas du tout, mais lui est coloriste originale etc’est la meme chose pour Signac, mais aun autre degré . . . Mais moi ‐ je le dis franchement ‐ je reviens plutot aceque je cherche avant de venir aParis.

(What is Seurat doing? I should n o t dare to show him the studies already sent, but the ones of the sunflowers,the cabarets and the gardens, I would likehimto see those. I often think of his method, although I do n o t follow it atall; but he is anoriginal colorist, and Signac, too, though to adifferent degree . .. But I myself‐ I tell you frankly ‐ amreturning more to what I was lookingatbefore I came to Paris.) (LT 539)

This letter confirms Van Gogh’s acknowledgement of Seurat’s import‑ ance on the avant‐garde Parisian art scene.29 Van Gogh had visited his studio on the day he left Paris for Arles and referred to him in many letters from Provence, expressing his wish to make an exchange with Seurat for one of his paintings (LT 468), or to persuade Seurat to join him and others in their scheme for aco‐operative society for artists (LT 551). Moreover, this letter suggests that some of the urbanmotifs which Van Gogh had been painting in Arles, such asthe public gardens with

99 V A N GOGH, 1888‐9

their bourgeois promenaders,” or the cabaret or café scenes,31 represent a greater concern with the issues raised by Seurat ‐ and hence m e t r o ‑ politan modernity ‐ than Van Gogh was prepared to admit. His refer‑ ence to the paintings of the sunflowers,32 painted in intense yellows, indicates the area of common interest in a desire to achieve intense colour through amore Synthetic” and systematic application of the laws of colour combination and contrast following the example set by the work of Eugene Delacroix. It was this combination of areas of general agreement and divergence

which enabled Van Gogh to participate personally in French vanguard painting while, ideologically and formally, hereverted to the ideas that hehad brought with him to Paris. His painting after 1888 continued to be aseries of experiments undertaken in the search for aviable modern art practice in which heenjoyed no greater certainty than in the varying paths hehad trodden in the same pursuit during his years in Holland. The difference is that hewas no longer working in isolation. He could situate himself aspart of anartistic community, aself‐confessed sense of the context for which hewas producing, amore specific notion of the publics for whom hewas working. In attempting to produce aworkable space and practice for himself within these confusing and contradictory conditions, Van Gogh had to negotiate the options on offer. He called on his o w n past practice, asmuchason current trends in Parisianpaint‑ ing represented above all by Seurat and his circle. In addition helooked carefully at the experiments being undertaken by Paul Gauguin in Pont Aven in Brittany, and by Emile Bernard, who was poised insecurely between the positions of Seurat and Gauguin.34 It was with these t w o artists, Bernard and Gauguin, that Van Gogh

established a working contact, corresponding with both of them and hoping to set up ajoint studio either in Arles or Pont Aven.35 They t o o had Withdrawn from Paris,partly because the capital was t o o expensive a place to live for artists of limited means. But, of equal importance, although for differing and complex reasons, was the fact that the sites of Paris and its banlieues were no longer available asthe spaces or subjects for their representations. A letter of about 18June 1889 provides a revealingexposition of how Van Gogh retrospectively conceived of this move away from Paris. Lorsquependant quelque temps tu auras vue ces deux études, ainsi que celle du lierre, mieux que par des paroles je pourrai peut~étre re donner une idée des choses dont Gauguin, Bernard et moi o n t quelquefois causé et qui nous o n t préoccupé; cen’est pas un retour auromantique ou indes idées religieuses, non. Cependant enpassant par leDelacroix,davantage que cela paraisse,par lacouleur et un dessin plus volontaire que l’exactitude trompe‐l’oeil, on exprimerait une nature decampagne plus pure que la banlieue, les cabarets deParis . . . Que cela

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F R A M I N G F R A N C E 1 0 0 1 0 1

existe ou n’existe pas, nous le laissons de coté, mais nous croyons que la nature 5 s’étend audela de St. Ouen. (When you have looked at these t w o studies for some time, and that of the ivy aswell, it will perhaps give you some idea, better than words could, of the things that Gauguin and Bernardand I sometimes used to talk about, and which we’ve thought about a good deal; it is n o t a return to romantic or religious ideas, no. Nevertheless, by going by Delacroix, more than is apparent, by col‑ our and a more spontaneous drawing than delusive precision, one could express apurer nature ofa countryside compared with the suburbs [1a banlieue] and cabarets of Paris . . . Whether it exists or n o t is something we may leave aside, but wedo believe that nature extends beyond St. Ouen.) (my italics) (LT 595)36 The phrase ‘apurer nature of acountryside’ invites comparison with

the terms in which Van Gogh had represented his move from another city,The Hague,to the ruralprovinces of Drenthe and Brabant in 1883‐ . 4 in which he contrasted the calm, ordered peacefulness of the country ; to the bustling confusions of the modern city. However, the final sen‐ l tences of this quotation indicate acrucial difference in his conception of , the countryside in 1888‐9,for there is n o w real doubt about the possib- 1 ility of such aplace of purity and peace in reality.Although Van Gogh’s conception of the ‘country’ was always dislocated, between 1881 and 1885 he had attempted to produce compelling images of contempor‑ ary social conditions of change in rural society. By 1888 Van Gogh’s engagement with the social and historical realities of the modern world was less overt and secure. The world of art increasingly became for him a substitute, an imaginary and alternative world which could provide consolation in face of the difficult social realities in which heno longer ; believed art could directly intervene.37 This ‘withdrawal’ operated on anumber of levels: practical and, more

significantly, ideological. Van Gogh physically removed himself from Paris, from the moderncity, and retreatedto amore agriculturally based area of France.38 This move, however, signifies a refusal to engage with the modern city asthe subject of his art practice. He was unwilling to take on the issues soinsistently opened up by Seurat’s work ‐ the awk‑ ward unavoidable complexities of the social relations of the metropolis, the ‘classement sociale’ (socialclassification) of which one reviewer spoke when discussingSunday afternoononthe Grandejatte (1884‐6;Chicago, Art Institute)”Yet the place to which Van Gogh went in 1888 was n o t a rural alternative to the urban environment. Arles was a substantial town. The countryside ‐ the agricultural economy ‐ was asmuch in process of modernising change. It t o o was a site of class conflict and new economic relations. In a sense Van Gogh had discovered this for himself when hepreviously moved from city to country. But in 1888 it was n o t the real countryside, changed or unchanging, to which Van .

VA N GOGH, 1888‐9

Gogh retreated. Provence was refracted, or rather, translated through a range of images, memories, associations. He laid upon it meanings dictated by this evolving ideology of artistic withdrawal which, I would suggest, indexes Van Gogh, paradoxically, to what would become the preferred tendency of bourgeois modernism after the t u r n of the cen‑ tury; art functioning asasurrogate in face of the complexities of social modernity with whose representation all but afew refused to engage. Provence represented an artistic idea, the idea of the South, exotic

and historically associatedwith earlier developments towards acompens‑ atory and displacing modern art: orientalism. In 1834 Delacroix had travelled to Morocco and was much affected in his use of colour by the encounter with the light and the exotic Arab and Jewish inhabitants. The South had been the home of the Marseillais painter Adolphe Monticelli whose ric-hly coloured works Van Gogh had discovered in Paris.40 Cezanne, born in Aix‐en‐Provence, hadrecently returnedto live there: Paul Gauguin had travelled to Martinique and Panama in 1887 and brought back paintings which exhibited a new richness of colour inspired by the tropical, colonial landscape.41Van Gogh’s ‘South’ was a fiction constructed from these artistic models, these supposed pioneers of anew paintingbased onrichluxurious colour ‐ much asDrenthehad served earlier asanother Barbizon‐ but with this difference: ‘Barbizon’ had been areal and particular place which the artists who worked there represented in landscape and figure paintings; whereas that South, sig‑ nified by Delacroix, Monticelli and Gauguin, exemplified amanner of painting, especially the use of colour, which had at best an oblique and more often an entirely mythical relationship to the Mediterranean or sub‐equatorial places which ostensibly inspired these artists’ interests in and use of colour. This eclectic construct, the South, was further extended (and further

removed from the specifics of time and place) by being assimilated to Van Gogh’s imagined idea of the Orient, of Japan. But this ‘Japan’ was itself composed of images whether from the Japanese coloured prints of which hehad become soavid acollector in 1886‐8,or from the descrip‑ tions of an insensitive French tourist to the East, Pierre Loti, whose novels such asMadame CbrysantbémeprovidedVan Goghwith aWest‑ ern view of Japanese life and landscape.42 Literary associations from other novelists like Alphonse Daudet, who had written about Tarascon (near Arles) and Africa, also mediated Van Gogh’s notions of the South in addition to the poetic connotations he found in Provence ‐ but from another epoch and country. He imagined Petrarch,Dante, Boccaccio in Provence.43 Provencewas thus repeatedly andvaryingly translated into representa‑

tions and ideals of Van Gogh’s enlarged muse’e imaginaire, asexotic,

F R A M I N G FRANCE 1 0 2 103

oriental, poetic, intimate.44 It was an imaginary space. However, many of the disparate elements of this mythical construct were secured and unified by the n o w dominant theme of Van Gogh’s artistic practice ‑ colour, which was the signifier of an aesthetic order distinct from both the social and the natural‐ represented by the terms ‘city’ and ‘country’ which hadserved asthe polaritieswithinwhichVan Goghhadattempted . to situate himself asanartist between 1880 and 1888.By 1888 Van Gogh proposed the application of the laws of colour in painting asaway of producing modernism in art (anotion to which hehad been initiated in Nuenenby his readingand which hadbeenreinforcedby his encounters with contemporary French artls). He was to argue that the future of modern art lay in the expansion of the possibilities of colour ‐ that is, in . the possibility of art asaparallel, and consolatory other, to the social real. This idea had to bereconciled with the fact that Van Gogh, still | hanging on to his slight understanding of mid‐century naturalism rep‑ resented by Millet and Barbizon, still believed that he should base his painting and drawing on models and motifs drawn from ‘life’. He was thus faced with the need to discover a place which could

furnish the motifs and models for his work ‐ he could n o t and would . n o t invent ‐ but which could be justified within a painting practice whose main representational means and signifying resource was colour, and that was n o t localcolour butcolour asanindependent connotational system. The new sites for modern art had to make sense in terms of an artistic practice thus constituted. The South signified ‘colour’ for Van Gogh but never at the level of its actuality ‐ where the hot sun bleaches away the colour. Whether or n o t Provence was in fact aplace of colour, abase for colourist painting, was incidental. Van Gogh could convince himself that it was because he subsumed the realplace in which helived and worked to this complex, ideological space hehad invented. It was also a‘utopian’ ideal ‐ ‘Que cela existe ou n’existe pas, nous le laissons i de coté’ (Whether it exists or not, is something we can leave aside) he | had written in LT 595. . Unlike the move from city to country in 1883, in 1888 the reality :

of the countryside was displaced by the idea of asite for the modern art ‑ of colour, thus represented.He n o t only enteredfully into a‘homelandof ! pictures’ but invented ahomeland for pictures: aplace where art could be made, n o t a place of which art would be the representation. The phrase ‘homeland of pictures’ is from aletter of 1880 (LT 133) in which 1 Van Gogh had first announced his intention to become an artist and intimated atendency to conceive of art asan ‘other’ imaginary world. i The notion of an artistic ‘homeland’ returned to his letters in 1888, occurring in an important statement in a letter to Emile Bernard of October that year in which the increasingly utopian character of Van

02 103 VA N GOGH, 1888‐9

Gogh’s dream of ahomelandfor the new art in the current conditions of uncertainty and retreat is made plain. He wrote, Or moi qui ai un pressentiment d’un nouveau monde qui crois certes a la possibilité d’une immense renaissance de l’art. Qui crois que cet art nouveau aura les tropiques pour patrie. (As for me, with my presentiment of a new world, I firmly believe in the possibility of animmense renaissance of art. Whoever believes in this new art will have the tropics for ahomeland.) (LB 19a)

The tropics of which Van Gogh spoke here were an extension of the imaginary, orientalist idea of the South. It signifies, however, the emer‑ gence of anew feature in Van Gogh’s ideological responses to contem‑ porary society and ideologicalconceptions of the possibilities of art and practice within it. It represents the need for another space, a space of otherness, an imaginary place, of colour, order and comfort ‐ a ‘patrie’ for artists in exile.46 Van Gogh’s vanguardism, by 1885 reactionary and conservative, solidified into apositionof artistic disengagement from the real conditions of modern society. The homeland of modern art would n o t beaspecific geographical location,but rather aninventedcondition, produced from the ideology of retreat from history: an evacuation from involvement through art to an involvement in art asa substitute ‐ a surrogate world. One final case study of the most ambitious yet disastrous painting ‑

tableau in the academic sense ‐ will finally explain Gauguin’s suggestion that the Bible has to come into Van Gogh’s idiosyncratic configuration of modernismin, and yet radically and doubly distanced from, the land‑ scape of France.

The fantasy of consolation: modern art asa surrogate world In June 1889, Van Gogh painted what is known asStarry night [16]. It would seem to bealandscape painting based in the countryside outside Van Gogh’s window at St. Paul de Mausole, St. Rémy. It shows us a village, with tile‐roofed cottages nestling around a church, near olive groves lyingin the lee of mountainous hills under adramatic sky with a sun and moon and eleven stars. It was, however, no such thing.” It was for Van Gogh his demonstration ‐ a manifesto painting ‐ of

modernart, andin its attemptedinterventionin the makingof modernart in the Parisian avant‐garde, this painting would also indicate that mod‑ ern art was precisely to be‘religious’: asurrogate world of consolation. One of the realproblems for art history is the surprisingfact that dur‑

ingthe summer of 1888,but months after his arrival atArles, Van Gogh planned to make areligious painting with overt biblical subject‐matter

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based upon traditional iconography: Christ with anangel in the Garden of Olives. The painting was begun in June, but the artist scraped off the canvas. The attempt was resumedin August andSeptember andVan Gogh described it to Emile Bernard as‘une toile importante’ (LB 19). Again the canvas was scraped and Van Gogh wrote to his brother:

J’ai pour la deuxiéme fois gratté une étude de Christ avec l’ange dans le jardin d’oliviers. Parce qu’ici je vois oliviers vrais, mais jeneveux ouplutot je neveux pas n o n plus le peindre sans modéles, mais j’ai cela entete avec dela couleur, la nuit étoilée, la figure du Christ bleue, les bleus les plus puissants,et l’angejaune citron rompu. Et tous les violets depuis unpourpre rouge sangjusqu’a lacendre dans le paysage.

(For the second time I have scraped off astudy of Christ with the angel in the Garden of Olives. You see, I can see real olives here, but I cannot or rather I will n o t paint any more without models; but I have the thing in my head with the colours, a starry night, the figure of Christ in blue, all the strongest blues, and the angel blended Citron‐yellow. And every shade of violet, from ablood‑ red purple to ashen, in the landscape.) (LT 540)

Drawing upon his knowledge of Corot, Delacroix and, above all, prints byRembrandt,mediatedbythe positioningof the latterby Charles Blanc asthe most modernof religious painters through his use of lumin‑ ous contrasts of black and white, Van Gogh’s project still seems an extraordinary move for anartist who iswondering what Seurat isdoing with nightclubs and pleasure gardens. This letter suggests one means Van Gogh could conceive in 1888 for reconciling atotally traditional and academic approach to a subject painting with what he had derived from his sojourn in Paris. A relatively rare iconography ‐ Christ in garden succoured by the angel appears only in the Gospel of St. Luke ‑ will be modernised by a colour scheme (Delacroix made simple) and a sympathetic landscape setting (Corot). Why the repeated destruction of the painting? Perhaps the eclectic

borrowing from Corot, Delacroix and Rembrandt appeared t o o direct; the sources almost plagiarised. Perhaps,after readingthe letters of Emile Bernard and Gauguin about the paintings they had competitively pro‑ ducedin August 1888,one ofwhich Gauguincalled ‘untableauréligieux’, known n o w asVision after the Sermon (1888; Edinburgh,NationalGal‑ lery of Scotland), Van Gogh had doubts about the viability and mod‑ ernity of religious painting with obvious biblical subject‐matter. The elements were asyet unresolved and would n o t be resolved until all figures disappeared and landscape won out. But a year later, his doubts had hardened into convictions and we

find Van Gogh bitterly attacking his erstwhile correspondents, Gauguin for his figurative version of Christ in the Garden of Olives (1889; West

04 105 VA N GOGH, 1888‐9

Palm Beach, National Gallery of Art), and especially Bernard for the latter’s painting Agony in the Garden, also known asChrist in Geth‑ semane [32]. Van Gogh (LT 614) denounced them asnightmares and added that it was the painter’s job n o t to dream but to think. He found their paintings archaic, stylised, abstracted. They lacked the ‘sentiment vrai des choSes’ (the true sentiment of real things); the phrase Theo van Goghused condemning Starry night (T 19). In aletter to EmileBernard written in the autumn of 1889,Van Goghproposed aradically different conception of a religious art that was based in the real and the poss‑ ible,namely through anew kind of landscapepainting. He described his o w n paintings of women pickingolives,Olivepicking (November 1889; New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art) and aView of storm‐struck trees, The garden ofSt.Paul’sHospital(October 1889; Essen,Folkwang Museum), aswell asawheatfield at sunrise, Landscape with rising sun (November 1889; Princeton, New Jersey, private collection). The last one was, heclaimed, aconsoling, luminous and peaceful motif. Jete parle de ces deux toiles, surtout alors dela premiere,pour te rappeler que pour dormer une impression d’angoisse, on peut chercher a le faire sans viser droit aujardin deGethsemane historique; que pour donner unmotif consolant et doux il n’est pas nécessaire de représenter les personnages du sermon sur la montagne.

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straight at the historic Garden of Gethsemane; and that it is n o t necessary to portray the characters of the Sermon on the Mount in order to produce a consoling and gentle motif.) (LB21)

In this letter we can detect a major shift. Landscape painting n o w replaces subject paintings with figurative compositions by paintings of things from the natural environment which are n o t in themselves the topic of the work. The pathetic fallacy of Romantic theories of landscape, which structured nineteenth‐century readings of the work of seventeenth‐century Dutchpainters likeRuysdael,allowedVan Goghto produce this concept of religious art based in landscape painting. Yet it is n o t landscape and especially n o t modernlandscape.That would imply the inhabited,man‐made,worked, social geography of moderncapitalist space of productionandconsumption. The premiss of Van Gogh’s argu‑ ment is tinged with agreat deal of Thomas Carlyle’s pantheistic concep‑ tion of Nature asaspiritual hieroglyph.Modernity ispresent only in the Protestant rejectionof Italianate and Catholic Christianiconography for the presentation of themes such assuffering, consolation and joy by a subjectivist representation of the imaginary construct ‘Nature’, which was Carlyle’s synonym for the divinity. The sun, moon, stars, trees, ripening wheat, grass become metaphors for asymbolically dense uni‑ verse that can bedeciphered with the appropriate lexicon. Between June 1888 and the autumn of 1889, Van Gogh’s position,

therefore, dramatically changed. Why? Competition and failure. In June 1889 Van Gogh wrote to his brother about t w o paintings, one of which is n o w called Starry night. Enfinj’ai un paysage avec des oliviers et aussi une nouvelle étude deciel étoilé. Tout enn’ayant pas vu les dernieres études ni deGauguinni deBernard, je suis assez persuadé que ces deux études,que jetecite, sont dans unsentiment parallele. (Enfin, I have a landscape with olive trees and a new study of a starry sky. Though I have n o t either Gauguin’s or Bernard’s last canvases, I ampretty well convinced that these last t w o studies I’ve spoken of are parallel in feeling.) (LT 595) In ignorance of the recent t u r n in both Gauguin’s and Bernard’s work

(he was only later to find o u t about their move into biblical iconography lambasted in the letter of autumn 1889 cited above), Van Gogh pre‑ sumed a continued consonance with his own. Starry night was a some‑ what belated reply to both these ‘comrades’, based on what he had understoodof their projects in late 1888,when Gauguin had encouraged him to put paintings together by assembling diverse elements from both the world o u t there and his own, already freighted memories.What Van Gogh meant by ‘sentiment parallele’ is elaborated in the subsequent passages of the letter which I have already quoted. This is the context

36 107 - V A N G O G H , 1888‐9 = w

for Van Gogh’s statement that he and his friends are n o t returning to romantic or religious ideas, but are passing by way of Delacroix, who stands for a use of heightened colour and arbitrary drawing to avoid illusionism and enhance effect. Although they all admire ‘Paris’ ‐ the Impressionists and their Neo‐Impressionist reinterpreters ‐ Gauguin, Bernard and Van Gogh are searching for ‘tout a u t r e chose’. This other thing ‐ the purer n a t u r e of the countryside ‐ may n o t really exist. In opposition to the social realities ‐ conflicts and confusions ‐ of the modern urban world in Paris, and its working‐class suburbs like St. Ouen ‐ the site of Seurats painting ‐ they are trying to produce la peinture plus consolante’ (the painting of consolation)

This phrase c a n n o t be understood without grasping its connotational freight within Van Gogh’s heavily art‐historicist discourse that had been elaborated in the letters to Emile Bernard in the summer of 1888. Rem‑ brandt, proposed by Charles Blanc as the sublime leader of the Dutch seventeenth‐century School and thus a model for a modern a r t that was unashamedly religious in sentiment, is in these letters represented asthe painter of luminous and consoling a r t . Thus this letter can be decoded to suggest that Van Gogh believed himself and his comrades in Pont Aven to be producing a religious a r t equivalent to what Van Gogh read, via nineteenth-century a r t historians like Blanc, in ‘Rembrandt’. Further on in this same letter, Van Gogh invokes Rembrandt directly: Isaacson et de Haan réussiront pas n o n plus peut‐étre, mais en Hollande ils o n t senti le besoin d’affirmer que Rembrandt faisait dela grande peinture et n o n pas du trompe l‘oeil, eux aussi sentaient a u t r e chose. (Isaacson and de Haan perhaps will n o t succeed any better. But in Holland they have felt the need to affirm that Rembrandt produced great painting and n o t trompe l’ceil; they also feel/sense something different.) ( LT 595)

Van Gogh thus argues: Gauguin, Bernard and he are painting things radically opposed to Paris as site and subject of modernist representa‑ tion. But they are n o t falling back into romanticism, Pissarro’s criticism of Monet and Renoir in the 18805. Equally, we m u s t add that they are n o t regressing to the positivism of Impressionism in the 18705. Beyond suburbs such asSt. Ouen and their sordid social realities, they will find a ‘purer n a t u r e of the countryside’. Borrowing the trees, hills, cottages and m o n u m e n t s of a world beyond the industrial bnnlz'ene, they will create a world that does n o t (and indeed could no longer) exist. Starry night is n o t a real Provencal landscape (a place), but it is a possible and imaginable ‘landscape’ (kind of painting). The Alpilles foothills that Van Gogh could see from his hospital windows, the cypresses and olives from the surrounding countryside, the cottages with their sharp‑ angled roofs, these draw upon a locality and its données provengnles,

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its regional givens, just asBernard and Gauguin had utilised ‘les données f\. n u ' 6 bretonnantes’ of Breton pardons and c o s t u m e s in their work in 1888. 1 But the scene is a ‘tableau’, an invented composition destined to signify o r, in academic terminology, to express consolation in the face of the . anxiety and heartbreak ‐ the loss of certainty and the securely remem- \“ bered ‐ created by modernity.

The complex genealogies of each of the elements of Starry night and their signification within Van Gogh’s eclectic discursive universe is far t o o dense a topic for this short chapter.48 The important fact here is, _ however, that the painting was illegible to its first audience for the very excess of this idiosyncratic connotational system. The painting was read n o t asan Agony, but asan Angelus; n o t asa modernised Rembrandt but as a regressive bit of rural nostalgia harking back to Millet.

Gauguin and Bernard saw it as an overagitated and hastily painted landscape ‐ just a village by moonlight, in Theo van Gogh’s dismiss‐ “ m y ive phrase. Starry night did n o t and could n o t signify. The letters Van Gogh w r o t e in 1889 denouncing Gauguin and Bernard w e r e his angry ff response both to their misrecognition of his work aspart of acontinuing ‘j' dialogue with them and to his discovery of the radical divergence that i for had opened up between his concept of modern a r t and theirs. The paint‐ 35 ing was a decisive failure in its avant-gardist c o n t e x t . Yet its underlying ;\ strategies and resources can be seen to have sustained Van Gogh’s n e x t 5‘- ‘ j ; moves in his work: painting ‘Memories of the North’ and copies.49 The 33] continuity lies in the underlying tropes of memory and a r t historicism L a z ; that I suggest frame Van Gogh’s n o t seeing Provence.

In May 1890, Van Gogh produced a painting called The resurrection of Lazarus [33] in which he made use of a motif from an etching of the same name by Rembrandt [34], indeed the etching Charles Blanc m o s t celebrated. On receiving aprint after the etching, Van Gogh commented that it made him think of what Charles Blanc had said about it. Blane praised the dramatic composition, the expressive physiognomies, the eloquent gestures and the disposition of light and shade that served to render a miraculous scene and convey the emotional responses amongst its witnesses. F o r Blanc, Chiaroscuro was n o t merely a technical pro‑ cedure; it was the signifying and affective medium. The fall of light stands for the life‐renewing power of the central, divine figure. Baroque composition becomes modern in the humanitarian vision of the Christ reflected in the surrounding figures’ faces and gestures. Van Gogh’s somewhat simplified reading of Blane allowed him to imagine that he could incorporate and update the Rembrandt project by substituting complementary colour combinations for the Dutch master’s Chiaroscuro. Van Gogh’s hope that a system of colour could generate a comparable 34] semiotic response was, however, avain one. ‘La combinaison de couleurs L a z ;

8 109 ‘ VA N GOGH, 1888‐9

33] Vincent van Gogh, The resurrection of Lazarus, 1890

34] Rembrandt (after), The resurrection of Lazarus

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ainsiparleraitpar elle-méme delameme chose qu’exprime leclair‐obscur del’eau‐forte’ (The combination of colours thus will by itself speak of the same things asthe Chiaroscuro of the etching), he w r o t e in LT 632. Darkness and light have huge and widely disseminated metaphorical loads in Western, Christian culture. But does violet? or pink and green stripes? or yellow? Can one artist’s colour mythology do the same job asaculturally coded tradition? Most art historians describe Van Gogh’s painting as a copy of

Rembrandt’s etching. It is not . Van Gogh has lifted several figures but he has made radical changes. The figures are placed in alandscape. Van Gogh has invented a wheatfield and hills which are n o t part of the original etching. He has relocated the Rembrandtean figures outside, and n o t inside, the cave. He has changed the time of day, or at least defined one for the scene. The event does n o t take place in adarkened cave at night but in the morning with a huge luminous sunrise. Most significantly, Van Gogh has omitted the figure of Christ. This omission dispossesses the work of its immediate religious anchorage. Some might argue that the sun substitutes for Christ ‐ apantheistic replacement of dubious theological justification, however. While the sun can and does help life on earth, it cannot besaid miraculously to restore life to the dead. Moreover, the sun is n o t even painted asthe source of light in the painting and thus asthe sign of miraculous power of life over death. In his essay on Van Gogh in January 1890, the critic Albert Aurier pro‑ posed aheliomythic allegory in Van Gogh’s work to explain the recur‑ rence of the sun in hispaintings.But Van Goghwas n o t asunworshipper and did n o t entertainmysticalbeliefs in itspower.A moreprosaic analysis of the theme of the sun in his written work suggests that the sun was the sign of the South, and the South was the homeland of colourist painters and, therefore, the sun was meant to signal the modernising of art by Van Gogh. Notareferenceto the southernclimate, the sun was usedto recodeVan

Gogh’s borrowings from artists of the previous generations ‐ Delacroix and Millet‐-sothat hecouldpalpably signalhis own, modernisingmove on those he, none the less, had to evoke in order to sustain his Own insertion into their tradition, in order to appropriate their legitimation. For instance, the sun in apaintingof the sower references, defers to and then differs from the grey tonalism of Millet who made the theme of sowing his o w n signature. Thus, while putting in the sun asthe laconic sign of Van Gogh’s

totally non‐esoteric meaning system that runs along a daisy chain of sun, South, colour, Millet, Delacroix and his o w n landscape paintings, Van Gogh negatedthe meaningof the Rembrandtprint of The resurrec‑ tion of Lazarus entirely. For without the Christ figure, the religious

3 1 1 1 ‘ VA N GOGH, 1888‐9

subject‐matter ceases to make any sense at all. How is Lazarus being raised? To what are the women reacting? I would like to suggest that these figures are n o t meant to function asfigurative and expressive ele‑ ments in apainting about the miracle of resurrection. They are ciphers, citations. They invoked ‘Rembrandtness’. The use of violet‐yellow colour complementaries signal ‘Delacroix’ and the sun ‘Millet’. This is what the painting is about in away comparable to aprevious manifesto painting produced when Starry night’s predecessor, The potato enters, also failed to belegible: Open Bible,extinguishedcandle andnovel([17], 1885;Amsterdam,RijksmuseumVincent van Gogh).Van Gogh’spainting ‘after Rembrandt’ was n o t acopy and it was n o t atranslation. It was a manifesto ‐ a message to Gauguin and Bernard. In the letter he had written to denounce Bernard’s nightmarish medievalising abstraction of religious art, Van Gogh stated that instead of painting historic Gardens of Gethsemane or Sermons on the Mount, one could express sensations and hence modern, universally accessible (the source for such ideas is the art criticism of Thoré) meanings inherent in such stories by means of landscape and colour. A consoling motif could beaffected by painting a wheatfield at sunrise, ascene filled with warmth and light from the gold of the wheat to the gold of the sun. Pointing its hoped‐for viewers towards Delacroix and Rembrandt,

the painting also leads us back to Starry night which had been such a disappointing failure asanexemplar of his new, surrogate religious art, based upon landscape, based upon the imaginary confection of ‘a purer Nature’, with its revelations of celestial illumination in the darkness of night ‐ another citation from the sky of aRembrandtprint.The Lazarus paintingpointedly employs adifferent, more didactic strategy. Borrowed motifs, coded signs, intertextual references become the basis for articu‑ lating n o t the particular meanings to befound in any one of the works by Van Gogh or other artists, but for an artistic agenda that negates religious art in order to generate amodern art that will succeed to its place and function: aconsolation in the face of the impossible complex‑ ity and social contradictions of modernity. The homeland of pictures in which Van Gogh had attempted to

situate himselfwhen hefirst decided in 1880 to try o u t the professionof art‐making and intervene in the social world of communication through art was dramatically transformed within ten years. Paintings themselves purported to beaworld, to offer access to animaginary and surrogate world of art, displaced from engagement with the pressing realities of society and history. Van Gogh had dreamt of another Brabant, which was accessed through art, another social order, calm and serene like that which he imagined from paintings of the time seventeenth‐century patriciate Hollandto have been.By the later 18805 hewas stilldreaming,

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this time of another Provence, another South, which was his dreamed‐of, childhood and art‐history‐book Brabant transformed by colour. Within anaesthetic vocabulary that ran the gamut from orientalism to romanti‑ cismvia art historicism,nestledadistinct ideologicalpositionwhich was ultimately reactionary and conservative for all its utopian fantasies. Van Gogh constantly looked back to animage of anolder, hierarchical and traditional social order which hecould imaginatively access by progress‑ ively learning to make paintings that functioned aesthetically to rein‑ state that world’s social logic. But it was an impossible project and it culminated in the perverse combination, after 1889, of anart of memory and the direct citation: the painted copy or translation. Van Gogh’s artistic history is distinct and separate from that of the

Parisian avant-garde to which he is so often mistakenly assimilated. In going to Arles, it looks asif hewas following the trend set by Gauguin and Bernard in Brittany. Van Gogh was not, however, just another tourist in, or coloniser of, regional difference. He was a conservative Dutchman abroad asan artist, ideologically adrift in the challenging conditions of capitalist modernity. Yet, in his retreat from the modern world, signified by Paris and its metropolitan tropes represented by Seurat, he, none the less, found his way to the path of bourgeois mod‑ ernism and into the aesthetically autonomous and imaginary world of art assurrogate and consolation. In n o t seeing Provence, or seeing its fields and hills only asthe support for a world that he wanted to be, if n o t true, still possible, he disengaged from France in all its peculiar modernity ‐ urban aswell asrural‐ and herevealed the weakness of his grasp on the project of modernism that had momentarily dominated in Paris from 1862 to 1886.When you look closely at these paintings, you just don’t know what you are seeing and, most of the time, they give you little sense of what they meant to the artist who painted them. The trouble is that because Van Gogh’s twentieth‐century viewers are tour ‑ ists, and because we travel with his images aspart of our ideological baggage, we think we see Provence when we are n o t seeing it at all. We see ‘Van Gogh’ and the travel companies know it when they realise the potentialof sellingtheir locality throughhis associations and what were, ultimately, his radical misrepresentations.

Notes 1 An example of this kind of project isJean PaulClébert and PierreRichard’s, Van Gogh and die Provence, Marburg, Hitzeroth, 1989. Detailed identification of locations in Provence painted and drawn by Van Gogh are to befound in t w o volumes by Ronald Pickvance, Van Gog/9 in Aries and Van Gogh in Auwers and St. Remy,New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1984 and 1986respectively.

113 VA N GOGH, 1888‐9

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DeanMacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, New York, Schocken Books and London, Macmillan Press Ltd., 1976. For adiscussion of MacCannell’s paradigm of tourism and modernity in its relation to modern art, see Griselda Pollock, Avant‐Garde Garnhits: Gender and the Colour of Art History, London,Thames 86Hudson, 1992. Fred Orton and I discussed this ‘avant‐garde gambit’ in our ‘Les Données bretonanntes: la prairie de représentation’ [1980], reprinted in Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock,Avant‐Gardes andPartisansReviewed,Manchester,Manches‑ ter University Press, 1996. Marseille, the only other city than Paris,hadacommune in 1870 and the agricul‑ tural workers of the region were politically active and determinedly on the left during the Third Republic. During the 18805 the peasantry of Provence was quite militant,and becameinvolvedin marxistpolitics asaresult of the economic crises between 1871and 1914.The decline of the old rural economy in Provence led to growing support for socialist solutions. See Tony Judt, Socialism in Pro‑ vence, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1979. See Nicholas Green, The Spectacle of Nature, Manchester, Manchester Univer‑ sity Press, 1990 for anelaborate analysis of the formation of this concept and its relation to bourgeois culture within which landscape painting functioned asa significant instance. Michael Jacobs, The Good Life, Oxford, Phaidon Press, 1985; see also Nina Liibbren,Artists’ Colonies in Europe,Universityof Leeds,Ph.D.thesis, 1996,for anextensive analysis of the phenomenon. All references to Van Gogh’s letters are from The Complete Letters of Vin‑ cent van Gogh, London, Thames 86Hudson, 1959 (English translation), and Verzamelde Brieven van Vincent van Gogh, Amsterdam and Antwerp, Wereld‑ Biblioteek, 1973 (originaltext in DutchandFrench).Quotationshavebeenchecked against facsimile copies of the original letters (LT=letter to Theo van Gogh, the artist’s brother; LW to his sister Wilhelmina van Gogh; LR to the Dutchpainter Anton van Rappard; LB to the French artist Emile Bernard; T by Theo van Gogh ‐ numbering is identical in both sources). Griselda Pollock, ‘Stark encounters: modern life and urban work in Van Gogh’s drawings of The Hague 1881‐3’,Art History, 6:3 (September 1983),pp. 330‐58. Nina Lubbren,Artists’ Colonies in Europe. On orientalism see Mary‐Anne Stevens, Orientalismfrom Delacroix to Matisse, London, RoyalAcademy, 1982, and the critical readingof the trope is provided by Linda Nochlin, ‘The imaginary Orient’, [1983] in her The Politics of Vision: Essays onNineteenth Century Society, London,Thames 86Hudson, 1991. T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers, London, Thames 86Hudson, 1984, chap. 3, ‘The environs of Paris’. See also PaulTucker, Monet atArgenteuil, London and New Haven,Yale Uni‑ versity Press, 1982, and Richard Brettell, Pissarro and Pontoise: The Painter in the Landscape, London and New Haven, Yale University Press, 1990. Paul Gauguin, Intimate journals, translated by Van Wyck Brooks, London, Heinemann, 1923, p. 9. Paul Signac, 1894, in John Rewald ‘Extrait du Journal Inédit de Paul Signac 1894‐5’, Gazette des Beaux‐Arts, 36(1949), p. 106. See, for instance, LW 3, 5, 12and LB 2. This argument forms the basis of my Ph.D. thesis, Van Gogh andDutchArt: A Study of Van Gogh’s Notion of the Modern, London University, 1980, which I

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amin the process of revising for publication asThe Case Against ‘Van Gogh’: The Cities and Countries of Modernism, London,Thames 86Hudson. Willem Burger [Théophile Thoré], Les Muse'es de la Hollande, Paris, 1858, vol. II,p. x. Raymond Williams discerns this slippage between childhood memory and the fantasy of anidealisedcountryside asarecurringdimension of nineteenth‐century literature in sofar asthe displacement from rural childhood to urban adulthood was for several generations the formative experience of change and loss; see The City and the Country, London, Granada Publishing, 1975. I cannot gointo detail here about the complexities of the paintings made directly from prints of other artists in 1889‐90 but suffice to say that the notion of copying hardly scrapes the surface of this complicated art‐historical issue. The panorama was one of the specific genres of landscape painting developed in seventeenth‐century Holland. See Wolfgang Stechow,DutchLandscapePainting of the Seventeenth Century, London, Phaidon Press, 1966. Philips deKoninck (1619‐88)was alandscapepainter, thought, in the nineteenth century, to havebeenapupilof Rembrandt.There was also aSalomondeKoninck (1609‐56) who imitated Rembrandt’s works but he was n o t really a landscape painter. Van Gogh may have confused the names of De Koninck and one of the Ruysdaels.Mark Roskill thinks it was Salomon and n o t Jacob Ruysdaelto whose work Van Gogh was comparing the Provencal landscape. I remained uncon‑ vinced because of the well‐documented role of the Haarlemtje-typelandscape in Van Gogh’s work and the attention paid to Jacob Ruysdael in the critical liter‑ ature which Van Gogh read. Roskill’s Views are explained in ‘The Blue Cart and Van Gogh’s Creative Process’, Oud Holland, 81:1 (1966), pp. 3‐19. But it was n o t only the landscape elements of Dutch art that took on this new significance. Both portraiture and the townscape, represented by the work of Hals and Vermeer, also entered the arena of Van Gogh’s notion of modern art. One example of Van Gogh’s figure painting is suggestive and complex. The painting of Madame Ginoux, known asL’Arlésienne (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art), painted in October‐November 1888, shows a woman posed against aplain coloured background, seated at atable on which lie some books, one of which is open. Details such asthe contrasting dark dress and touch of white fichu, the pose and the air of respectability invite comparison with sombre bourgeois portraits by Hals and Rembrandt.But the colour scheme employed in this portrait denotes apoint of contact with another seventeenth‐century painter of the female figure, Vermeer. The portrait of Madame Ginoux is painted in sharp contrasts of blue and yellow, acombination of colours which isrepeatedly mentioned in Van Gogh’s letters from Arles in 1888 in conjunction with the name of Vermeer (LT 521, 539, LB 12). In 1885 Van Gogh had seen Vermeer’s Woman in bluereadingaletter (1663‐4; Amsterdam, Rijksmuseurn)in the newly opened Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and he was much struck by the masterful use of contrasts of blue and yellow in this work. There is of course no real basis for comparison between Vermeer’s use of these colours and Van Gogh’s in L’Arlésienne, nor in another important work based on this scheme, The yellow house (1888; Amsterdam, RijksmuseumVincent van Gogh)which shows astreet scene in Arles. The relationship between Van Gogh’s work and that of Vermeer is certainly n o t a matter of derivation or limitation. ‘Vermeer’ was signified for Van Goghby the use of t w o colours, blue andyellow. Vermeer ‐ anartist whose colourist subtlety was sofar beyond Van Gogh ‐ was invoked by the simplistic

115 - V A N GOGH, 1888‐9

use of these colours whatever their hue. However, in the case of the painting of Place Lamartine and his studio, The Yellow House there is another level of ‘Vermeer’ connotation,signs of anotherVermeer.The Vermeer of townscape paint‑ ings such asthe View ofDelft (1660‐1); The Hague,Mauritshuis and the smaller, more intimate street scenes, The little street (1657‐8; Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum) for instance, lies behind Van Gogh’s conception of atownscape scene, indirectly signified by his painting of it in the colours that were the sign of Vermeer.

22 Fred Orton has shown how Van Gogh’s uneven grasp on perspective and his use of a perspective frame frequently produced the strange extension of the foregrounds. If one covers over the bottomtwo‐thirds of the painting,drawing a notional line atthe levelof the standing wheat, the painting resumes the propor‑ tions of its Ruysdaelianprototype.

23 Nederlunds Kunsthistorischjuurhoe/e, 1971, pp. 363‐71. 24 Cited from English summary, ihid., p. 371. 25 Cf. LT 519. Van Gogh regretted the current tendencies in Parisian art to turn

against the examples of Millet, the generation of Delacroix, Millet, Rousseau, Monticelli, Israels, Corot, Meunier, etc. He told Theo that a new school was needed, like the old Dutchmen,portrait painters, genre painters,animal and still‑ life painters.

26 In the summer of 1888 Van Goghused the terms ‘abstract’ and ‘abstraction’ with reference to the schematic use of flat colour in Japanese coloured prints (LB 6) and to the mystical drawings of Italian primitives, in which Bernard was cur‑ rently interested on account of its ‘signification symbolique’ (LB 14). Terms such as ‘abstract’ or ‘abstraction’ were much in use in Parisian art

circles in the 1880s.FélixFénéondescribed Seurat’s execution as‘comme abstrait’. Gauguin had written to both Schuffenecker and Van Gogh about ‘abstracting’ from Nature. Littré’s Dictionnuire dela languefrunguise (1889) defines abstrac‑ tion: ‘Action d’abstraire, operation intellectuelle par laquelle, dans un objet, on isole un caractere pour ne considérer que le caractere resultat de cette action’. When Gauguin visited Van Gogh in Arles, he encouraged Van Gogh to experi‑ m e n t in this mode. Van Gogh, however, later rejected it entirely, providing in LB 21(December 1889) grounds for his reaction by citing Millet and Delacroix, stating that heremainedattached to Truth, to the possible, to anart closely based on astudy of the model. Cf. also LW 4 and LW 7, LB 19.

27 Albert Aurier, ‘Les Isolés:Vincent van Gogh’,Mercure deFrance, no. 1(January 1890),pp. 24‐9, in (But/res Posthumes, Paris, 1893,pp. 257‐65. The phraseology moreover recalls a statement by Millet, reported in Sensier’s biography, quoted by Van Gogh in aletter to Theo in 1885 (LT 400) on artistic expression. In LT 400 also occurs the reference to painters ensuhots in conflict with the bourgeois of Parisian art world.

29 On Seurat see LT 468, 471, 473, 474, 481, goo, 528, 539, 551, 553, 555. See especially LT 500 in which Van Goghquestioned the conclusions of anarticle in Lu Re'vue Inde'pendunte which had hailed Anquetin asthe leader of the new tendency. Van Gogh argued ‘le chef du Petit Boulevard est sans aucun doute Seurat’.

30 See, for instance,F 470, 471, 472, 479, 485 with reference to Sunday afternoon on the Grundejutte by Seurat. See Nightcufe’ (1888; NewHaven,Yale UniversityArt Gallery) and The Cafedu Terrace ontheplace duForum (1888; Otterlo, Rijksmuseum Kroner‐Muller). In

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addition to the locations, the setting of such scenes atnight may also have been partially aresponse to Seurat’s recent work, especially his night scene Parade de cirque or Theparade (1887‐8; New York, MetropolitanMuseum of Art), exhib‑ ited at the Salon des Artistes Indépendants in the spring of 1888, and probably in his studio at the time of Van Gogh’s visit in February 1888. See Roskill, Van Gogh, Gauguin and the Impressionist Circle, London,Thames 81; Hudson, 1970, for further arguments to this effect. See for example, Three sunflowers (1888; USA,private collection), Fourteen sun‑ flowers (1888;London,Tate Gallery), Twelvesunflowers(1888;Munich,Bayerische Gemaldegalerie),Fivesunflowers (1888; destroyed): for identification see editor’s comment on Three sunflowers in J. B. de la Faille, Vincent van Gogh, Amster‑ dam, 1970, p. 207. The term ‘synthetic’ was put to various uses in the critical andpaintingcircles in Paris in the late 18805 before it was adopted by Gauguinand Bernardasadescript‑ ive label. Littré, Dictionaire de la languefrangaise, defines the ‘synthese’ in the followingways; ‘1)Proprement,composition,2)Terme dephilosophie‐ opération mentale par laquelle on construit un systeme.’ (I) Properly, composition, 2) Philosophical t e r m ‐ mental procedure by which one constructs asystem) As the critic Félix Fénéon used the word in his reviews of Seurat and Gauguin in 1889, ‘synthesis’ contrasts to the more arbitrary and empiricalapproaches charac‑ teristic of the paintingmethods of the Impressionists of 1874.Van Goghemploys the t e r m ‘synthetic’ of the stylisation of Japanese drawing in LT 511. See Orton and Pollock, ‘Les Données bretonnantes’, on this point. The work by Bernard of 1888, Bretbn women in a meadow (Paris, private collection) engages with issues posed by Seurat’s Sunday at La Grandefatte, afact which Van Gogh himselfmade clear in his report of this work to his sister Wilhelmina in November 1889: ‘J’aivu un aprés-midi deDimanche enBretagne’. He was much impressed by this work by Bernard(LT 558a and 557, 562) and himself made acopy of it in watercolours (Milan,Civica Galeria d’Arte Moderna di Milano).But in the paint‑ ing Bernard does n o t employ Seurat’s divisionist application of colour; instead, colour is laid on in large flat areas. Despite Van Gogh’s oft‐expressed pleasure in the South of France and ideal of a future modern art based in the South or the tropics, hewas ‐ it would appear from the letters ‐ more than willing to leaveArles and join Gauguin and Bernard in Pont Aven (see LT 507). The notion of ‘la peinture consolante’ is a common one in Van Gogh’s letters from Arles and St. Rémy. It occurs significantly in LT 596 in which Van Gogh continued the discussion of his, Gauguin’s and Bernard’s aims ‐ ‘En parlant de Gauguin,deBernard,etdecequ’ils pourraient bien nous faire delapeintureplus consolante . . .’ (Speaking of Gauguin and Bernard, and that they may well give us a painting of greater consolation); one of the most oft‐quoted references is that which occurs in LT 531 ‐ ‘Et dans un tableau je voudrais quelque chose de consolant comme une musique’ (And in a painting I w a n t to say something comforting asmusic is comforting). A fuller discussion of Van Gogh’s ideologicaland politicalpositionin this period will beundertaken later in this chapter. But see especially LW 4and LB 14, both summer 1888. The move to asmall t o w n (Arles) constitutes, however, akind of half‐way point ‐ a t o w n of about 23,000 inhabitants surrounded by wheatfields, olive groves, Vineyards. See the drawings of the margins of the city in which Van Gogh

117 VA N GOGH, 1888‐9

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juxtaposes harvestingactivities with the railway line, gas tanks and factory chim‑ neys of the town, titledArles seenfrom the whentfields (one of which was owned byHenriMatisse,and one of which was in the RobertHirschCollectionin Basel). Jules Christophe, ‘Chronique. Rue Lafitte No. 1’,]0iirnaldes Artistes, quotedin T. J. Clark, ‘The edge of the city: modernistpainting and Paris 1860‐1890’, 1978, draft manuscript, chapter I, p. 40 for the book which later appeared as The PaintingofModern Life:Paris in the Art oannetandhisFollowers,NewYork, Alfred Knopf, and London, Thames & Hudson, 1984. See also Sally Medlyn, Senmt andAnarchist Theory, MA thesis, University of Manchester, 1975, for a different reading of Seurat’s attitudes to the social structure of Paris and its leisure pursuits. Compare Roskill, Van Gogh, Gauguin and the Impressionist Circle, p. 87: ‘Seurat’s ar t was acutely contemporary in the sense that his major canvases embodied sociological rather than simply asocial insight into the whole character of metropolitan middle‐class life at the time.’ See A. Sheon, ‘Monticelli and Van Gogh’,Apollo, 85(June 1967),pp. 444‐8. Gauguin’s painting of women of Martinique had been acquired by Theo van Gogh and was much admired by his brother (see LB 5). LB 2, 22, LT 463 for instance. For afull discussion of Van Gogh,Japan and the effects of Loti’s novels, see F. Orton, ‘Van Gogh’s interest in Japanese prints’, Vincent, 1:3 (1971), pp. 2 ‐ 1 2 . In LT 539, 541, 544. Petrarch’s sojourn at Avignon provided amore specific link with ItalianRenaissance poets and the South of France. But the association was based upon imaginings of these poets wandering amongst the oleanders and cypresses of thepublic gardens in Arles. In LT 544 Van GoghidentifiedGauguin, ‘the new poet’, with Petrarch. In additionto the southern connotations, older references also occur ‐ Millet for instance. In LT 514 Van Gogh spoke of anearbyvillage hehadvisited as‘duvrai Millet absolument ngreste et intime’, (real Millet absolutely rustic and homely). Paul Signac wrote an account of the development of modern colour painting, entitledD’EiigéneDelacroixannéo-impressionnisme,Paris, 1899.ForVan Gogh’s ideas on the link see LT 518; for notionof Delacroix handingonthe torch to the Impressionists, LT 539 asfor the resurrection of Delacroix in Impressionism. The metaphor extended from aneed for sure patrie or homeland to the idea of contemporary artists suffering from public incomprehension and misrecognition as'exiles. See LW 13: ‘Hélas, souvent le souffle et la foi nous font défaut, ator t certes mais ‐ etvoila ou nous revenons 5nos moutons si cependant nous voulons travailler il faut nous soumettre et a la dureté opiniatre du temps et a notre isolement quelquefois dur asupporter comme l’exil. Or devant nous, aprés nos années ainsi relativement perdues la pauvreté, la maladie, la vieillesse, la folie et toujours l’exil.’ (Alas,weoften get o u t of breath and faith, which is certainly the wrong thing to do ‐ but there, n o w we return to our starting point: if we nevertheless w a n t to go on working,we have to resignourselves to the obstinate callousness of the times and to our isolation, which is sometimes as hard to endure aslivingin exile. And sowehave to expect, after the years that relatively speaking we lost, poverty, sickness, old age, madness and always exile.) Alternative interpretations of this painting can befound in Albert Boime, ‘Van Gogh's Starry night: amatter of history and ahistory of matter’,Arts Magazine, 59 (December 1984), pp. 86‐103, and Lauren Soth, ‘Van Gogh’s agony’, Art Bulletin, 68(June 1986), pp. 301‐13.

FRAMING FRANCE

48 Full analysis is given in my doctoral thesis and will bedeveloped in my forthcom‑ ing book The Case against ‘Vzm Gogfa’: The Cities and Countries of Modernism, Thames Ex' Hudson, 1995.

49 Ronald Pickvance n o t e s that in the substitution of Dutch thatched cottages for the tiled French ones in a drawing done after the painting. we may identify the beginnings of the project Van Gogh titled 'Memorit-s of the Nurtli’: R. Pickvance, Van Gog/J in SI. Rémy and Atmcrs, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1986. p. 103‘

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