Van Gogh the preacher? New show to explore artist’s life before painting
|
Version 0 of 1. This summer the Grand-Place in the Belgian city of Mons will be transformed into a blaze of yellow, a field of 7,500 sunflowers celebrating the city’s turn as European capital of culture, and the peculiar man who spent 18 months living in the area and failing at yet another chosen career. This time his failure marked a turning point in the history of art: sacked as a preacher and evangelist working in the Borinage, a tough coalmining region, Vincent van Gogh decided that his future lay in art. In 1880, not yet even a failed artist, he was living in Cuesmes, a village on the outskirts of Mons in southern Belgium. Images of the battered landscape, poor simple houses and grinding hard work he witnessed would stay with him for life. The Borinage inspired one of his first major works, The Potato Eaters, and its sootily dark palette, though it was not painted until 1885, after he had left the region. Van Gogh in the Borinage, open from 25 January at BAM, the Beaux Arts Mons gallery, will include scores of paintings by Van Gogh and other artists who inspired him. It will bring together for the first time his early versions – made from prints – of works by Jean-François Millet, whose paintings of peasant life he greatly admired, and his paintings of the same subject made years later in the last months of his life when he was in the asylum at Saint-Rémy. The exhibition will be the first to focus so strongly on this early period, explaining how Van Gogh chose themes and subjects that echoed throughout his career. Curator Sjraar van Heugten tracked The Mower, the only survivor of many copies of the subject he made, to a small private museum in Japan. It will be part of an exhibition for the first time, shown beside the later painted version. Van Heugten, who has been researching this period of the artist’s life, says his time in the Borinage was of huge importance, bringing him for the first time into contact with true poverty and the hard lives of working-class people. As the letters that will also be on display demonstrate, it was not a happy time. The man who died miserable and unsuccessful, but whose paintings would later become among the most coveted and expensive in the world, was trying and failing at a new profession – as a preacher and evangelist who baffled the church leaders and local people he was supposed to inspire. Van Gogh was, the evangelisation committee noted, endlessly patient and kind to the sick and injured, watching over them at night and giving away his clothes and even his bed linen – but he was incapable of eloquent speech, or of organising meetings. “It is a fact that the absence of certain qualities may render the performance of the evangelist’s primary function totally deficient,” they said. “Unfortunately that was the case with Mr Van Gogh.” The painter wrote bitterly to his brother and ever-loyal correspondent, Theo: “You must know that it’s the same with evangelists as with artists. There’s an old, often detestable, tyrannical-academic school, the abomination of desolation in fact, men having, so to speak, a suit of armour, a steel breastplate of prejudices and conventions.” The detestable old tyrants were able to organise appointments to suit their own proteges, he wrote. In fact, they were planning to sack him. As a budding artist, his failure was equally shattering. He gave as gifts drawings of the family he lodged with (the house is being restored and will reopen to the public this spring). Some were later found torn up and discarded. Most of the pieces, which would now be worth a fortune, vanished, probably into the fire. Van Heugten has also uncovered new facts about the period Vincent spent in Brussels and his brief time studying at the academy there. Inevitably, it did not go well. “He followed a course where students had to copy plaster casts,” Van Heugten says, “and ended last of the class.” Critics have already given the planning and infrastructure of Mons’ time as capital of culture a kicking, and it didn’t help when a major sculptural installation – a labyrinth of timber poles by the artist Arne Quinze – collapsed and had to be removed. However, things should liven up once the events and exhibition programme gets under way: Van Gogh in the Borinage is among 44 planned, with one show exploring another wild child of European culture, the poet Paul Verlaine, and the 15 months he spent in the city’s prison – a few years before Van Gogh’s arrival – after shooting his lover Arthur Rimbaud twice and succeeding only in slightly wounding him. Van Gogh, an enemy only to himself, barely lasted another 10 years after his unhappy months in and around Mons. By then he had created a body of work that began in the Borinage, and which would never be forgotten. |