The exciting Vincent van Gogh show that has arrived at the National Gallery is packed with thrills and achievement. Everything at the event — 60 works, including many of his greatest — was produced in the two tumultuous years he spent in the south of France, from February 1888 to May 1890. It’s Van Gogh’s most fruitful span, a concentrated outpouring of masterpieces of such intensity and at such a rate that I do not believe anyone in art has matched it. Certainly no one I can think of.
The show makes this fully evident. With striking loans and a classy arrangement in the lofty upstairs galleries at the National, it’s an airy and beautiful experience. Among the notable exhibits are some of his best-known works: two versions of the Sunflowers; Starry Night Over the Rhone, with its gorgeous explosions of starlit nocturnal dreaminess; The Yellow House, that soppy and golden vision of his home in Arles; the touchingly plain and emotionally scarring interior of his bedroom. They are all here, and they all excite.
At the centre of the journey, in its most inventive sight, two of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers are presented in a triptych with his portrait of the motherly Mme Roulin rocking her baby in an unseen cradle. It’s an arrangement that Van Gogh himself hoped to witness — a secular version of a religious moment — but never managed in the flesh. The National Gallery has done it for him.
So that’s the good news. Less good is the overall thrust of the display and the message it is seeking to convey. The masterpieces are here in generous numbers, but they are involved in something of a propaganda war. Not content with confronting us with so much prime Van Gogh, the event is seeking also to alter our view of him.
Gone is the ear-cutting madman of popular legend, the bellicose boozer who threatened his pal Gauguin with a razor and gave the remains of his mutilated ear to a local sex worker. That Van Gogh has vamoosed: disappeared from the story. Replacing him is a scholarly post-impressionist nourished by books and colour theory, a cultivated progressive absorbing and perfecting the latest developments in art.
Some of the shift was necessary. There are, after all, only so many jokes you can make about cutting off your ear before it becomes tedious. In Van Gogh’s case that point was reached 70 years ago when Kirk Douglas erupted into ridiculous American agonies in Lust for Life, a Hollywood retelling of Van Gogh’s life that prompted more belly laughs in the sentient viewer than the entire corpus of Charlie Chaplin.
So our image of the flaying Dutchman has been in genuine need of reshaping. And the control centre of the global Van Gogh industry, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, has sought deliberately in recent years to achieve this with a propaganda campaign of shows and publications that sought aggressively to redraw his picture. Out with the old Vincent. In with the new.
By following the same path, the National Gallery is joining the curatorial consensus. It’s what curators do. Nowhere here is there the barest hint of the tragic events in Arles: the breakdown, the brothels, the craziness. By avoiding his biography entirely — there’s just one self-portrait in the show — by jumbling periods and locations, by grouping its fabulous array of holdings into indistinct thematic clusters, the National’s “once in a lifetime” event has been turned into a parade of greatest hits.
Does it matter? Not really. Great art has a presence that is unimpeachable and there’s loads of it here. Anyone who feels they have already experienced a lot of Van Gogh, that he is an overly familiar presence, will have those doubts lifted by a succession of adventurous borrowings most of us have never previously seen.
The stand-outs for me were the trio of views of olive trees painted near the asylum in St Rémy, where the gnarled and twisty character of the trees prompted Van Gogh into recording them with outrageous clusters and splatters of astonishingly adventurous paintwork. But it is here, too, that the old vision of him, or a portion of it at least, would have helped with a fuller understanding. The gnarled, twisty olive trees, surviving in difficult and barren conditions, need surely to be read as symbolic self-portraiture? Throw away the mad Van Gogh and you throw out the baby with the bathwater. Van Gogh the cerebral progressive is as much of an invention as Van Gogh the crazy ear-cutter.
There is confusion, too, about the journey we should be following. The show is called Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers, a title prompted by two portraits that open the proceedings, one of a dashing Zouave soldier called Lieutenant Milliet that Van Gogh entitled The Lover, and another of a dreamy painter friend, Eugene Boch, that he called The Poet. But how we are supposed to follow this continuing storyline of poets and lovers is, alas, never made clear. It’s there at the start, then disappears in a flurry of divergent loans.
The striking absence of captions and wall texts is deliberate. The ambition, I suppose, is to let the art do all the talking. But I’m afraid simpletons like myself, hungry for directions, will find ourselves wandering from unrelated masterpiece to unrelated masterpiece asking: where did the poets and lovers go?
So, yes, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime collection of works and, yes, a recurrently thrilling display that will perk up even the most jaded Van Gogh observer. But it also feels as if it is mouthing the latest received wisdoms rather than hitting real nails on the head.
Van Gogh: Poets & Lovers is at the National Gallery, London WC2, to Jan 19
