Evidently, Julian Bell rejects Hans Kaufmann’s and Rita
Wildegans’s revisionist version of how van Gogh got his ear cut off.
He doesn’t mention it in his Van
Gogh: A Power Seething (2015). Kaufmann and Wildegans argue that it was
Gauguin who accidentally severed van Gogh’s ear while brandishing a rapier: see
Adam Gopnik’s "Van Gogh's Ear" (The New
Yorker, January 4, 2010). Gopnik attaches considerable significance to the
“ear” incident. He calls it “the Nativity fable and the Passion story of modern
art.” He says,
When, after van Gogh’s suicide, in 1890, his fame grew, and
the story of the severed ear began to circulate, it became a talisman of modern
painting. Before that moment, modernism in the popular imagination was a sophisticated
recreation; afterward, it was a substitute religion, an inspiring story of
sacrifices made and sainthood attained by artists willing to lose their sanity,
and their ears, on its behalf.
In contrast, Bell adopts the orthodox version of the story
(i.e., the ear-slicing was an act of self-mutilation) and spends little time on
it. His “preferred focus,” he says, “is on a corpus of astonishing paintings
and letters rather than on a lump of bloody gristle to which a social misfit is
no longer attached.” He takes the same approach regarding van Gogh’s alleged
insanity. He says, “Insofar as Van Gogh the painter communicates to us, with an
oeuvre that viewers for over a century have found uniquely thrilling and
sustaining, it is not our business to call him mad.”
I find Bell’s approach refreshing. Instead of treating van
Gogh’s life as some sort of parable, as Gopnik does, he concentrates on van
Gogh’s art. For example, he describes van Gogh’s Quinces, Lemons, Pears and Grapes (1887) as “a single resounding
chord of yellow played out on various vegetal instruments, almost entirely
freed up from perspective and chiaroscuro.” He further notes that “rather than
using stained-glass compartments to generate complexity within this unity,
Vincent created an over-all crackle of visual electricity through the emphatic,
polyrhythmic hatching that was his and his alone.”
Descriptions such as this expand my appreciation of the work.
Here’s another one:
Yet perhaps we should rather picture the seething of his
mind as a surge of curling and hooking movements, translated by his handiwork
into visible analogues to its hyperconnectivity. The Starry Night pictures a
mystical consummation, although Vincent with his choice of bold modern means
declined to call it “religious,” and at the same time, that great swirl was a
vortex deeply structured in his soul.
How fine that “the seething of his mind as a surge of
curling and hooking movements”! Bell’s Van
Gogh brims with such descriptions. It takes me inside the heart of van Gogh’s incomparable art.
No comments:
Post a Comment