May 18, 1918
George Bernheim told me: “In a little while, at six, I’m going to the brothel on rue Favart to see sixteen Toulouse-Lautrecs for which they’re asking 100,000 francs. They’d have turned down 120,000 before the war.”
“Quite possibly,” countered Alforsen, a Swedish artist, “as business is bad in the houses….”5
Lautrec painted the underside of Paris, its brothels and dancehalls. There is sometimes frenetic energy, other times a fatigued despondency. But never boring, nor do you react with pity. It is a tough life, but true.
Fishing Boats with Hucksters Bargaining for Fish (1837–38)
Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851)
Joseph Mallord William Turner, Fishing Boats with Hucksters Bargaining for Fish, 1837–38
Oil on canvas, 174.5 x 224.9 cm
Mr. and Mrs. W.W. Kimball Collection (1922.4472)
The Art Institute of Chicago
Photo credit: The Art Institute of Chicago / Bridgeman Images
Turner existed only to paint. He started at age eleven and didn’t stop until his death in 1851. He was cockney and a prodigious worker. Landscape was his friend. Everywhere he went, he took his notebooks. He mastered watercolour.
This 1837 painting is a grand sweeping stage. He had a passion for the sea. He has caught the fury and the wet of the sea. Here the boat may be out of control, in the frothing, giddy power of the waves. There is a vibrant novelty to these waves with their ginger-ale fizz and drag current. Was ever the roil of the sea caught better? The spinnaker pushed by a hell-bent gust, driving the boat to a surge. How can the hucksters get close? A desperate painting with, off in the distance, a new-fangled steamer. The future? The waves, a pattern of spun gold, the sky over brutish black and an ochre lump, all airy blue, buttery yellow atmosphere and light, the colour becoming the story — painting set free, reflecting the vicissitudes of nature. He applied his watercolours wet on wet, allowing paint to diffuse and outlines to soften, influencing his oil painting. This is at first a traditional painting but, at a closer look, changes are afoot.
Turner and Constable were opposites. The promiscuous Turner railed against marriage; Constable pious, devoted in marriage, conventional.
Constable said of Turner when they met in 1813, “I was a good deal entertained with Turner. I always expected to find him what I did — he is uncouth but has a wonderful range of mind.”
This painting was done only seven years before his more abstract later works such as Rain, Steam and Speed.
JP
27. The Bedroom (1889)
Vincent van Gogh (1853–90)
Vincent van Gogh, The Bedroom, 1889
Oil on canvas, 73.6 x 92.3 cm
Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection (1926.417)
The Art Institute of Chicago
Photo Credit: The Art Institute of Chicago / Bridgeman Images
Van Gogh, meteoric in his late-blooming passion as an artist, disturbed, driven, his prodigious talent is measured in mere months. He produced his masterworks in only thirty months.
In October 1888 he painted a picture of his bedroom, a novel subject for a painting.
He produced two more paintings of his bedroom in Arles. The first, damaged by water, is in Amsterdam. This, his second, was meant as a sort of reproduction. The description that follows has a slight variance from the painting here. It modifies the first painting. But except for the floor colour, which has changed, it mirrors this canvas.
His letter to his brother, Theo, sets out his vision:
I had a new idea in my head and here is the sketch to it … this time it’s just simply my bedroom, only here colour is to do everything, and, giving by its simplification a grander style to things, is to be suggestive here of rest or of sleep in general. In a word, to look at the picture ought to rest the brain or rather the imagination.
The walls are pale violet. The ground is of red tiles. The wood of the bed and chairs is the yellow of fresh butter, the sheets and pillows very light greenish lemon. The coverlet scarlet. The window green. The toilet-table orange, the basin blue. The doors lilac. And that is all — there is nothing in this room with closed shutters. The broad lines of the furniture, again, must express absolute rest. Portraits on the walls, and a mirror and a towel and some clothes.
The frame — as there is no white in the picture — will be white. This by way of revenge for the enforced rest I was obliged to take.
I shall work at it again all day, but you see how simple the conception is. The shading and the cast shadows are suppressed, it is painted in free flat washes like the Japanese prints …6
Van Gogh stresses rest. Up close this is clearly wrong. This is a disturbed painting and anyone sleeping in this seething bedroom under tilted walls would either be careening from LSD or the world’s most roiling hangover.
The bed’s frame, which Van Gogh describes as “the yellow of fresh butter,” is in fact an uneasy, ribbed, heavy impasto, dabbed colour, the pillows “very light greenish lemon” are a study of turmoil. The matting on the chair is alive, an infested blob. “The walls are pale violet,” no, they’re psychedelic, pinching the viewer as they tilt in fighting the fury of the bed. Van Gogh said, “Looking at the picture ought to rest the brain, or rather the imagination.” No, it’s a psychiatric Ping Pong game.
Pissarro, a companion artist, said, “Many times I’ve said that this man will either go mad or outpace us all. That he would do both, I did not foresee.”
When furnishing the yellow house in Arles, he bought twelve chairs. He never entertained and had no disciples. He had intended to establish a community of artists in the south of France, but only Gauguin visited, a disaster ending with Vincent’s razored ear.
Julian Barnes, the novelist and art critic, says of Van Gogh:
He isn’t one of these painters like, say Degas or Monet, who over the years refine and deepen our vision. I am not sure Van Gogh’s paintings change for us very much over the years, that we see him differently, find more in him at 60 or 70 than we did at 20. Rather, it is the case that the painter’s desperate sincerity, his audacious resplendent colour and his intense desire to make paintings a “consolatory art for distressed hearts” take us back to being 20 again. And that is no bad place to be.7
I think this is both valid and profound.
He was a voracious reader: Dickens, Shakespeare, Flaubert, Longfellow, Whitman, Charlotte Bronte, and Aeschylus.
JP
28. American Gothic (1930)
Grant Wood (1891–1942)
Grant Wood, American Gothic, 1930
Oil on beaver board, 78 x 65.3 cm
Friends of American Art Collection (1930.934)
The Art Institute of Chicago
© The Estate of Grant Wood / SODRAC, Montreal /
VAGA, New York (2017)
Photo credit: The Art Institute of Chicago / Bridgeman Images
As