Reading, writing, rambling...

Friday 26 February 2010

Van Gogh at the Royal Academy

The current Van Gogh exhibition in the Royal Academy is huge and absorbing. Despite the large number of masterworks displayed, the heart of it is a selection of letters, in Dutch, French and English, in which Van Gogh describes with a hard-rending simplicity, clarity and enthusiasm his methods and ambitions. The 7 years he spent in England gave him a fair fluency in English, while at a certain point he and his brother Theo began communicating in French. It would be interesting to chart this linguistic switch against the change in his palette, so transformed by the colours of Paris and Provence.

Tormented genius, thwarted lover of the world, successful (eventually) only as a suicide and then as a posthumous reputation and market investment, the Lust for Life version of Van Gogh has elided the thoughtful, articulate man who could talked so clearly, so engagingly about his subject matter, his compositions, his marks. It also became clear (jostling for space in front of the letters, full of eager sketches of his latest paintings) that this was a well-read man, someone whose rustic tables were covered with books, whose head was full of ideas and debates. His interest in and indebtedness to Japanese art, the subject of an exhibition in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam a couple of years ago, is also highlighted. Try to get there, and try to have at least half a day.

On a personal note, it was delightful to spot, across a crowded exhibition room, the painting of a tree in blossom that I used to see and enjoy on wet weekends (not a rarity in the Edinburgh climate) in the National Gallery of Scotland. It's been with me for over 50 years, and I feel affectionate and proprietorial about it now.




Thursday 11 February 2010

Up guards and at 'em

Reading the scattered Web debate on whether the label avant-garde has any meaning in the post-modern world (or is that the post-post-modern world?), I was reminded that for most consumers of literature the partisan opinion on both sides of this argument would resemble (as Borges memorably said of the Falklands War) two bald men fighting over a comb. But it is a fascinating debate, not least for someone interested in the roots of words and phrases.

An avant-garde, in military terms, is the advance unit, the vanguard - first into battle, composed of the most hardened, reliable and resourceful fighters. For some reason, I'm visualising shakos and Napoleonic era moustaches. I'm not sure though how these qualities map across to ground-breaking artistic endeavour. Tough, not easily diverted, able to put up with being chronically misunderstood, prepared to risk the garret, sure - but do we want our avant garde to be reliable?Unreliability, unpredictability, the breaking of ranks - surely that's inherent in the cultural variety of avant-gardist? Napoleon would have had most of them shot.

Perhaps the metaphor becomes more appropriate when there's a citadel to be stormed. The first troops across the ditches and up the ladders used to be labelled "forlorn hopes" - an avant-garde composed of the super-ambitious, the condemned, the desperate, the renegade, sure to take withering fire and huge mortality rates. Ring any bells? Comparatively few would survive, but those who did could have their lives transformed - and could be credited with some of the transformations of victory. Though of course it was the main body of troops following on who built the breach of the walls into an established victory. Plus ca change (as Napoleon would have said)...

Then there's the post-avant-garde... no, I'm not going there just yet.