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Vincent Van Gogh: Originality and the Validation of Repetitions

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Vincent Van Gogh: Originality and the Validation of Repetitions Page 1 Sara Cecilia Johnson Honors in Art History American University College of Arts & Sciences Spring 2014 Undergraduate Capstone Vincent van Gogh: Originality and the Validation of Repetitions Dr. Juliet Bellow Professor of Art History at American University ABSTRACT: This paper explores Vincent van Gogh’s tendency to repeat: the artist often made copies or variations of other artists’ work and of his own paintings. The fact that van Gogh frequently repeated his works may seem like a form of obsessive action, playing into the myth of van Gogh as a mad genius. My paper instead uses van Gogh’s repetitions to develop a discussion of the avant-garde concept of originality, examining how his practice of repetition operated within a value-system that prized uniqueness. Looking critically at van Gogh’s artistic process of making repetitions, guided by the recent Phillips Collection exhibition catalogue, Van Gogh: Repetitions, I show that van Gogh’s process was intentional and complex. I compare his process to traditional academic methods of art-making, premised upon emulation and copying, and to that of his contemporaries in the avant-garde who were against copying. I conclude that van Gogh’s process of artistic production, which combined originality and repetition, represents the Post-Impressionist synthesis of Impressionist and Academic approaches to art-making. Page 2 “We are forgetting that painting was a simple craft, and we are adopting the modernist principle that innovation is primary and any reiteration of themes needs to be explained and justified.” - Patricia Mainardi 1 The idea that Impressionist painters were unanalytical and only painted what they saw in nature has been discredited.2 Although the Impressionists made it appear like their work was completed en plein air, the evidence reveals that those artists had studios where they took time to finish each painting, such as in Gustav Caillebotte’s painting The Floor Scrapers [figure 1]. The image is cropped, as the body of the figure on the left side is cut off by the edge of the painting, illustrating its transient quality, convincing its viewers of its quick production. Yet, this painting brings attention to lighting and, on further inspection, the composition is quite complex, indicating that it could not have been completed in one sitting. This and other paintings by the Impressionists were not done spontaneously as they appeared in style and composition, but they were thoroughly planned out pieces— a constructed image. The same goes for Post-Impressionist Vincent van Gogh: the theory that he painted in wildly emotional states of pure genius is no longer valid regarding his work. The answers to explaining van Gogh and the Impressionists’ implied impermanence lies in their artistic method. One cannot assume that based on his style of heavy impasto and visible brushwork that he lacked a painting process. A large portion of scholarship on van Gogh is dedicated to either proving or disproving his stigma as a mentally unstable yet expressive artist. Scholars tend to put him into his own category and isolate him from influences, viewing him as an anomaly of great creativity rather than another artist building upon previous artistic ideas. The recent exhibit on van Gogh at 1 “Copies, Variations, Replicas: Nineteenth-Century Studio Practice” Visual Resources 15 no.2 (1991): 138. 2 Robert Herbert, “Impressionism, Originality, and Laissez-Faire.” Ed. Mary Tompkins Lewis, Critical Readings in Impressionism and Post-Impressionism: An Anthology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007: 23-29, 148-161. Page 3 the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, titled Van Gogh: Repetitions, analyzes van Gogh’s means of production and, in doing so, has brought up the heavily avoided subject of the abundant repetition in van Gogh’s oeuvre, demonstrating his influences and bringing him into context with the artists of the nineteenth century. 3 Van Gogh: Repetitions thus allows us to rethink the myth of originality that still hangs over the late nineteenth-century French artistic avant-garde. Indeed, it allows us to examine an inherent contradiction in the painterly tradition that van Gogh inherited and extended. On the one hand, the Impressionist concept of plein-air painting implied that each painting was the product of a spontaneous and unique encounter with the motif; on the other hand, these same artists contradict the concept of implicit aura of originality through the practice of copying other artists’ work as well as their own. Though art historians have long recognized that the practice of copying or working in a series was a mainstay of painters’ working method at that time, the theme of repetition is shunned in the discussion of famous nineteenth-century artists. What it is about the copy that makes art historians turn a blind eye to this issue? It is probable that they wish to preserve the greatness of the artist, which reaffirms the traditional canon of art as well as the myth of originality. In this paper, I will discuss van Gogh’s artistic production in relation to the notion of repetition, illustrating his modes of production and how they change over time through his experiences and interactions with other artists. I will discuss the hypocritical nature of the avant- garde in their rejection of academic painting, which promoted copying, while they often drew from traditional practices. I will also discuss the implications that repetition has on van Gogh’s 3 Eliza E. Rathbone, Van Gogh: Repetitions. New Haven: Yale University Press in association with The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. and The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2013. Page 4 mythic persona and how art as a whole consciously or inevitably uses imitation, whether through mimicking other artists or nature itself. Originality, which is often attributed to van Gogh and the Impressionists, is something that can grow out of repetition and copying. Repetition played a significant role in van Gogh’s artistic process that affected his fundamental views of making art. In Eliza Rathbone’s introduction to the Phillips Collection’s exhibition catalogue on this theme, she asks the primary question of this study: “what can we learn by looking at... examples of repetition in his [van Gogh’s] work, in portraits as well as landscapes?”4 The catalogue presents, in chronological order, thirteen serial paintings done by van Gogh that span his entire career, identifying a unique and systematic approach. Van Gogh would make a study from life and then rework it through variations of that same theme, applying his own term “repetition” to define these particular series. Because of all the letters that van Gogh wrote to his brother, Theo van Gogh, explaining what the artist was doing at the time, they confirm van Gogh’s use of the word and what it means. To van Gogh, “repetition” meant reworking the same painting over and over to perfect it, making changes but keeping the composition and subject close to identical. The catalogue goes through an extensive description of each of the thirteen repetition series by providing historical background to the paintings and discussing them in comparison to the other works in the same series. The discussion primarily focuses on the technicalities of each piece and tries to determine how van Gogh might have produced these repetitions since they appear remarkably close to one another in composition yet they lack indication that the artist used any tools to aid in their replication. One issue with this catalogue is its privileging of the first or “original” repetition in each series, meaning that the 4 Rathbone, 1. Page 5 authors of the study attribute a large portion of each entry to determining which painting was made first in each series. It is rather difficult to tell what was painted first because they were painted so close together in time and because some paintings bring up issues of authorship, indicating that they are forgeries and not painted by van Gogh at all. The issue of originality is problematic because if one is to view each of van Gogh’s repetitions as works in their own right then why should it matter which painting came first? Besides this methodological flaw, the works in the catalogue bring together pieces from collections worldwide for the first time that aid in exploring van Gogh’s repetitions. Some examples included in the catalogue are his repetitions picturing the Moulin de la Galette in Montmartre, a motif he explored during his stay in Paris with his brother from 1886-88. There are two versions of the painting, both made in October, 1886. The version from the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo [figure 2] was the first in the series, and the second version from the Nationalgalerie in Berlin [figure 3]. The general consensus from the scholars who contributed to the Phillips Collection catalogue concluded that the first work in any series is his painting that exhibits the thickest impasto and the loosest brush strokes, and this idea solidifies the differences between the two Moulin paintings.5 In comparing the two paintings, the Otterlo version has more distinct and visible brush strokes, as seen in the jumble of strokes that create the street in the foreground and how the buildings are represented by short vertical strokes. Although the Berlin version contains visible brushstrokes as well, there is more clarity and crispness with slightly tighter, smaller strokes and the use of dark blues and blacks that define and outline objects in the painting. There is evidence of revision in the Berlin painting because 5 Rathbone, 6. Page 6 van Gogh removes two small figures in the middle ground and the changes mood of the painting from warm browns to cool blue tones.
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