367 Vincent Van Gogh the Artist, the Man, the Land

n° 367 - November 2014 © Tutti i diritti sono riservati Fondazione Internazionale Menarini - è vietata la riproduzione anche parziale dei testi e delle fotografie Direttore Responsabile Lorenzo Gualtieri - Redazione, corrispondenza: «Minuti» Edificio L - Strada 6 - Centro Direzionale Milanofiori I-20089 Rozzano (Milan, Italy) www.fondazione-menarini.it Vincent van Gogh the Artist, the Man, the Land An important exhibition now on in Milan traces the life and work of the great Dutch master, offering a novel perspective on his existential vision As part of the grandiose series of events promoted on occasion of EXPO 2015, revolving around an ambitious theme with great relevance for the future of humanity, Nutrire il pianeta (Feeding the Planet), an exhibition celebrat- ing Vincent Van Gogh seems exceed- ingly appropriate. The exhibition, at Milan’s Palazzo Reale from 18 Octo- ber 2014 to 8 March 2015, is enti- tled L’uomo e la terra (The Man and the Land). With perceptive cohesive- ness, it explores the great Dutch artist’s personality and his relationships with life and nature. ‘The man – as the curators of the exhibition explain – who never ceases to question himself and to question, with a sort of mute yet terrible inter- rogation such as that which may fil- ter through a face depicted on canvas and which contains “the question”, the first and last of existence; and the land, which in the end is the only an- swer for those who feel alienated and relegated to marginal existences by a pragmatic society which assigns work only to create profit and which re- jects out of hand anyone who inves- tigates the condition and destiny of mankind: this is the what this Van Gogh exhibition is about, its “sense” and its “purpose”. To journey through the world of the art – but above all the existential phi- losophy – of the great painter. A phi- losophy which – as Giulio Carlo Ar- gan has observed – ‘borders on Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky and stands by the disinherited, the peas- Self-Portrait - Otterlo, ©Kröller-Müller Museum ants from whom industry takes not only the land and their bread, but also The exhibition includes Vincent’s their dignity as human beings and most celebrated Self-Portrait – with any feeling of the ethical value and ‘that taut, almost aggressive expres- religiosity of labour’. sion and a look that inspires fear’, the page 2 from top, clockwise: Bowl with Peonies and Roses Evening Landscape with Rising Moon Peasant Woman, Picking Up a Sheaf of Grain Otterlo, ©Kröller-Müller Museum look of a man who has not been de- it. In the drawings, such as the Peas- feated, despite the world’s having ant Woman, Picking Up a Sheaf of pushed him to the very limits in all Grain and others of women gleaning things, to the dark of the madhouse, or hoeing. Drawing was a technique and who in silence screams to the much loved by Van Gogh; he wrote world his rage and his unmitigated to Theo, ‘I must now draw constantly. solidarity with the disinherited, like Examine and draw everything that’s a Christ crucified but unbowed – and part of a peasant’s life . I’m no longer a series of oils and drawings that fully so powerless in the face of nature as I convey the artist’s total immersion in used to be’. And again, in the land- the rural world as in the cycle of hu- scape he painted again and again in man life: farmers, landscapes of the oils, always a revelation, like upon his cold North and of the sunny Midi, arrival in Provence: ‘The Mediter- snapshots of life, still lifes, vases of ranean – has a colour like mackerel, flowers, unique and precious tiles in other words, changing – you don’t in a single mosaic – because, as the always know if it’s green or purple master wrote to Theo, ‘ . in a paint- – you don’t always know if it’s blue ing I’d like to say something consol- – because a second later, its changing ing, like a piece of music. I’d like to reflection has taken on a pink or grey paint men or women with that je ne hue’. These works include View of sais quoi of the eternal . .’ Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, Olive Grove The central corpus of the exhibition with Two Olive Pickers and The Green is made up of works from the Kröller- Vineyard. Müller Museum of Otterlo and is And in the portraits as well, because, fleshed out with others from the Van as Van Gogh wrote in June of 1890, Gogh Museum of Amsterdam, the ‘[t]here are modern heads that one Museo Soumaya – Fundación Car- will go on looking at for a long time, los Slim of Mexico City, the Centraal that one will perhaps regret a hun- Museum Utrecht and private collec- dred years afterwards’. Heads, faces tions normally inaccessible to the pub- like those of the Portrait of Joseph- lic. It is a rare occasion to view, through Michel Ginoux or the Postman Joseph the artist’s eyes, the complex relation- Roulin (both on show). Argan wrote ship between the human being and of the latter, ‘Where is the tragic in the nature that surrounds him. the portrait of postman Roulin? Not The six sections of the exhibition of- in the figure, sitting serenely . Art fer visitors the opportunity to view, becomes, Pavese would have said, the and to make their own, life and hard “craft of living”; and it is this craft of work in the fields as Van Gogh saw life which Van Gogh desperately pits page 3 against the mechanical work of industry, which is not life’. In the rural world, Van Gogh sought out, in such simple, ‘pure’ figures as the mailman who came to see him every day in the madhouse and sang La Marseillaise, the ‘sense’ of life and of things. He found it in toil, in hard work. Like that of the peasants he por- trayed, because, as he wrote to his brother, his preferred correspondent, ‘[we] have to get old working hard, and that’s why we then get despon- dent when things don’t go right’. His was work that was never repaid, im- possible to understand in his time, a work of signs and styles that were completely new despite the influences of and his relations with several of the Impressionists and his beloved Mil- let and Daumier and amplified by his reading of his contemporary novel- ists, they as well too far advanced for their time. The Palazzo Reale exhibition cannot but surprise visitors, who will find themselves fully im- mersed in the theme, navigating through a bitter world which, as Van Gogh wrote to Theo in May of 1882, ‘. never sees or respects the “human” in the human being, but only the greater or smaller value in money or goods he bears this side of the grave. The world takes no account at all of the other side of the grave. This is from top: Still Life: Drawing Board, Pipe, Onions and Sealing-Wax - Otterlo, ©Kröller-Müller Museum why the world sees no further than Postman Joseph Roulin - Boston, Museum of Fine Arts the end of its nose’. lorenzo gualtieri n° 367 - November 2014 © Tutti i diritti sono riservati Fondazione Internazionale Menarini - è vietata la riproduzione anche parziale dei testi e delle fotografie Direttore Responsabile Lorenzo Gualtieri - Redazione, corrispondenza: «Minuti» Edificio L - Strada 6 - Centro Direzionale Milanofiori I-20089 Rozzano (Milan, Italy) www.fondazione-menarini.it Antonio and Piero del Pollaiolo: Two Brothers for Four Noblewomen A comparison of great expressions of 15th-century Florentine portraiture at an exceptional exhibition in Milan The fortunes of portraiture, under- were invented and others, widespread stood as the art of recognisably por- in antiquity, were resurrected. Ap- traying the features of given individ- preciation for and exaltation of na- uals, depend on mimesis. Over the ture and of individuality inevitably history of art, portraiture has surfaced led the artist to closely study the phys- and submerged with the tides of nat- iognomy and the character of the in- uralistic representation; during the dividual to be described in image. Renaissance, buoyed by the princi- Although Flanders provided exam- ples of humanism, it enjoyed a splen- ples less constrained by the classical did season. models (that is, portraying the sub- Humanism, the cultural premise for ject in three-quarter view), in Italy, that ‘rebirth’, placed man at the cen- and in particular in Florence, the ‘pro- tre of the universe and also trans- file rule’ continued to apply. This is formed iconography: new solutions the typical formula for the celebra- Antonio del Pollaiolo: Portrait of a Woman - Milan, Museo Poldi Pezzoli Antonio del Pollaiolo (attr.): Portrait of a Woman - Berlin, Gemäldegalerie page 2 Antonio or Piero del Pollaiolo: Portrait of a Woman - Florence, Uffizi Piero del Pollaiolo (attr.): Portrait of a Woman - New York, Metropolitan tory portrait, drawn from study of an- tan Museum of Art of New York. For cient coins and accompanied by a re- the first time in their history, these turn of the medallist’s art. In this con- four noblewomen, whose identity re- text, the work of Antonio Pisano, mains a secret but whose rank is clearly painter, medal-maker and miniatur- deducible, will all stand together. ist, assumes real importance; it is to Four female portraits, pure expres- his work that such artists as Piero sions of the Florentine Renaissance. della Francesca, Botticelli and the The choice of works is not based only Pollaiolos make reference.

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