Vincent Van Gogh "Timeless Country- Modern City"

Vincent Van Gogh

Complesso del Vittoriano

October 8- February 6 2010

http://www.vangoghgallery.it/mostra-van-gogh-vittoriano.htm

by Sara Pelliccia

Curated by Cornelia Homburg, a leading expert in the world of Van Gogh, the exhibition Timeless Countryside-Modern City investigates the two fundamental aspects of the Dutch artist’s identity: his love for the countryside as the emblem of simplicity and eternal natural beauty, and his attachment to the city as the center of fast moving, modern life. Paintings, watercolors, and drawings on paper alongside the works by artists who inspired him, including Millet, Pissarro, Cezanne, Gaugain and Seraut, are displayed in the spacious and well-structured rooms of the Vittoriano complex in Rome as a celebration of Van Gogh’s inner dualism. The contradictory inclination of the artist, inspired by the beloved bucolic world and, at the same time by the urban one, is the reading key of this show which aims at bringing out the importance of these two different environments as sources of inspiration for his art and for the development of his personality.

Divided in several sections corresponding to the periods in which the artist was in Holland, and in France, the show starts with a series of drawings and prints by Dutch masters, representing scenes of rural labor and portraits of peasants. The attractiveness of a peaceful life far from the “artificiality” of the modern cities was, indeed, the main reason which encouraged Van Gogh to depict idealized images of countryside since his debut as an artist. His insatiable passion for collecting prints joined with his astonishing visual memory contributed to improve his artistic skills and create innumerable masterpieces considered as triumphs of the natural landscapes. In the first sections of the exhibition, the images of the sorrows, weavers, and potato harvesters dominate Van Gogh’s paintings as though he had wanted to convey the idea of an enormous joyful country chorus celebrating the hard and honest life of the peasants. “A primordial Holland”, made of cornfields surmounted by endless horizons, becomes the symbol of the artist’s existential loneliness and his passionate search for religious truths. The Old Church Tower at Nuenen, in which we see an old Dutch church, a setting sun, and a solitary peasant in the field, seems to say something about the profound, unchanging relationships of religion to humble toil, to the daily cycles of work and seasons. Basically, this canvas is emblematic of Van Gogh’ desire for exploring the supernatural in the natural suggesting some symbolic connections between man, nature, and death, just like the Northern Romantics in general, and Friedrich, in particular, had started to explore.

The following rooms examine the artist’s peculiar relationship with the city of Paris in which he moved in 1886. The discovery of the Impressionist style and the Japanese prints determined a radical change in Van Gogh’s choice of topics and stylistic treatments. A rich display of huge canvas representing industrial structures and working class neighborhoods expresses his love/hate feelings towards the world of the modern city. The two paintings, Behind the Moulin de la Galette and Kitchen Gardens on Montmartre, show the artist’s attitude of critically observing the transformation of the city in the 19^th century. Rarely interested in depicting the bustling streets or picturesque squares of Paris, he preferred to represent views of the suburbs, people strolling in the public parks, and the round hills of Montmartre where a windmill is glimpsed in the distance. Although the city was vitally important for Van Gogh as the place of contemporary experience where the newest developments of art could be seen and where careers could be furthered, actually, it was there that industrial progress negatively changed man’s life and corrupted the most genuine human feelings. Road with Underpass, representing a dark tunnel and a tiny figure inside, is the metaphor of the passage from the idyllic world of the countryside to the chaotic one of the city, from the catharsis operated by nature to the alienation produced by factories and industries.

The theme of the dualism countryside/city continues to be explored in the last sections of the exhibition, where Van Gogh combines the two in really impressive ways within the same composition. During his stay in the South of France, the artist reinterpreted Daumier’s The four Ages of Man by adding a background of flowering trees on the one side and smoking factory chimneys on the other evoking once more the dialectic city and country, new and old. The fusion of modern and tradition was propelled by Van Gogh’ s extraordinary use of contrasts of colors and violent brushstrokes revealing a particular state of his mind. The terrible experience of the illness and his reclusion in the mental asylum in Saint-Remy de Provence provided him an unprecedent source of inspiration for his art which becomes now mirror of his dramatic inner state. The paintings of the 1890s characterized by the series of olive orchards, cypresses and cottages with thatched roofs, testify, instead, his return to the timeless atmosphere of the previous Dutch canvas as though past and present were fused just like in the harmony of consonant and dissonant music intervals.