The exhibit focused on Van Gogh's becoming, well, Van Gogh. Works covered the entire span of his career from his early sketches (which should give any aspiring artist hope because they were certainly not his best work) to some of his masterpieces. I loved it because while great art is nice to look at, seeing that great artist's work progress from the my-little-nephew-can-do-that stage to the ok-I-give-up-that-is-so-far-beyond-anyone-I-know stage is a revelation. The exhibit is a wonderful example of Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hour thesis, that anyone practicing something mindfully for 10,000 hours can become a master. (Which of course leads a person to the uncomfortable conclusion that there are only so many 10,000 hour chunks left in their life and oh-my-God! what am I going to spend it on? And why didn't I know this when I was twenty?)
So, to distract myself from thoughts of how I may have squandered my hours I will now describe for you some of my favorite parts of the exhibit.
Van Gogh used a perspective frame. This was a frame that showed the lines of perspective (think of the Last Supper with those diagonal lines drawn on it.) You place the frame in front of you and look at the landscape you are drawing through it. Then you use the lines as guides. He also had a grid frame. Same thing, hold it up between you and your subject and then transfer what is in each little square to the corresponding square on your paper. I'm not sure how this simplifies your life, but Van Gogh was a big fan.
Van Gogh copied copiously from other artists. Of course, how else do you learn a new technique if you do not copy and practice? But it is still a bit jarring to see it. The fun part is that sometimes, especially as the exhibit progresses, his work is so much better than the work he is copying.
Van Gogh did not love color in the beginning. He had to work and learn about color. His earlier works have very little color in them but as the exhibit unfolds it becomes more and more important. One of his techniques to strengthen his color sense was to use yarn. He would take two colors of yarn and roll them into a ball so he could then see how the two colors affected each other, thus simultaneously improving his ability to paint the colors side by side without mixing them and endearing himself to all the knitters.
Van Gogh was friends with Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. And they took an art class together in Paris. The class consisted of learning to draw the human figure from plaster casts. Since he and Toulouse-Lautrec were assigned seats behind the plaster casts because, apparently, they did not draw very well, we are treated to sketches of the backsides of nude women. For what it's worth, in a side by side comparison of sketches Toulouse-Lautrec's seem a bit better than Van Gogh's. The exhibit does not mention which students in their class sat in front of the models.
Van Gogh's ears were not referred to once. An odd omission since that is the first thing anyone thinks of when they think of Van Gogh. Not to worry, though, I looked it up. As we all know Van Gogh cut off his ear and sent it to a prostitute. (OK, I didn't know that. I knew he cut off his ear and sent it to someone, but I did not know she was a prostitute. Nor did I know that because she was, understandably, horrified she alerted the police and they found the artist before he bled to death.) He supposedly did this after an argument with his friend Gauguin. Well, good news! According to two German scholars none of this makes any sense at all and they have put forward an alternative theory. Instead of Van Gogh chopping off his own ear with a razor and sending it to the unfortunate woman, Gauguin, who liked to fence, cut off said ear during their quarrel and then Van Gogh sent it to the poor woman. No explanation of why he would send his ear to anyone, which, really, is the least understandable part of the whole story. Neither Van Gogh nor Gauguin could admit to what really happened because cutting off someone else's ear with a sword was illegal and Gauguin would have been jailed. That was the last time Van Gogh ever saw Gauguin.
Which brings us to the end of the exhibit and Van Gogh's death. He was thirty-seven years old which surprised me considering how much he accomplished. Now, again, we all know he shot himself and, again, we are all wrong. Since the gun was never found and the angle of the wound was odd and Van Gogh gave conflicting statements, people who study these things have come to a new conclusion. Van Gogh was shot by a friend's teenage son during a quarrel. Yes, yes, I know, shocking. You would think he would have learned from his encounter with Gauguin not to argue with people holding weapons, or at least to choose a better class of friends. And yet, he did not and we are left with some great works of art and the itch to know what he would have painted next and whom he would have quarreled with if he had lived.
