Vincent haunts the Courtauld Institute

9 April 2021

Vincent haunts the Courtauld Institute

              Vincent Van Gogh, Arles, January 1889

When in London, I often visited the Courtauld Institute at Somerset House. If I were eighteen all over again and if I had even a fraction of the Art-bug I do today, I’d re-do my life and  enrol at this institute and learn everything about art history, art restoration and how to be a curator. It’s collection of paintings is well-rounded and top-notch. But my real interest is the self-portrait by Vincent Van Gogh which is hung on a wall by itself in a large room overlooking an immense courtyard.

On my last visit there it was somewhat empty and I had the place to myself, so I was able to completely plug into it. This amazing portrait must have been painted just days after Vincent cut off his ear. I know there is another version with a red background and also another one with a bandage, but it’s this one I find the most mesmerizing in every painterly way.

Here in this room are long and large windows with luminous thin shades pulled down to keep out the midday light. This seems only to accentuate the intensity of the cool harmonies in the picture. It’s a beautifully painted portrait of cool and disjunctive color harmonies emanating froma dominant lime yellow scheme. Van Gogh famously adored everything yellow to every extreme on the palette; from buttery rich cadmiums to these limey green hues. In this portrait particularly, he uses anusual combination of both warm and cool yellow tones to highlight the delicate shadowy relief in his face. It’s wild but harnessed. No one had ever done anything like it. And it’s flat! And yet it falls into line with everything traditional that had come before it. There is Holbein in it, and Rembrandt too. There is even Matisse in it, waiting to arrive.

It’s a complex painting too, despite its apparent simplicity. It’s so flat, and yet there is every indication of relief throughout its surface. I think he picked this up from the Japanese. The Prussian Blue hat which also figures in the other portrait with its black fringe, acts like a kind of black hole around which everything seems to gravitate. 

Well,.. for me it is extraordinary, beautiful, and yes; perfect. But I hate that I write that because I don’t generally 

believe in in any kind of perfection in Art and I gulp at the use of this adjective. Maybe I should qualify it by saying that it’s simply a truthful portrait, one that rivals his great hero, Rembrandt, but one illuminated by the new electric lighting in France. 

One can only imagine what the uncultured and equally uninspired folk of the 19th century might have seen: Ugliness! Brutality! Hideous insanity! But we know Baudelaire’ wisdom when he wrote that often new and original works of Art can look ugly on first viewing. A picture like this forces us (me) to be on our contemporary toes. Where are the Van Goghs of today? Would I be able to discern them with a fresh but cultured set of eyes? It is also a great reminder that none of us, both painters and the viewers, can afford to worry about outside opinions regarding out own work. 

As I left the institute and found myself on the busy streets of London, I realised that what had trapped me in front of his self-portrait for an hour was its humanity. As I wandered the city streets I found myself looking for humanity and finding it everywhere.It seemed to me that only a painter of such heroic humility could paint such a portrait. And yet remarkably, in it, isn’t a hint of sentimentality anywhere, just a plea perhaps to God, that he might be understood.