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Category: Van Gogh

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Twisted

Among the missing: Vincent van Gogh’s Vincent on his way to work / The painter on his way to Tarascon, Property of Kulturhistorisches Museum in Magdeburg, Germany (formerly the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum). Missing from the Stassfurt salt mines art repository near Magdeburg, Germany, on April 12, 1945.
When I was doing art festivals, I never worked very hard to secure the inventory. Most other painters took the same approach. While jewelers and other craftsmen sometimes had things stolen, paintings were immune. Most working artists sell paintings to people who have an emotional response to their work, and that’s something that would be blunted if the work in question were acquired dishonestly. Artwork at this level hasn’t been commodified in the same way that collectible masterworks are.
Among the missing: Emil Nolde’s Red Poppies. Purchased for Sl. Dr. Koch, documented on artist’s list (“Purchaser List”). Lost at Hamburg harbor (Überseehafen) in 1939. Painting appeared again in the 1980s and went from a northern Germany collection into a North German Gallery (Kiel or Hamburg?), and after not selling at auction was sold through the Austrian art market (Salzburg) to an unknown purchaser.
That’s vastly different from one of the main moral dilemmas facing our age: the problem of repatriating paintings stolen by the Nazis. Today’s announcementby Federal officials that an eighteenth century painting has been returned to Poland was timed to coincide with the release of George Clooney’s The Monuments Men.
“If members of the American public question the provenance of cultural objects from World War Two in their possession, they are urged to call Homeland Security Investigations,” said Nicole Navas, a spokeswoman for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Right. The bald fact is that, sixty years after the fact, most Nazi loot is returned only reluctantly.
Among the missing: Claude Monet’s Manet painting in Monet’s Garden, Property of Martha and Max Liebermann Collection. Bought by Max Liebermann in France in 1898; visible in a photo hanging in the salon of his Berlin apartment at Pariser Platz, in 1932. It remained in the possession of Liebermann’s widow Martha until it was confiscated and sold in Berlin in 1943.
The Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg or ERR was dedicated to stealing cultural property from subdued nations, Jews in particular. It managed to steal 20% of the known art in Europe, operating in France, Belarus, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic states.
A vast amount of that was recovered immediately post-war; however, there are still hundreds of thousands of items that have never been returned to their rightful owners (or their descendants, since those owners are mostly now dead).
Among the missing: Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Man. Property of The Czartoryski Museum in Krakow, Poland. Confiscated by Nazi officials in September 1939 for Hitler’s FĂŒhrermuseum, Linz, Austria. Last seen in Dr. Hans Frank’s chalet in Neuhaus on Lake Schliersee, Germany, in January 1945.
Somewhere there is a rich collector who goes to his basement vault to revel in possessing the spectacular haul from the never-solved Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist of 1990. That person is pretty twisted. But the unrecovered Nazi loot is far, far worse, in part because of its scale. There are hundreds or even thousands of people out there holding on to it. They eat off silver and crystal in dining rooms graced with paintings that were bought and paid for with the blood of millions of genocide victims. That’s beyond simple theft; that’s absolute perversion of the soul.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Harvest at La Crau with Montmajour in the Background, 1888

This week I’m on the road. I’ve left you with six landscape paintings that should be on everyone’s Top Ten list, but probably aren’t (for the simple reason that there are way too many great paintings out there).
Harvest at La Crau with Montmajour in the Background, Vincent Van Gogh, 1888
It’s absurd to try to pick out a “best” or a most-representative Van Gogh, so I just chose one which emphasizes the things I like most about him: his color sense, his meticulous draftsmanship, his love of place (in this case, the rocky outcrop of Montmajour) and his passing allusions to religion (the Benedictine abbey at Montmajour is in the background). It is high summer in this painting, and it’s high summer here. However, all the color sense in the world wouldn’t have made this painting successful had Van Gogh not trained himself to draw perfectly.

Join me in October, 2013 at Lakewatch Manor—which is selling out fast—or let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in 2014. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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“I can’t draw a straight line.”

Street in Saintes-Maries, ca. July 17, 1888, by Vincent van Gogh–done as a mature artist. 
The good Lord willing and the creek don’t rise (which is, sadly, not wholly rhetorical right now) I will have a new drawing student this week. My friend has internalized the message that she can’t learn to draw; in fact she told me that she “lacks the gene to draw.” I think that is absolutely wrong, and I challenged her to let me teach her. She has risen to the challenge:  “I have a special brand-new sketch-book and a special old and beloved pencil all in readiness.”
I am not a big believer in an art genius, any more than I’m a believer in a math genius or a language genius.* People are more facile at some things than others, but almost everyone can learn to draw, just as almost everyone can learn to do sums, conjugate verbs or sing.
An early drawing of houses at 87 Hackford Road in London by Van Gogh. He was an adult when he drew this, but untutored. Good thing he never told himself “I can’t draw.”
My friend has a PhD in Classics, can rattle away in several antique languages, and has been entrusted with the molding of impressionable minds at a Catholic college. On that evidence alone, I doubt she is learning-impaired. So I am confident she will learn to draw very quickly.
Imagine if we taught other subjects like we teach art:
Here is Drusilla in English class. Her teacher encourages the class to write down words that express their feelings, without ever discussing spelling, syntax, or structure. Having no notion of grammar, Drusilla gets herself totally balled up in ‘can and could/may and might/shall and should/will and would,’ and throws down her pencil in frustration. “Oh, Drusilla,” says her teacher in a sad voice. “That’s OK. Not everyone can learn to write.”
Here is Drusilla in math class. Day after day, her teacher stands at the board calling out numbers in vast, voluptuous streams of ever-changing patterns. Drusilla, however, wants to calculate the volume of a sphere. “Oh, Drusilla,” says her teacher in a sad voice. “That’s OK. Not everyone is good at mathematics.”
Exploring creativity is instructive for five and seven year olds. By age 13, a kid needs to be taught the tools of art if he or she is going to succeed. We have, by and large, abdicated teaching those tools. We place self-expression above craft, and the results are predictably poor.
Oddly, virtue is another subject where the educational establishment has decided it has no right to impose standards. Virtue is unquestionably a learned discipline, as any person who’s ever struggled to civilize a child can tell you. Is the decline in teaching art somehow related to the decline in teaching ethics?

There is only one slot open for my July workshop at Lakewatch Manor in Rockland, ME, and August and September are sold out.  Join us in July or October, but please hurry! Check here for more information.

*Speaking of “genius,” the word originally referred to a tutelary god or guardian deity or spirit. Using it to refer to a person of outstanding ability is the product of the Renaissance, which shows how our thinking has morphed over time.
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Joan of Arc

My friend John Nicholson and I have decided to try a new project. I will choose a painting based on a Biblical theme and write about it from an artist’s viewpoint; John will write about it from a pastor’s perspective on his blog, The Shepherd’s Staff.

John is a Baptist pastor from Alabama; I am an artist from New York. Can we find enough common ground in our Christian faith to make this work?


Joan of Arc, 1879, Jules Bastien-Lepage (French, 1848–1884)
Oil on canvas; 100 x 110 in. (254 x 279.4 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Jules Bastien-Lepage’s portrait of Joan of Arc at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York never fails to make me catch my breath. I wander away from Rosa Bonheur’s gigantic The Horse Fair, which is a monumental, formal study of controlled energy, and am slapped in the face by The Maid of OrlĂ©ans.

Joan of Arc was born into a bleak moment in French history. France and England were entering the penultimate phase of the Hundred Years’ War. The English had captured huge swathes of territory and secured the French crown under the Treaty of Troyes, which also declared the Dauphin Charles VII illegitimate. The French countryside was bearing the brunt of a century of fighting, depredation, and the Black Death 75 years earlier.

At about age 13, Joan began to hear voices. Eventually, she sorted these voices to be those of St. Catherine of Alexandria, St. Margaret of Antioch, and the archangel Michael. These coalesced into visions. At her trial, she said: “I saw them with these very eyes, as well as I see you.”

By the time she was 16, her heavenly counselors had become more insistent and specific. She never recounted her visions at her trial, but there is a record of them that slightly predates the relief of OrlĂ©ans. A Flemish diplomat named De Rotslaer recorded “that she would save OrlĂ©ans and would compel the English to raise the siege, that she herself in a battle before OrlĂ©ans would be wounded by a shaft but would not die of it, and that the King, in the course of the coming summer, would be crowned at Reims, together with other things which the King keeps secret.”

The story of her initial rejection (“Take her home to her father and give her a good whipping”) and eventual triumph is worth studying. Two details touch me. The first is that the Dauphin subjected her to a careful theological examination before entrusting his troops to her. The second is that her career ended abruptly after her visions were fulfilled.

Jules Bastien-Lepage was part of a movement in European art and literature known as naturalism. This embraced realism but often was invested with an awareness of the condition of the poor, which in some cases makes the art into manifesto (see Charles Dickens as an example). At the same time, the nineteenth century saw an enormous population shift from the countryside to the cities, so there are elegiac overtones in the genre.

Jean-François Millet (1814-1875)
Gleaners, also called, The Gleaners
Oil on canvas
MusĂ©e d’Orsay
(for a far better, copy-protected reproduction, see here)

Bastien-Lepage was temperamentally the heir of Jean-François Millet, who painted the incomparable Gleaners. About Millet, the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1913 said, “he has shown us how the trivial can be made to serve in the expression of the sublime, and how the Infinite and the Divine can be discerned in the humblest existence.” Vincent Van Gogh, HonorĂ© Daumier, and Bastien-Lepage also had that sympathy, although it was tuned differently in each of them.

Bastien-Lepage painted Joan of Arc after the Franco-Prussian War. With their empire ruined and Alsace-Lorraine taken, the French identified powerfully with Joan. Bastien-Lepage’s painting is thus nationalistic, but to regard it as mere propaganda would trivialize it.

For one thing, there is the question of identification. Both the artist and the subject were from Lorraine. Joan was a peasant heroine and Bastien-Lepage was a peasant painter. She must have been an irresistible subject.


Jules Bastien-Lepage
Hay Making (Les foins), 1877
Oil on canvas
MusĂ©e d’Orsay (see here)

Bastien-Lepage’s most famous painting was Hay Making. Because it is a smaller and simpler canvas than Joan of Arc, you can make out the technique more easily on your monitor. His technique looks peculiar to us today. He married controlled realism in the figures to Impressionism in the background. These are two radically different ways of seeing and painting. As odd as this seems now, photography and Impressionism were both new in 1877, with no rigid rules. In fact, he synthesized the two approaches beautifully.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau
Tricoteuse, 1879
Owned privately

To understand the academic virtues of his painting, compare Joan of Arc to William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s Tricoteuse, painted the same year (Bouguereau vies with Caravaggio as the best painter of feet ever). The figures share the same perfection of drawing and modeling. But there the resemblance ends. In his best work, Bastien-Lepage used perfection only where it advanced his narrative, and there he pushed it to a photographic clarity—Joan’s loosely-laced jacket, the muddy shoes on the reaper. Bouguereau distilled detail to an ideal. His girl is an archetype of poverty, frozen in time.

In Joan of Arc, Bastien-Lepage introduced Catholic symbolism archaically, so we can almost read this painting like an icon. Joan’s own discarded spinning wheel (covered with wool so coarse we can practically smell it) stands in for St. Catherine’s wheel. Michael’s sword (Joshua 5:13–15) hovers in the air as a portent of the sword Joan would later find behind the altar in the chapel of Saint Catherine de Fierbois.

You can easily see Bastien-Lepage’s Impressionistic brushwork in the background of Hay Making, but it is also the device that allows the three saints to shimmer in Joan of Arc (we just can’t see it online). Moreover, he shoves us into the picture with Impressionist abruptness. We sense we’ve stumbled across Joan in her back garden. Compare this to Gleaners, which is profoundly powerful, but far more classical in its structure.

Nevertheless, Bastien-Lepage was not remotely an Impressionist. It is always Joan’s face to which I first respond. Her moment is awful in the deepest sense of the word. It is not that she has shut us out; instead, she seems to have stopped completely. Today many people see that frozen look as a failure, the result of painting from a reference photo. I disagree. It is a face of transfixion, of awed intelligence. After all, the face of the tedder in Hay Making, is hardly photographic, even though the painter was using the same technique. She is loose-jawed, beyond exhaustion.

This is where Bastien-Lepage diverges from the earlier naturalist painters. Millet saw nobility in the peasants’ suffering; Bastien-Lepage looked forward to the bleakness of the coming century. In the eyes of Joan and the tedder in Hay Makers, there are glimpses of the deep psychological pain of the German Expressionist KĂ€the Kollwitz.

Bastien-Lepage died young (at 36) and much of his work is either schmaltz or unformed. But some of it veers into greatness. I have to wonder what he would have produced had he lived longer.

(You can peruse Bastien-Lepage’s Ɠuvre online here. You can read the transcript of Joan’s heresy trial here, and the nullification trial here.) In researching this, I also came across the delightful and idiosyncratic Hay in Art.)