The RA's Real Van Gogh Exhibition - A Review 

From the very first moment of hearing about this exhibition you know it is something new, designed to change the perception of the masses to realise who Vincent Van Gogh really was. The title: ‘The Real Van Gogh: the Artist and his letters’ reveals the intentions of the Curator Ann Dumas in collaboration with others, that Van Gogh was not just the madman and erratic artist that everyone has come to know him as, but a deep thinker, constantly exploring and developing, and analysing his own skill, and that of others too. 

This exhibition at the Royal Academy which displays around 65 canvases, 30 drawings and 40 original letters by Van Gogh, has been assembled to reveal the development in the artist’s mind before, after and during his workings. It focuses on the compulsive correspondence and themes found within his letters, a literary/visual symbiosis is the starting point of the Royal academy’s exhibition.

It is not only the most important exhibition of Van Gogh’s letters and paintings seen in London for over 40 years, but is the first exhibition that explores the writer and the artist, thus forming a response to the recent publication by Thames and Hudson in October 2009  ‘Vincent Van Gogh – The letters: The Complete Illustrated and Annotated Edition’.  This fifteen year project by three scholars of the Van Gogh Museum in turn took the Royal Academy three years of planning, and two months to set up a visual exhibition to promote this great canon of work. This is not some thrown-together exhibition for the sake of getting crowds through the door and making money. It is, as it has been publicised, a unique opportunity to gain an insight into the complex mind of the man, a new way of looking at this world-famous artist.

At the entrance to the gallery the quote on the wall immediately tells the visitors the intentions of this exhibition “There’s the art of lines and colours, but there’s the art of words that will last just the same”. There is so much emphasis on this topic that it almost appears to make the pictures less important. However that is a valid point for this exhibition; is Van Gogh really famous for his pictures or is his fame more to do with the myths surrounding his life as an eccentric artist? As Adrian Searle wrote in his review of this exhibition in the Guardian “I am much more fascinated by the artist’s drawings [and letters] than his paintings. Drawing and writing are closely allied, and the first lends to the latter in the same way that a cry, a laugh or groan lends to speech.”

Wandering around the exhibition you can see how Van Gogh’s letters are so much more open than his paintings. They show his impassioned nature – pouring things onto the blank page, very different to his painting, which seems to be more calculated and thought out that one would first suspect after reading snapshots of his writing. The letters inform us that Vincent found the cost and availability of paints and its sister materials trying, which explains why he has used such unusual and unstable materials to paint on and with: tea-towels for canvases and pigments which now have faded leaving behind the white that can be seen in some works.

Opposite this in the same room are the photos of Vincent aged nineteen and his younger brother Theo. These simple, almost locket like, sepia photos seem to convey the reality that this exhibition is not only about the artist himself and his works, but his relationship with others, particularly his loyal brother, who is the main recipient of the letters displayed in this show. It should perhaps not be called ‘The Real Van Gogh’, but ‘The Correspondence That Made the Man’.

The exhibition leads the visitor through Vincent Van Gogh’s ten year career but it is not based on his chronological path. It is more thematically designed, moving through the topics that Van Gogh discussed so ardently in his letters and focusing on his development as an artist. It begins with his struggles in his initial career with perspective that he famously calls “Downright witchcraft” and teaching himself to draw in the Dutch landscape. We see in a letter to Theo he draws a wooden perspective tool he made to help him overcome this. The exhibition moves through figurative drawings, to colour and the Japanese prints that were a fashionable source of inspiration for up-an-coming artists of the time that influenced his application of bold, flat tones. The exhibition then moves to the modern portrait, and via the literature that he devoured, to his later paintings in Arles and further afield within the realms of nature, and sacrifices he made for his art. You could almost say the genius of this exhibit is that Vincent himself tells us to look at what is actually there – not what our imaginations or years of critical comments have told us.

The letters displayed in the show are actually very instructive and demonstrate what they are designed to do: to re- inform the visitor, however their small size and vast numbers makes it hard for viewers to really appreciate the workings within, when trying to move through the vast crowds surrounding each item on display, you would need a good half day to go through this exhibition properly. This is something which the curators could have designed better when planning the exhibit. Unless one reads the majority of the text on offer, one might not realise that the curators have tried to show the visitor something new: Van Gogh’s letter describing his work, with a working sketch, along with the picture on display.

Unnecessary repetition of accompanying text can prove frustrating. This could be deliberate; however, it seems rather sloppy and makes the viewer feel cheated of the time taken to read. Every piece is supposed to have individual significance; if that is the case, then it should merit something new and interesting to read.

This exhibition is all about learning and the curators seem determined to teach the visitor something about the artist. There is information everywhere about the man, even down to a small “learning centre” behind a display, a reading and interactive spaces with computers giving the visitor even more information about the exhibition and the man.

Visitors may be disappointed with this exhibition. The majority of the works shown here do not really illustrate anything about the artist’s actual talent. There are no “great” works of art to be seen.  It conveys more of his own thoughts about his ability. The beginning of the exhibit seems to have some sort of story to it. One understands what influenced him to become the artist so commonly recognised, however at the end of the exhibition one feels that there is no great climax, nothing save the fragment of the last letter he wrote, discovered in the clothing he wore the day he walked into the middle of a field to shoot himself. Even the letter does not give us an ending. It is a piece of writing filled with the joys of painting, not a suicide note. This is perhaps something that the exhibition lacks, anything that sums up who Van Gogh really was from his decade-long career. But perhaps that is the point: his death was his final statement on his life, and even that is not what we would imagine.

This exhibition is not designed to show the whole story of Van Gogh, more to re inform the viewer of the mythical artist. It is knocking down preconceptions of how Vincent worked, and telling the story through Vincent’s own voice, not just the hearsay of a century of gossip mutilated into fact.