VAN GOGH'S

CONTEMPORANEITY
An exhihition that highlights the Dutch artist's
penchant for repeating images prompts
new thoughts on his relevance in the 21st century.

hy Michael Lohel

CURRENTLY ON
VIEWVanGogh
Repetitions," at the
Cleveland Museum
of Art, through
May 25.

MICHAEL
LOBEL is a
professor of art
history at Purchase
College, State
University of
New York. See
Contributors page.

AT THIS POINT, one could reasonably say that Vincent van

Gogh has become the Rodney Dangerfield of modern artists. Don't get me wrong; obviously, his work attracts massive
outpourings of attention and love from the public, and it
commands astronomical prices on the market. And by now it
is a clich to point out that his images circulate in a seemingly
endless variety of reproductionsfrom dorm room posters and
refrigerator magnets to mouse pads and iPhone cases. Nevertheless, they do not seem to command a commensurate level
of respect. This is no doubt due to their enormous popularity,
which for some (regrettably) argues against taking van Gogh
seriously. And it also must have something to do with his role
as a tragicfigure:the ear incident, the emotional struggles, the
untimely death (the details of which still invite endless speculation). The combination of these factors has largely pushed aside
consideration of van Gogh as a serious artist, at least among the
cognoscenti. With his wildman persona and his work's expressive underpinnings, he seems utterly a creature of the 19th
century. Wherein lies his relevance for art today?
A comparison with fellow Post-Impressionist Paul
Czanne is illuminating in this respect. Czanne is the head
to van Gogh's heart; the former's deliberate approach and
116

MAY 2014

engagement with the theoretical complexities of vision put

him much more in line with the conceptualist leanings and
restrained affect of wide swaths of contemporary artistic practice (as well as the preoccupations of much current art writing). That's why it is difficult to imagine, at least at present,
a van Gogh equivalent to the 2009 Philadelphia Museum of
Art exhibition "Czanne and Beyond."That show connected
Czanne not only to key modern masters (Matisse, Mondrian
and Leger among them) but also to a range of practitioners
working today, including Brice Marden, Sherrie Levine, Jeff
Wall and Francis Alys. Those sorts of contemporary connections just don't seem as evident in van Gogh's case. This is less
a question, however, of the shortcomings of his art than of our
own ability to grasp its full range and resonance.
How might we begin to perceive the continuing relevance
of van Gogh and his work? A recent show at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C, currently on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art, made some headway on that front. As
its title suggests, "Van Gogh Repetitions" focuses on a notable
aspect of the artist's practice, namely his inclination to repeat
the same image or motif in multiple iterations and formats.
The exhibition's impetus was a comparative study undertaken

Vincent van
Gogh: The Large
Plane Trees (Road
Menders at SaintRimy), 1889, oil on
fahric, 28% by 36V8
inches. Cleveland
Museum of Art.

The Road Menders,

1889, oil on
canvas, 29 by ibVi
inches. Phillips
Collection,
Washington, D.C.

Weaver, 1884,
pencil, pen, ink
and watercolor
on paper, 12 by
16 inches. Van
Gogh Museum,
Amsterdam.

by curators and conservators at the Cleveland Museum of Art

ofthat institution's The Large Plane Trees (Road Menders at
Saint-Rmy) and the Phillips Collection's The Road Menders
(both 1889)closely related versions of a boulevard scene.
The show eventually grew into a display of groupings of
repeated motifs by the artist: three versions of weavers at
their looms, four postman Roulins (three painted, one in ink
on paper), eight etchings of Dr. Gachet. While copying and
repetition were common features of 19th-century artistic
practice within both the academy and the avant-garde, van
Gogh's intense embrace of them can already help us shift out of
received notions of his work: here we see him not as the painter
of nature par excellence, proceeding directly from the motif
and striving for the expressive ideal of the original, authentic
gesture, but rather as an artist who understood the modern
condition of the image as repeating and repeatable and subject
to extensive circulation in the form of reproductions.^ Already,
this version of van Gogh is more compatible with the artistic
outlook of our own time, in which the strategy of appropriation
has become a central device in the artist's toolkit.
While bringing together a relatively small body of works,
the exhibition nonetheless points out the limitation imposed
by the common framing of van Gogh's career. The earliest
works included were several in an extensive series of depictions
118

MAY 2014

of weavers that he executed around 1884, while living in the

town of Nuenen, the Netherlands, where his parents were then
residing. In their relatively dark palette and their subject matterin most cases, a single seatedfigureworking at a loom
these pictures are far, in both formal effect and emotional affect,
from the van Gogh pictures that keep museum gift shops buzzing. And this is precisely the point; the most readily identifiable
of van Gogh's imagesThe Starry Night (1889), the bedrooms,
the countryside around Aries and Saint-Rmy in the south of
France, the Roulin family portraitsdate from only the last
two years or so of his life. For a career that was itself relatively
short (a scant decade), the representative "van Gogh" is thus
woefuUy abbreviated. The weavers, better known to scholars
and specialists, offer a useflxl corrective. These aren't the more
uplifting depictions of agricultural laborers, sowers and the like,
out in sun-drenchedfields,but rather workers indoors, in close,
cramped conditions, engaged in manufacture. They are also
distinctive in that their tools are not particularly up-to-date,
an aspect of van Gogh's approach to representing rural labor
that has provided the grist for analyses by scholars like
Griselda Pollock and Carol Zemel.^ Van Gogh's weavers
work on heavy, wooden, antique looms, ones at least a century old by the time he depicted them. If, by that point, power
looms and the factories in which they operated had become

VAN GOGH

Weaver, 1884, oil

on canvas, 2A%
by 33U inches.
Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston.

symbols of industrialization (and of the social and economic

changes it brought with it), his treatment of the subject comes
off as a kind of politically aware proto-steampunk, a deliberate archaization of the mechanical.
The overpowering presence of biography in the general
reception of van Gogh, given an early, decisive boost by Irving
Stone's novelized Lustfor Life (1934) and its later screen version by Vincente Minnelli, has effectively shaped the image of
the artist as one who savored direct contact with the natural
world and its formsits sunflowers, its wheatfields,its starlit
nights-all the while submitting them to his own powerful,
expressive vision. Yet, in point of fact, van Gogh was markedly conversant with, and at home in, the realm of mechanical reproduction, dating back to even before he decided to
become an artist. When he was just setting out in the professional world in the 1870s, family connections to the art market (his uncle and namesake. Cent, was in the art business)
helped him land a position with the prestigious Goupil & Cie
gallery, which maintained branches in various European cities.
Goupil, which would also come to employ Vincent's younger
brother Theo, was not only a commercial powerhouse but also
one of the primary firms responsible for developing a market
for reproductions of works of art in the 19th century. Goupil
operated a photographic works in Asnires, on the outskirts

of Paris, where it employed proprietary printing processes to

churn out art reproductions, including compilations of works
that had been exhibited in the annual Paris Salon. Indeed,
Goupil was the publisher of materials pivotal to van Gogh's
development and his experience of artistic repetition: Charles
Bargue's collections of lithographed drawing exercises, including the Cours de dessin and Exercices aufusain, from which the
artist-in-training diligently copied in order to teach himself
how to draw.
Vincent's time in Goupil's London office was crucial to
his immersion in yet another sector of the culture of mechanical reproduction. As chronicled extensively in Martin Bailey's
1992 exhibition catalogue Van Gogh in England, it was during
the artist's three years in the British capital that he discovered,
and fell in love with, the black-and-white illustrations in
popular printed publications like the Illustrated London News
and The Graphic.^ A decade later, in his early years of fashioning himself as an artist, van Gogh would write to his friend
Anthon van Rappard,
I do assure you that The Graphics I now have are
amazingly interesting. More than ten years ago I used
to go every week to the display case of the printer
of The Graphic and London News in London to see

VAN GOGH

ART IN AMERICA 119

the weekly publications. The impressions I gained

there on the spot were so strong that the drawings
have remained clear and bright in my mind, despite
everything that has since gone through my head.
And now it sometimes seems to me as if nothing lies
between those old days and nowat any rate my old
enthusiasm for them is now greater rather than less
than it was originally."*

The Postman Joseph

Rou/in, 1889,
oil on canvas, 25^8
by 2P4 inches.
Krller-Mller
Museum, Otterlo.

Van Gogh was referring to a 21-volume set of bound

issues of The Graphic that he had recently bought at auction.
This was his largest purchase of the kind but certainly not
the only one, as he made regular purchases of back issues and
individual sheets, mounting selected ones on paper backings
to better preserve and organize them.
To say that van Gogh was passionate about the work
of these English illustrators would be an understatement.
His missives, particularly to van Rappard, are filled with
detailed descriptions of specific images and rapturous
praise for their makers' efforts, refiecting his attraction both to the social consciousness evidenced in these
pictures and their simple, bold rendering. This latter facet
of Van Gogh's personality would have found ample room
for expression in our own time: it is easy to imagine him
haunting the aisles of a comic book shop, rifiing through
back issues stowed in mylar sleeves; or regularly posting

on an online forum, debating the relative merits of one

artist's work over another's. In other words, particularly
in his exhaustive, exhausting, at times rambling letters,
which convey his clear enthusiasm for and attentiveness
to the minutiae of the forms of popular culture, van Gogh
emerges as the essence of a distinctively contemporary
type: the ardent, devoted fanboy. (Although it no doubt
would strike some as a perverse comparison to make, in the
tone of his letters and his disquisitions on illustration van
Gogh often reminds me of the portly, ponytailed Comic
Book Guy from "The Simpsons" animated seriesboth of
them evincing a preoccupation with the fine shadings of
pop culture paired with no small degree of social awkwardness.) In his correspondence, he will move from declaring
that prints from the early years of The Graphic "form a kind
of bible for an artist"^ to weighing in on the comparative
merits of illustrators like Hubert von Herkomer, Frank
HoU and Arthur Boyd Houghtonnow almost unknown
to usto bemoaning the decline of the craft of wood
engraving. His particular brand of fandom was of the type
shaded with nostalgia, as he preferred back issues to the
current crop and extolled the black-and-white drawings
that had appeared a decade or more prior, all the while
lamenting the decline of illustration in the present day.
For him, this devotion to popular imagery wasn't an end in
itself but rather a motivation for his own art, as evidenced
in another letter to van Rappard: "I assure you that whenever I'm a little downhearted, my collection of woodcuts
gives me fresh heart to set to work myself."^
It occurs to me that, in this way, van Gogh would have
been at home in the 21st centurynot mostly, or at least not
only, because his psychiatric or medical problems would have
been more readily identified (and, hopefully, treated), but
also because his characterological attributes are consonant
with the current cultural climate. He shares traits with the
bloggers and social media mavens who flourish in the digital
world: indefatigable, at times obsessional, and, most important of all, logorrheic. Consider the popular caricature of
users of websites hke Reddit, which bills itself as "the front
page of the Internet." Socially awkward (and potentially
hygiene-challenged) men in their 20s and 30s living in their
parents'basements and ruminating over the minutiae of a
certain subsector of cultureStar Wars, computer gaming,
bronies, Japanese anime, or what have you-are, upon reflection, not that far from what van Gogh was like. If, like them,
the artist is generally portrayed as a loner and social outcast,
in fact he consistently sought out human connections, even
as his interpersonal and emotional difliculties got in the
way of establishing them. He repeatedly tried to reach out
to others: in a series of ultimately abortive love afl^airs with
women, in his up-and-down relationship with Theo, in his
associations with a succession of artists including van Rappard, Emile Bernard and, most famouslyor infamously
Paul Gauguin. (Not to mention that social awkwardness is
no longer the obstacle to success it once was, as attested to
by the burgeoning ranks of computer nerds-turned-Silicon

Front page of the

Illustrated London
News, Oct. 25,
1851.

120

MAY 2014

VAN GOGH

Le Moulin de la
Galette, 1886,
oil on canvas, 15
by 181/4 inches.
Nationalgalerie,
Staatliche Museen,
Berlin.

Valley tycoons.) He was also not averse to doing similar

Sea, Saintes-Maries-e-la-Mer {18SS) to Bernard and John
networking in the professional realm. This was the case, for
Russell. In Bernard's version, the foaming turbulence of
instance, when he executed a hthograph of The Potato Eaters the tide is matched by the active pose of the foreground
(1885) before he had even finished work on the painting,
sailor, while that figure's more relaxed posture in Russell's
sending the print off to Theo in Paris with the hopes of
version finds its complement in a comparably calmer sea.
drumming up interest in the forthcoming canvasan early
(The repetition did not end there, since there is a third
attempt at building an artistic brand.
version that went to Theo.) For Vincent, repeating an
In other words, van Gogh's character and approach
image was a means of circulating it in the world, sending it
accord with the particular combination of intimacy and
through communication channels to a social network that,
distance emblematic of our online age.'' And his desire to
one hoped, might distribute it still further (even if this was
transmit his art through a social network of sorts served
largely an unmet goal in his case). Remember this the next
as a basis for his interest in repetition. His habit of giving
time you post an image to social media or attach one to an
away and sending off works to friends, family members
e-mail, most fittingly if the latter is sent to several recipiand associates often resulted in multiple versions of the
ents at once. Who knowsit might even be a van Gogh. O
same painted motif Other repetitions, particularly his
memorable drawings in reed pen, were meant to keep
1. A current show at New York's Museum of Modern Art, "Gauguin: Metamorphocorrespondents apprised of his activities by providing
ses," accomplishes much the same thing by pointing out the frequent reliance on
repetition and reproduction in the work of van Gogh's contemporary Paul Gauguin.
them with small-scale renditions of painted works. One of
For an earlier scholarly argument along these same lines, see Alastair Wright, "Parathose drawings, a picture of Joseph Roulin included in the
dise Lost: Gauguin and the Melancholy Logic of Reproduction," in Alastair Wright
exhibition, is both a portrait of a friendthe postman who
and Calvin Brown, Gauguin's Paradise Remembered: The Noa Noa Prints, Princeton,
N.J., Princeton University Art Museum, 2010, pp. 49-99.
had become a companion to the artist in Ariesand a gift
2. See, for instance, Carol Zemel, Van Gogh's Progress: Utopia, Modernity, and Latefor a friend, since it was sent to Bernard, one of van Gogh's
Nineteenth-Century Art,"eth\ey,\nv!e!Aty of CsMomid.Vxess, 1997.
regular correspondents. Hence the annotations at the bot3. Martin Bailey, Van Gogh in England: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, London,
Barbican Gallery, 1992.
tom, which note the color scheme of the canvas on which
4. Van Gogh to Anthon van Rappard, circa Feb. 4,1883, from Vincent van Gogh:
it was based. Often, the rendering varies significantly from
The Letters website, http://vangoghletters.org; retrieved Mar. 20, 2014.
one drawing to another, even when the same motif is being
5. Letter to van Rappard, circa Feb. 10,1883, ibid., retrieved Mar. 20,2014.
6. Letter to van Rappard, circa Oct. 29,1882, ibid., retrieved Mar. 20, 2014.
repeated, as if a single picture were being translated into
distinct visual dialects depending on the intended recipient. 7. For one such view of digital media's impact on human relationships and identity,
see Sherry Turkle, ^/oi" Together: Why We Expect Morefrom Technology and Less from
For instance, van Gogh sent different versions of Boats at
Each Other, New York, Basic Books, 2011.
VAN GOGH

ART IN AMERICA 123

The Postman Joseph

Roulin, 1889,
oil on canvas,
25V4by21>/4 inches.
Kunstmuseum
Winterthur,
Switzerland.

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