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Self-portrait with Japanese print, December 1887

Images courtesy of Kunstmuseum, Basel, Switzerland. Click on images to view larger

By Bob Evans

Basel, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - “In landscapes, Van Gogh found the peace of mind and balance that was missing from his own life.”

Visitors to a stunning exhibition at Basel’s Kunstmuseum this summer could be excused if they found reason to quibble with this assertion from its curators as they emerge from the 70-painting  survey of the Dutch artist’s frenetic 10-year career in the last-but-one decade of the 19th century.

A European cultural event of the year

But there is no doubt that the show in this 1,000-year-old art-mad city is a European cultural event of the year.

“Vincent Van Gogh-Between Earth and Heaven: The Landscapes” has already attracted a record for the Kunstmuseum, one of the continent’s recognized greats, with 250,000 people from around the world in the initial 90 days of its five-month run.

Billed as the first-ever exhibition to cover landscapes from every period of Van Gogh’s  work, it ranges from the dark tones of the 1881-85 Brabant rural scenes through to the bright but restrained northern French country views of the frenziedly-productive three months in Auvers before he shot himself in July 1890 on a walk through the fields.

Farmhouse in Provence, June 1888

Cornfield in Provence, June 1888

In between, it covers the bright cityscapes and suburban vistas of his two years in Paris from 1886-88, the blooming orchards and deep-blue sky-and-yellow- wheat Provence harvest scenes of his eventful year in Arles, and the menacing cloud swirls and twisting trees of the 12 months he spent as a patient in the psychiatric hospital at St Remy.

A period of mental turmoil

These last, as they have for many critics over the century and more since his death at the age of 37, surely encapsulate and express the mental turmoil that had built over years as he moved from unsuccessful art dealer to failed Protestant preacher and finally to the penniless painter that he was at his suicide.

They include “The Garden of Saint Paul’s Hospital” of November 1889, where the brown chunky stump of a decapitated tree leans towards the gray-green wall of the hospital like a stricken giant seeking support – an image that was certainly intended to convey the sufferings of the anguished painter himself.

Also there are “Enclosed Field with Ploughman,” a clear allegory of his confinement, and the  archetypal olive groves and cypresses and a reaper amid sun-soaked wheat painted during the first half of his confinement – symbols of his erratic but firm-held Christian belief.

Little sign here, then, of “peace of mind.”

The works on show in Basel have been gathered in from public and private collections in Europe, the United States, Israel and Japan – the last a country whose delicate art style he partly adopted and which he longed to visit, had the needed funds ever been available.
But Van Gogh, like so many other great artists throughout history, was largely unrecognized until after his death when, as the exhibition’s carefully-documented catalogue declares, it was quickly recognized that he had been a revolutionary whose influence stretched well into the 20th century and beyond.

Throughout his decade as a full-time artist, he was supported financially by his younger brother Theo, who as an art dealer in Paris had followed one of the twin career lines that ran back over three or four generations of the Van Gogh family. The other, which Vincent had tried and abandoned before he decided to dedicate himself to painting in 1880 at the age of 27, was the Dutch Reformed ministry of their father.

From dark to lighter

Flower beds in Holland, April 1883

Angler and boat at the bridge of Clichy, 1887

Among the paintings of the Dutch period in the Basel exhibition, sponsored by UBS,  are “The Old Tower at Nuenen” of 1884, one of a series in which a grim, stark church stands amid ploughed fields, and “Potato Planting” of April 1885, two of his best-known early works.

In Paris, where he moved in 1886 when Theo suggested he would benefit from contact with the Impressionists and their successors, his palette lightened and religious themes seemed to become less pervasive.

In Basel, alongside familiar Montmartre and Paris rooftop scenes are delicate suburban vistas: “The Seine Bridge as Asnieres” of 1887 and a triptych collectively dubbed “Riverbanks in Clichy” showing strong influence of Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro.

But the social themes of the Dutch period, perhaps sparked by his brief exposure as a would-be missionary to the dismal life of miners in northern Belgium in the late 1870s, also re-emerged, in the exhibition’s “Factories at Asnieres” portraying the push of industrialization into the previously unspoilt countryside around Paris.

Time in the South

Garden with flowers, July 1888

Concluding in 1888 that living in the city was affecting both his physical and mental health, he uprooted and went south in search of warmth and light, leaving the train during a freak snowstorm in Arles, the ancient Roman city on the plain of Provence where he set up house with the aim of establishing an artistic community.

Always prolific, and always creating his landscapes live, he produced some 200 paintings and 100 drawings over the following year – starting, as the spring came, with the blooming orchards and cypress trees that he became convinced, as he told Theo in a letter, would help sell his work to Northerners, and especially the English.

Cypresses, June 1889

cypress”Apricot Trees in Blossom” and “Orchard Bordered by Cypresses” represent that period, in Basel, and are quickly succeeded by the sharply contrasting deep blues, sharp yellows and  greens of “Grain Harvest in Provence”, “The Wheatfield”, and “White Mas (Farmhouse) at Saintes-Maries” that are often viewed as the height of his art.

But amid the creative activity, his project for setting up an artists’ collective in the small town, where his sometimes erratic behaviour led local people to dub him “le fou roux” (“the mad red-head”), crumbled.

Paul Gaugin, whom he knew from Paris, agreed to come down and stay with him at the Yellow House – the famous painting of which is not part of the Basel show. But they soon quarrelled and in a fit of fury two days before Christmas 1888 Van Gogh sliced off a part of his earlobe – not his whole ear as popular mythology still holds.

View over Arles with irises, May 1888

Gaugin departed, and after a brief stay in hospital Van Gogh resumed painting alone. “Peach Blossom in the Crau” and “Landscape under a Stormy Sky” represent in Basel that still productive period, cut short when he became increasingly alarmed at his rapidly fluctuating moods and checked himself into the St Remy clinic in May 1888.

Recurring mental crises constantly interrupted his work there and exactly a year later, advised by Pissarro, Theo moved his elder brother into the care of Dr Paul Gachet, a specialist in depression and similar illnesses who had treated other well-known artists, at Auvers on the River Oise just north of Paris.

Over the next three months, and despite a mistrust of the doctor, he produced over 80 works, mainly landscapes – “Daubigny’s Garden” and “Farms near Auvers” are included in the exhibition. But he also worked on portraits, one of a pensive Gachet himself which a century later was one of the most highly-priced paintings on the world market.

The enigma of a final love endures

The Basel show ends on an enigma, not so much on the reasons for shooting himself in the chest – which could well have been a cry for help rather than a genuine suicide attempt – as on his relations with Gachet’s 21-year-old daughter Marguerite, who accompanied him on expeditions with his paints and easel into the surrounding countryside.

Exceptionally, the exhibition includes his portrait “Mademoiselle Gachet at the Piano” placed  alongside “The Plain at Auvers” which Van Gogh told Theo in a letter complemented each other.

“It is believed that he developed feelings for her that were not requited,” says the superb Basel catalogue. But it cites little evidence either way for a love that would have been hardly surprising for the artist whose constant search for female affection mirrored his sense of the lack of appreciation he felt his talent had encountered in the world at large.

How did Marguerite, a 21-year-old provincial girl used to artists around the family circle but perhaps not to one who made her the subject of portraits and drawings and took her on his painting sorties, respond?

“The Last Van Gogh”, a 2006 novel by US writer Alyson Richman on offer at the exhibition’s extensive bookshop, suggests she did indeed fall for him. Richman, who researched extensively into the Gachet family background, argues that Marguerite was in fact the last – if unconsummated – love of the painter’s life.

The exhibition lasts until 27 September 27

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