"We are going to tell you something that will interest you:
we have made some excursions to the brothels and it is likely that we will return to work often
." This is how Vincent van Gogh and his admired Paul Gauguin boasted about
how they killed time in Arles
, while dreaming of creating A community of modern and utopian painters in the south of France. Both artists wrote these words in a letter sent to their friend Emile Bernard in 1888. They told him with enthusiasm the plans they were hatching from the emblematic Yellow House in Arles.
A hyperactive Van Gogh Almost manic, disappointed and confused, nervous and depressed
, he turned his writing into a lifesaver in which he unburdened himself with words, sketches and drawings.
The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has taken advantage of the pandemic to remove some of its most fragile pieces, which it never exhibits due to its delicacy and sensitivity to light, ambient temperature and the wear that could be caused by moving them
.
Your Vincent, with love
is an exhibition of 40 of the 820 letters written by the post-impressionist master, with beautiful and careful calligraphy, which include unpublished details about his life and works.
The correspondence of that lonely man, mostly sent to his brother Theo, is a significant resume of his long wanderings through South Holland, Brabant, Drenthe, Belgium and the south of France,
when he sought to find himself
in a corner, between canvases and brushes.
Sketch of 'The Peasant Sowing' in one of Van Gogh's letters.
In them, intimate details and curious reflections are collected.
Van Gogh discusses the size of the heads in
The Potato Eaters
, his painting from April 1885, which is drawn in what he himself called a "scrawl" in a letter dated April 9.
He had a hard time correctly locating the "women's heads" of "those farmers surrounding a plate of potatoes."
He was attracted to the fishermen on the beach of Scheveningen, a coastal district of The Hague, which also hosted a soup kitchen frequented by the painter, a recurring theme in his letters.
But he
not only talks about art, he also talks about that girlfriend he had, an ex-prostitute who left him abducted
, about his need for love, and about his financial problems.
Theo ended up supporting him for 10 years, in exchange for sending him paintings to sell in Paris, where he worked as an art dealer.
"These letters speak of things with which we all feel identified these days, they collect everything from
loneliness, love, friendship, need, depression, tensions,
" underlines the museum's curator Nienke Bakker to EL MNDO , about a treasure that the art gallery kept in its pantry for fear of wear and tear.
One of the key times was 1888, a year full of emotions for Van Gogh.
It began with a painter who was passionate about building the foundations of modern art, and ended with the artist mutilating his earlobe on Christmas Eve.
He had lost his mind and it was the beginning of his decline, the beginning of the end for one of the most admired artists of the nineteenth century.
With tired eyes, a barely intelligible handwriting and a document full of studs, Van Gogh sketched on October 17, a few days before Gauguin's arrival in Arles, his bedroom of pine furniture, which he would later turn into his famous work
The room
.
"I wanted to express absolute tranquility with those different tones in which the only white is the little note that the black frame mirror gives," he said.
The letters are on display, until January 10, along with the final work outlined in each of them.
They range from the first known, written by a 19-year-old Van Gogh who was enjoying an internship as an art dealer in The Hague, back in 1872, to two recent acquisitions: the joint one written by Van Gogh and Gauguin (November 1, 1888), for which this museum paid 210,600 euros, and the one that the painter wrote on February 9, 1890 to the critic Albert Aurier, acquired for almost 108,000.
Sketch of 'The room', in Van Gogh's letters.
Handwritten, these letters enabled experts around the world to understand what was going through the mind of a unique artist.
"I can also have prejudices against women who wear dresses. My territory is more those who wear jackets and skirts," he
wrote on March 2, 1885 to his brother, criticizing the women represented by the French painter Jean-Baptiste Simeon Chardin (1699-1779), influenced by the Dutch style.
"In my opinion, respectable Dutch ladies like our sisters really lack, in an extraordinary way, the charm that French women have.
I don't find it very attractive to paint or think about the supposedly decent side of Dutch women
, but certain common servants, on the other hand, they are very
chardinesque
", added the artist.
After fighting with Gauguin, mutilating his ear and suffering a nervous breakdown that ended with him being admitted to an asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in March 1889, Van Gogh did not throw in the towel.
He asked his brother, in a few words written on the envelope of another letter he just received from Theo because he had run out of paper, to send him brushes so he could paint from the mental hospital because that would help him recover.
"I'm locked up for days and with guards at the door
. Maybe this is nothing more than a quarantine I'm going through. Who knows!" He told her, squeezing the letters because he had run out of space.
Van Gogh had been kicked out of his Yellow House by neighbors scared to see how he had been able to cut off his ear.
"I'm not crazy, I'm the brother you already know,"
he pleaded with Theo.
Van Gogh's life, and the sample of letters that he never imagined would go down in history, ends with a letter dated July 27, 1890. "Thank you for your letter today and for the 50 franc note it contained. What to insist on less important things, if the business is going well, what is the main thing? It will surely be a long time before I can talk to you about other matters with a calmer head, "the artist began to write in what was his last letter.
That time with a calm mind never came.
This letter was in his pocket on the 29th, the fateful day he was found dead.
It was addressed to Theo, his friend and confidant, and the younger brother whose heart he broke with his departure.
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