Steve_Bamlett_blog

THE EY Van Gogh & Britain Exhibition: Tate Britain Seen 02/05/2019

Let’s get the worst over. Seeing this exhibition is a nightmare if like me you are appalled by the victory of ineffective management processing of large numbers of people over curatorial innovation – the numbers distract and overwhelm as thousands press towards each painting seen only through the placement of each as the focus of a photograph on a mobile phone. You can count the very few who actually seem to look at the pictures with the naked eye.

This is a pity because this is an exhibition of great curatorial flair. Inevitably the crowds hover around those incomparable van Gogh’s that are rightly celebrated. Seeing these paintings is seeing something wonderful, especially in the clear painterly handling of colouring, and surface volumes – paint itself emerges as a kind of miracle. However, this exhibition is at Tate Britain for a purpose – in fact three purposes:

1. To show Van Gogh’s ability to learn a national artist tradition such as that in Britain and despite the resistances value its lessons. Hence we can try to see the debt to Millais rather than to Japan
   (although the latter is forever obvious and glorious). This extends beyond British artists to British collections in the then Galleries. But influence on Van Gogh is only a small part of the story as it should be. And, if anything that ‘influence’ is shown at its greatest through writing in English – notably George Eliot, who appears more dominant in this show than the well-trodden debts to Dickens.
   Carlyle’s Past and Present and Sartor Resartus speak though too with
   great volume. Van Gogh’s special fondness for Hard Times comes out as a reminder that he was a great defender of the social marginal subject, partly reinforced by British radicalism. Some very great paintings (the Trunk of an Old Yew Tree 1888) stick out, despite Harold Gilman’s debt to it) as not about Van
   Gogh and Britain but Van Gogh and a
   deep internalisation of Japanese tradition.
2. To emphasise the importance to Van Gogh of relationships to British artist and dealers in Paris as well as London, through choice as well as Goupil contingency.
3. To show the range of ways in which Van Gogh changed the direction of English and Scottish painting. In the process we can re-evaluate Matthew Smith, Peploe, Spencer Gore, Sickert and Christopher Wood and, for me, most important and surprising of all, David Bomberg. We enter into much suppressed British traditions in painting by this route – traditions intrinsically alien to the still dominant official narratives of modernism that still dominate Art History courses. These traditions are not only those we name figurative but also those which see form and content as in much tauter and complex inter-relationship and interaction. There are contestable surprises but I did think Sickert’s The Juvenile Lead (Self-Portrait) 1908 sang out as rightly placed if you looked long enough.

Of course to end the show with Francis Bacon’s very great Van Gogh portrait figures in landscape is a stroke of genius – however obvious it seems in retrospect. Here a very great painter sees into another’s subject, forms, compositional and stylistic innovations. What emerges is incomparable because great on another parallel, whereas strangely my other favourite modern, Bomberg, is great in the exact same line, despite lack of evidence for acknowledged influence in this latter case.

To see this show (now impossible) next to Bonnard is instructive. Surface comparisons between the artists are unhelpful except in saying both are great colourists but the poverty of that adjective emerges in close comparisons of the use of surface colouring and layering. It is not only because Bonnard uses impasto effect very sparingly in some great paintings but that the use of the latter is vital in Van Gogh as is the use of lines of deeply ‘impastoed’ waves of paint in straight or hatched lines in Van Gogh. Not in Bonnard whose medium is the deceptive transparency of films of paint – the gauze of textile or even the Southern air.

This is a greater exhibition than I can say though its people management processes nearly killed it).