Van Gogh Poster

I've been staring at a Van Gogh poster a lot lately that I acquired last summer in St Remy de Provence, the village where Van Gogh voluntarily committed himself after cutting off a portion of his ear in nearby Arles. I visited Arles years ago but this was my first time in St Remy. I'd always heard what a beautiful village it was and I wasn't disappointed, but is there an ugly village in Provence? I'm not a fanatic abouty tracing an artist's footsteps but I have been to Neunen, Van Gogh's home village in Holland and to Rue Lepic, where he lived with his brother in Paris. I think it can be misleading to know too much about an artist's private life when you can best discover an artist through their works. All of the speculation about Van Gogh's mental health or possible physical maladies are pointless. One must accept the man and his work at face value, not as the work of a madman or handicapped delusional. Still, there I was in St Remy and I'd heard that you can visit the hospital and actual room where he'd stayed....

The first step was the tourist bureau where you encounter all things Van Gogh. How ironic that the site of so much of his suffering has made its fortune off his misery.Even out of season there were still plenty of tourists who were also on the Van Gogh trail. The locals have obviously figured out this is a lucrative trade and there are walking tours of Van Gogh sites as well as prints, gifts and other information. I found out how to get to the hospital and took a glance at the posters for sale. I flipped through the big bin and recognized the beautiful works that he had created in the area. I couldn't resist buying one, especially with the St Remy notations which somehow made them seem more authentic. I selected a less known work of Van Gogh's, one that he had painted in St Remy but which was not a local scene. The title is "The First Steps" and is a copy of a work by Jean-Francois Millet. Before I describe it further I will briefly mention my visit to the hospital.

The St Paul de Mausole Asylum is still in operation and is a brief walk of about a mile outside of the village. You can drive of course but there is also a quieter path with markers along the way showing actual spots where Van Gogh painted. Considering the amount of development in the South of France, the countryside around St Remy is still remarkably similar as to when Van Gogh lived there. The asylum is lovely and quiet but they do charge you admission. There was a steady stream of visitors the day I was there, including many Japanese tourists, and the narrow passageways were cramped at times. The highlight, if you will, was to see his bedroom, which looked pretty much as you would expect. It was Spartan but appealingly simple and clean. I thought, "I could (happily) live here." The view out his window form the second story almost breaks your heart, for you're looking at one of his paintings and the effect is a bit eerie as if you were looking through his eyes. I realized then how terribly unhappy he must have been or what little control he had over his mind at that time if he couldn't be happy in one of the most beautiful villages in one of the most beautiful areas of France.

When I got home I put the poster right where I'd planned, on my living room wall leading to the kitchen where I'd be constantly seeing it. So, why this painting? When Van Gogh was at the asylum, the doctors and attendants wanted to be very careful not to upset him. They weren't sure if it would be good for him to paint or even to leave the grounds of the hospital. Perhaps the feverish pace of his painting in Arles had contributed to his mental breakdown. So when Van Gogh went back to painting he began slowly and executed many copies. He was very knowledgable about contemporary artists and trends. He collected illustrated magazines and there are many comments in his letters about the prints he collected. He painted many copies at this time. I am not sure of the exact order but I believe his copies of Delacroix's "The Good Samaritan", Rembrandt's "Lazarus", Daumier's "The Topers" and several by Millet were all painted at this time. These copies reveal Van Gogh's great loves and passion, for the spiritual, the religious, the humility of Christ's teachings, the draughtsmanship of his heroes (Daumier, Rembrandt), his countryman Rembrandt, and the love of the earth and the peasants found in Millet. In many ways I believe Van Gogh saw himself as the successor to Millet. Van Gogh's early studies of peasants in Holland and his masterpiece, "The Potato Eaters", all bear the same passion if not the technical mastery of Millet. Millet was a curious artist who shunned Paris and the more glamourous subjects of his contemporaries and only belatedly received recognition for his beautiful works of rural life. My poster is a copy of Millet's "The First Steps" which shows a simple family in the country in the garden behind the house or barn. The mother is just letting go of a small girl only about a year old who is eagerly taking her first steps as she lurches forward. The father is a few feet away and bent down at the knees to recieve the child in his arms. It is a touching scene which contains all of the tenderness and emotion of such a moment. Not only does the painting show Van Gogh's love of the rural life and the simple people he admired but there was potentialy a deeper connection. Van Gogh's brother, Theo, had married recently and his young wife had given birth to a baby boy who they'd named Vincent. This must have been very touching to Vincent for the hommage of his namesake and also because of his childless state. It has been conjectured that Vincent felt guilty about being a financial burden to his brother at a critical moment of his life when his brother was struggling to make ends meet with his own young family. So in this one painting you can see Van Gogh's love of his artistic hero, his love for the peasants of the soil, and a tragic reminder of his personal story.

As I stare at this poster daily I think about Millet as much as Van Gogh. I think Millet has been a bit forgotten due to the evervesence of the Impressionists who followed him. Also, many people might mistakenly think of Millet as trite from having seen too may bad reproductions of "The Angelus" showing the peasnats praying in the field or "The Gleaners" with the three peasnt women bent over amassing the final bits of wheat left behind. (Dali once called "The Gleaners" the sexiest painting ever painted!) I have a book of Millet's drawings and pastels which brings his work into a brighter and more modern light. The paintings can seem dark or overworked but the freshness of the colors in the pastels is unmistakable. Likewise his drawing ability is phenomenal as he captures body motions and the emotions that they convey, be it a peasant resting exhausted on the ground, or a peasant wrestling with a pig to take it to slaughter. There are many spritual subjects in Millet but I don't know how deliberately spiritual he was. There is also a very neutral, almost sociological vantage point in Millet's work. One thing I find very interesting in the wotk of Millet is his equal treatment of man and beast in his work as equal actors in life's dramas. It is not so much lowering of humans to the animal level as it is an organic sense that we are all in this together. We are all actors in the natural cycle of life. There are pictures of women carrying a newborn lamb or a newborn calf back to the barn with the animal mother trailing attentively along. In such a scene the human is equally the mother and nurse and they are all sharing in the moment. Even a group of men tussling with a pig to get it to slaughter has a humorous aspect as if a group of friends is trying to pull an obstreporous drunken mate out of the pub. I don't think Millet was deliberately trying to enoble the peasant class but was just showing them and their life as they are, although the interest he showed them was somewhat radical for the times.Obviously it was a simpler life when men and animals had equal roles in life's dramas and when horses still pulled us and we didn't pull them in fancy trailers. Millet is showing a timeless rhythm to life that most closely resembles the life of the American Indians in this country. Strangely I see an echo of this aproach in some early works of Picasso who treated animals as equal actors in life. I'm thinking of the wonderful painting of a family of circus performers. They are resting in a group by the roadside, parents, children and baboon, a family. There is no hommage to the peasant class in Picasso's work but there is a detached regard at life where poet, aristocrat, bum or animal share equal standing.

I've drifted off from my contemplation of Van Gogh which could go on and on. Perhaps it's even a little embarassing to have a glossy poster of Van Gogh hanging in my comfortable house in California. And maybe I'm way off base for what I interpret to be Van Gogh's thoughts and feelings; but at least the man lives on and by staring at his beautiful work perhaps some of his inner truth will get through to me.

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