Wrestling with Nature
The Obscuring Mirror & the Dream of True Perception
Page II
to change and remake reality. I want my paintings to be inaccurate and anomalous in such a way that they become lies, if you like, but lies that are more truthful than literal truth.
(Vincent van Gogh)
In January of 1885, several months before painting The Potato Eaters, Vincent van Gogh declared in a letter to his brother Theo that “whether people approve or do not approve of what I do and how I do it, I personally know no other way than to wrestle with nature long enough for her to tell me her secret.” When expressing the manner of his method of creating, van Gogh revealed the character of his relationship to nature, embodying a tradition or heritage that erupted with Heraclitus. In referring to his relationship with nature as a ‘confrontation that made him feel more himself,’ van Gogh defined his bond with nature not as passive, but as active and agonal. Nature, though something he was in awe of, was something he wrestled with, something he said he was in “a hand-to-hand struggle with.” It was a competition. Out of that struggle, which was marked by an ascetic type of suffering, his vision of art was formulated and refined, though it was always to undergo transformation.
One year after seriously taking up drawing, van Gogh emphasized the value to his brother Theo of devoting one’s life “to expressing the poetry hidden” not only in “the figure of the laborer,” but in plowed fields, in sand, sea, and sky, elaborating an aesthetic practice of aletheia. Nature reveals something, speaks to the painter who investigates the world like a psychologist: “something of what wind or breath or figure has told me is in” the painting. The earth is van Gogh’s academy; nature is his studio; the sun is his master. He listens to them as they speak.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra)
What he creates is not born of a “studied manner or a system” but is “rather from nature itself.” But this is not naturalism or realism at work; van Gogh is not merely holding up a mirror to nature—that is a practice he disdained, something he criticized with derision as “still connected with romanticism.” He painted what struck him, not simply photographic resemblances of what he saw. What guided him was “passionate expression,” which was “a means of expressing and intensifying” things. What was crucial for him was painting the poetry concealed within nature. How he discovered what he referred to as the ‘secrets of nature’ must be taken into consideration.
In The Veils of Isis, an elucidation of man’s relation to nature and the changing conception of Heraclitus’ statement on nature, often translated as ‘nature loves to hide,’ Pierre Hadot distinguishes two methods of unveiling ‘the secrets of nature’ and they include the Promethean and the Orphic: “Whereas the Promethean attitude is inspired by audacity, boundless curiosity, the will to power, and the search for utility, the Orphic attitude, by contrast, is inspired by respect in the face of mystery and disinterestedness.” Further, the Orphic method is one that “seeks to discover the secrets of nature while confining itself to perception, without the help of instruments, and using the resources of philosophy and poetic discourse or those of the pictorial arts.” “Orpheus,” Hadot elaborates, “thus penetrates the secrets of nature not through violence but through melody, rhythm, and harmony.” In van Gogh’s immediate observation of and confrontation with nature, as well as in his immersion in literature, both of which he related directly to life and to his work as a painter, sensory perception guided his discoveries. Thus, his mode of ‘unveiling nature’s secrets’ was Orphic, which further letters as well as his practice as an artist confirm.
Yielding to the secrets of nature, the Orphic painter’s art is like that of the lyric poet who, while rooting creativity in the self, does not root it in an empirical form of the self. Rather, it is rooted in the primal Dionysian self, which is the obliterated self transfigured in the body of the deity. In the world of appearance as Nietzsche defines it, the logic of identity is shattered, each mask revealing but a proliferation of further masks. Yet, while nature is van Gogh’s goddess, his relation to her, or it, is complex and nuanced. He is no simple naturalist, more the epopt of a pagan cult. Though he continuously reiterated that one must work directly from nature, he didn’t merely reproduce exactly what he saw or brought forth; instead, he used color “arbitrarily in order to express [himself] forcibly.” At first, from his statements, it almost seems as if he was interested in the most extreme mimetic depiction of nature. Again and again, without reservation, he decries studio painting and with unrestrained fervor insists that painters must go outside, paint outdoors, paint under the sun, paint in the midst of nature, expressing in this fidelity one more binding than any other in his life. It is reality that is of paramount import to van Gogh for, according to him, one’s imagination “always falls short of [nature].” He reiterates this point tirelessly. At times, the results of his immersion in nature are reinforced in the most literal manner: “I had to wipe off at least a hundred or more flies from the four paintings you will receive, not counting the dust and sand, not counting that when one carries them across the heath and through the hedges for several hours, some thorns will scratch them, etc.” Material reality blends with his depiction of it as if to make it more real. Studio painters, those who work from memory, and the painters of Arabesque visions are all generally condemned. Young painters who compose from memory disgust him—”the whole thing makes me sick”—and the painters of fantastic scenes are derogatorily referred to as “imagiers!” From this it might be possible to conclude that van Gogh is working in the very manner that Nietzsche problematized; yet, there is a keener degree of perspicacity in his method. It is not the dream of true perception.
Instinct is a primary force for van Gogh, who continually sifted things through his camera obscura. Facts were anathema to him; they did not reveal truths. “I see a chance of giving a true impression of what I see. Not always literally exact, or rather never exact, for one sees nature through one’s own temperament.” What he was interested in was intensification and he was aware that what he was creating was a vision. He was changing and remaking reality, or what he could know of reality. And his overarching vision was of painting itself; of the past and the future of painting. To Theo, he confessed that he was nothing, that he was not interested in success, and that it was the future of painting that he believed his work would aid. The painter of the future would he said be a ‘colorist such as has never yet existed’ and it was precisely through his arbitrary use of color that van Gogh forged a new dimension, instigating an even more extreme and arbitrary use of color that painters such as Kandinsky, Heckel, Kirchner and others would employ. “As for me, with my presentiment of a new world, I firmly believe in the possibility of an immense renaissance of art.” While his viewpoints would have most likely continued to change over time, van Gogh may have enormously disliked ‘symbolist’ and ‘expressionist’ painting. For him, the painter must depict what is directly experienced from reality, what is brought forth or revealed through Orphic perception yet, feeling is involved—what one feels is to enter the painting, but not to the degree that what is painted is so distorted that it is unrecognizable. Feeling in and of itself is not to dominate, let alone some psychological experience of reality. “It is the painter’s duty,” he declared, “to be extremely absorbed by nature and to use all his intelligence to express sentiment in his work so that it becomes intelligible.” For van Gogh, this is “not painting things as they are, but as they are felt”—it is to make things “truer than the literal truth” and that is not by any means a slavish or mechanical imitation of nature. Nature is to be poetized, but always with an eye towards reality. A literary reflection perhaps bears some insight into his vision of art, or his relationship to the ‘real’ and the extent of how critical he was of excessive psychological interpretations of ‘reality.’
While professing that, at times, he admired the work of Hoffman and Poe, he found it more than not “impossible, because the imagination behind it is ponderous and meaningless, and has no contact with reality.” The excruciatingly sensitive painter who was faithful to the real—or his still basically mimetic image of the world—finally proclaimed that he found their work “very repulsive.” It was for him too gross a distortion. There is a tightrope then that as a painter he balances on—while decrying studio painting and any kind of photographic-like mimesis of reality, he wants to remain true to nature, but to imbue it with his thoughts and feelings, and it is this inclusion of man’s experience of nature or the mixture of man’s experience with nature’s ‘secret’ that defines art for van Gogh. “I can still,” he said, “find no better definition of the word art than this: art is man added to nature—nature, reality, truth, but with a significance, a conception, a character, which the artist brings out in it, and to which he gives expression, “qu’il degage,” which he disentangles, sets free and interprets.” Paintings that accomplish this disentanglement and unraveling of nature’s secrets through the Orphic mode “say more” and say what they are saying “more clearly than nature herself.” While the painter’s imagination may fall short of nature, art for van Gogh “sometimes rises above nature.” This occurs when the artist subsumes himself to nature and becomes a “type instilled from many individuals.” Here the shattering of the logic of identity and the continuous metamorphosis of being becomes even clearer. Van Gogh is all the painters in history. After perishing, he entered the pantheon of individuals out of which new masks would be created, and the ‘Expressionists’ reconfigured those masks, giving birth to new masks, to masks of their own which made manifest their encounter with the world. For van Gogh, nature had no significance or character; it is the artist that imbues the ‘goddess’ with significance and character through art. Or, the significance and character of nature cannot be expressed by nature alone, but is augmented by the artist, who gives expression to what nature cannot. The artist liberates significance and character from nature and interprets it through the fullness of expression more than nature ever can. The artist articulates the silent, manifesting images, giving birth to gods. Van Gogh makes of existence a song; the light of the sun flickers through his projector.
The Prelude)
It is the song of the self but that is the song of the lyric poet whose self has been obliterated and who when he speaks of the self, is speaking of an altogether different self—it is the self that reflects and expresses nature, both revealing and creating its experience and its vision of the world. Is this the lifting of a veil, or is it a knowing dance with the veils, van Gogh dreaming the dream of appearance?
sine qua non for the artist. The artist is a human being; he is himself nature, and a piece of nature within the area of nature . . . a creature on earth and a creature in the universe: a creature on one star among other stars.
(Klee—On Modern Art)
The influence of van Gogh on the painters exhibited in Van Gogh and Expressionism, that their work revealed a deliberate interaction or engagement with his, was palpably clear, but how he influenced them, what they made of his work, and what their relation to him is needs to be further elucidated, as well as how their relation to nature differed from his. The primary difficulty of the exhibition, if not the precarious escarpment on which it pivoted resided in the classification of all of the painters aside from van Gogh—Kandinsky, Kokoschka, Heckel, Schiele, Gerstl, Klimt, Jawlensky, Boeckl, Pechstein, Schmidt-Rottluff, Nolde, Macke, Marc, Münter, Klee, Corinth, Meidner, and Dix—as ‘Expressionist.’ To unify these varied individuals under the rubric ‘Expressionist’—which, of course, is an act already committed by art historians—though some of them were in groups together, is to efface their singularities and to blur what is in each distinctive. It is a false construction, invented to give cohesion to a fragmented and disparate history that essentially resists such unity, or, uniformity. Even painters within the Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter movements, each of which only existed for several years and neither of which referred to themselves as ‘Expressionist,’ had markedly different styles.
Clearly, such terms are in the chemical sense volatile and it is only through want of some greater strength of perception that they are even sustained. It is out of the blindness of the herd, out of a sheer refusal to perceive as well as an obsession for neat historical categorizations, that, predominantly, they persist. The term itself has shadowy origins, too. As the late Donald E. Gordon, whose Expressionism: Art and Idea is one of the seminal studies of the so-called movement, noted, it originated not in Germany as is commonly believed but in France. The term is French and was originally associated with Moreau and after him Matisse. It was not coined in 1911 by Herwarth Walden as Stolwijk claims after the curator Jill Lloyd in his essay in the exhibition catalogue, but, as Gordon revealed, was actually invented by Antonin Matejcek in 1910. He employed the term in his essay XXXI. Vystava: Les Indépendants, the catalogue introduction to an exhibition of paintings from the Paris Salon des Indépendants held in Prague from February - March of 1910. In Matejcek’s essay, Cezanne was declared the “spiritual father” of the movement with Gauguin and van Gogh listed as its pioneers. Other painters deemed by Matejcek ‘Expressionist’ included the Nabi Bonnard, Fauves such as Marquet, Camoin, Puy and Matisse, and the Symbolists Redon and Girieud.
The first exhibition in the world accredited as ‘Expressionist’ occurred in 1911 in Berlin and though it was referred to as French, comprised French, Spanish, and Dutch artists such as Derain, Braque, von Dongen, Vlaminck, and Picasso. When one critic of the time suggested that Pechstein should have been included in the exhibition, the director of the Dresden Städtische Kunstsammlungen, Paul Ferdinand Schmidt, found the suggestion dubious, stated that the painters in question had no relation to one another and that the phrase ‘Expressionist’ signified little and was the result merely of an impasse. Only later was ‘Expressionist’ conceptualized and imposed by critics on German and Viennese paintings and painters, though not without resistance. During its existence, Die Brücke as a movement was never referred to as ‘Expressionist,’ nor were any of its members singled out as ‘Expressionist’ painters. And in 1912, Marc and Kandinsky rejected the title not only as an accurate description of their work but of the work of other German movements as well. Instead, if one had to define the movement as having a single style Marc thought the phrase ‘Die Wilden,’ which is far more fluid, more thoughtful a description of Die Brücke style. Clearly, ‘Expressionist’ was not a term adopted by the artists themselves, as Breton and other Surrealists adopted the term Surrealist, and it should perhaps be employed with much reservation.
One other claim which must be examined is that of the curator, Jill Lloyd, as well as numerous writers in the catalogue who second her claim, which is that Van Gogh and Expressionism reveals “in depth for the first time van Gogh’s formative impact on leading German and Austrian ‘Expressionists’.” In a reply to the author of this essay, Ms. Lloyd clarified that it was the first exhibition “to develop the visual potential of the subject and to pull all the strands together.” The claim is still strange and more than difficult to believe if not substantiate while riding on the qualifying “in depth” is rather tenuous. More difficult to countenance is the claim of Renee Price, the Director of the Neue Galerie, who stated that van Gogh’s impact “has never been the subject of extended scholarly inquiry.” Stefan Koldehoff, who wrote one of the essays in the catalogue, is seemingly at odds with these claims when noting that “the thesis that van Gogh was a role model for the ‘Expressionists’ is over a century old.”
Van Gogh’s formative impact on the ‘Expressionists’ is a veritable commonplace of art history and has been since early in the twentieth century. In 1907, van Gogh was even referred to as ‘Germanic’ and numerous attempts were made by German critics to appropriate him, as did Georg Fuchs, who compared van Gogh to Hölderlin in his 1907 Deutsche Form. There is Matejcek’s aforementioned groundbreaking work in 1910, as well as others in the 10’s. Later, in the early 20’s, Paul Ferdinand Schmidt, who as noted previously questioned the validity of the word ‘Expressionist,’ stated in his Die Kunst der Gegenwart that van Gogh was “the greatest pioneer of Nordic-Germanic Expressionism.” There is even a dissertation, written in the 50’s by Wolfgang Eckhardt, Van Gogh und Deutschland, ein Beitrag zum Thema: Kunstler und Publikum, which explores the very subject in question. In a review in 1954 of Werner Weisbach’s Vincent Van Gogh: Kunst und Schicksal, Vol. 2, Künstlerischer Aufstieg und Ende, K. F. Ertel observed that one could “speak of a broadly-based and well-explored field within the framework of Van Gogh research and . . . Art Nouveau and early Expressionism,” highlighting Fritz Schmalenbach’s The Basis of Early Expressionism. And in a review to two exhibitions (Fauves and German Expressionism) in 1966 in Paris, Aaron Sheon remarked that “Schmidt-Rottluff’s thickly painted Self-Portrait and Kirchner’s Tête d’Enfant, both from 1906, illustrate how Van Gogh’s and Matisse’s art had been diffused throughout Europe.” There is also Patrick Bridgewater’s (another essayist of the catalogue) The Expressionist Generation and van Gogh, which was published in 1987 (this is mentioned in the catalogue), and Donald E. Gordon’s Expressionism: Art and Idea, which omission of mention is especially peculiar considering it is one of the most widely available and important texts on the subject. In Germany and the Netherlands, there must be texts too which have examined this relation. More recently, and more damning, in 1991, the Folkwang Museum staged an extensive exhibition titled Van Gogh and Modern Art (1890-1914), which featured works by van Gogh exhibited during the period in conjunction with over one hundred works by French and German artists who van Gogh influenced. The exhibition featured many of the same artists as the Neue Galerie exhibition, including Kirchner, Kandinsky, and Schiele, as well as many of the artists originally referred to as ‘Expressionist,’ such as Von Dongen, Derain, and Matisse. Of all the evidence, this shatters their claim more than any other. Why then make such claims? Regardless of whether this is or is not the first exploration of van Gogh’s influence and impact is inconsequential; the exhibition remains an important investigation and examination and it does I concur contain many discoveries.
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