Gauguin’s Chair and La Berceuse: Conceptualising Red and Green in the Art of Van Gogh

The Hermitage Amsterdam’s exhibition Vincent – bringing together seventy-five of the paintings of Vincent van Gogh, plus drawings and letters, whilst the Van Gogh Museum undergoes refurbishment – is into its final few weeks. The exhibition, which began 29 September last year, will run until 25 April; with the works then being relocated to the Museumplein for the reopening of the Van Gogh Museum on 1 May.

Van Gogh’s temporary stay at the Hermitage Amsterdam has allowed his paintings to be shown in a novel way: his works are displayed not chronologically, but according to seven themes – in order, ‘Practice makes perfect’, ‘A style of his own’, ‘The effect of colour’, ‘Peasant painter’, ‘Looking to Japan’, ‘The modern portrait’, and ‘The wealth of nature’ – with a room or section devoted to each theme, and each section’s walls a different colour. The strength of this approach is that it juxtaposes the broad range of techniques by which Van Gogh painted; shows where subject matter and method remained consistent despite a divergence of painterly styles; and highlights illuminating points of connection between paintings which might not otherwise be displayed together. Over the final few weeks of the exhibition, I intend to discuss and compare here a few of the paintings which Vincent has encouraged me to consider and appreciate.

As its heading indicates, the third theme and the third room of the exhibition has as its focus Van Gogh’s use of colour. In particular, it consists of a group of paintings significant for their use of bold colour and bold colour contrasts (the room itself is notable for bearing one of the paintings from Van Gogh’s Arles Sunflowers series). Two of the paintings which have most stood out for me from this room are Gauguin’s Chair and The Garden of Saint-Paul Hospital: painted a year apart; featured a few paintings apart in the room; and both predominating in reds and greens.

The caption the museum provides for The Garden of Saint-Paul Hospital notes Van Gogh’s psychological interpretation of the colours in the painting. It draws upon a letter Van Gogh sent to his fellow painter Émile Bernard on 26 November, 1889, whilst finishing off work on the canvas. That letter can be read in full here; the two paragraphs in which Van Gogh depicts his painting read:

Here’s description of a canvas that I have in front of me at the moment. A view of the garden of the asylum where I am, on the right a grey terrace, a section of house, some rosebushes that have lost their flowers; on the left, the earth of the garden — red ochre — earth burnt by the sun, covered in fallen pine twigs. This edge of the garden is planted with large pines with red ochre trunks and branches, with green foliage saddened by a mixture of black. These tall trees stand out against an evening sky streaked with violet against a yellow background. High up, the yellow turns to pink, turns to green. A wall — red ochre again — blocks the view, and there’s nothing above it but a violet and yellow ochre hill. Now, the first tree is an enormous trunk, but struck by lightning and sawn off. A side branch thrusts up very high, however, and falls down again in an avalanche of dark green twigs.

This dark giant — like a proud man brought low — contrasts, when seen as the character of a living being, with the pale smile of the last rose on the bush, which is fading in front of him. Under the trees, empty stone benches, dark box. The sky is reflected yellow in a puddle after the rain. A ray of sun — the last glimmer — exalts the dark ochre to orange — small dark figures prowl here and there between the trunks. You’ll understand that this combination of red ochre, of green saddened with grey, of black lines that define the outlines, this gives rise a little to the feeling of anxiety from which some of my companions in misfortune often suffer, and which is called ‘seeing red’. And what’s more, the motif of the great tree struck by lightning, the sickly green and pink smile of the last flower of autumn, confirms this idea.

The notion that the interplay of reds and greens in the painting relate to a ‘feeling of anxiety’ is interesting in its own right, and conducive for comparison; especially since the same combination is to be found in Gauguin’s Chair.

Gauguin’s Chair was completed in December, 1888. Van Gogh had moved to Arles from Paris in February of that year, enticed by the warmer climate – his health was poor; he was suffering from a persistent cough – and having some idea of forming an artists’ colony. Staying at a couple of hotels, he signed a lease for what would become known as the Yellow House, 2 Place Martine, on 1 May; but didn’t move into the house until late September when, furnishing it with two beds, he began to prepare for the arrival of Gauguin, whom he had enthusiastically encouraged to come and stay. Gauguin arrived 23 October; but just a couple of months later tensions between the pair had reached such a point that, so the account goes, on the evening of 23 December, Van Gogh stalked Gauguin through the streets of Arles with a razor, before ultimately cutting off part of his own ear.

Gauguin returned to Paris. Van Gogh spent the next few months in and out of hospital until, on 8 May, 1889, he entrusted himself to the care of the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, in Saint-Rémy. Van Gogh was initially confined by his doctor to the asylum’s walled garden; though he gradually began taking trips out into the surrounds, he painted numerous paintings of the garden and of details within it, its trees, tree branches and flowers. The canvas The Garden of Saint-Paul Hospital showing at the Hermitage Amsterdam is one of two nearly identical paintings of the Saint-Paul garden, which Van Gogh painted between November and December (within Van Gogh’s catalogue, F numbers 659 and 660).

Van Gogh mentioned Gauguin’s Chair in four letters to his brother Theo (letters 721, 736, 751, and 767, written between November 1888 and May 1889) and in one to the art critic Albert Aurier (letter 853, in February 1890). He calls the ‘twin studies’ – that is, Gauguin’s Chair and Van Gogh’s Chair, the painting of his own chair, with pipe, which he completed in tandem – ‘rather funny’; notes their ‘thick impasto’; and describes the former’s ‘broken tones of red and green’ in the letter to Aurier, in which he writes warmly of Gauguin and states that he owes Gauguin ‘a great deal’. Yet Van Gogh offered no analysis of the work, nor suggested any revealing purpose for it.

It is tempting to view the twin studies as comprising, together, a piece of artistic symbolism – a mode of expression, incidentally, more associated with Gauguin. The empty chairs themselves encourage a symbolical interpretation; and knowing the difficulties in the two painters’ relationship, and the disastrous climax of their time spent living together in Arles, it is easy to see Van Gogh’s Chair – with its soft blues and bright yellows and oranges – representing warmth and openness, the reds and greens of Gauguin’s Chair Van Gogh’s way of suggesting something agitated, even deceptive in his companion. There are other points which could be made – Van Gogh’s chair appears less sturdy, more prone to flight, where Gauguin’s merges with the floor – but Van Gogh’s remarks concerning the palpable anxiety of The Garden of Saint-Paul Hospital support this point-of-view.

Yet at the same time as Van Gogh was working on Gauguin’s Chair, he began a group of paintings of Augustine Roulin which feature a decidedly similar palette and thick application of paint. Augustine Roulin and her husband, Joseph, a postman, became close friends with Van Gogh during his time in Arles, and he painted numerous studies of both husband and wife, as well as their three children. Completing his first painting of Augustine in December 1888, Van Gogh would repeat the same composition four more times: twice in January, and once in February and March. He entitled these paintings La Berceuse, which means ‘The Lullaby’. The March repetition is in the collection of and has been recently showing at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

As implied by the title he gave to the paintings, Van Gogh saw La Berceuse evoking a sense of maternal affection and comfort. He considered the painting first in a letter which he sent to Gauguin, on 21 January, after Gauguin’s departure; then expanded on his thoughts to Theo on 28 January:

On the subject of that canvas, I’ve just said to Gauguin that as he and I talked about the Icelandic fishermen and their melancholy isolation, exposed to all the dangers, alone on the sad sea, I’ve just said to Gauguin about it that, following these intimate conversations, the idea came to me to paint such a picture that sailors, at once children and martyrs, seeing it in the cabin of a boat of Icelandic fishermen, would experience a feeling of being rocked, reminding them of their own lullabies. Now it looks, you could say, like a chromolithograph from a penny bazaar. A woman dressed in green with orange hair stands out against a green background with pink flowers. Now these discordant sharps of garish pink, garish orange, garish green, are toned down by flats of reds and greens. I can imagine these canvases precisely between those of the sunflowers – which thus form standard lamps or candelabra at the sides, of the same size; and thus the whole is composed of 7 or 9 canvases.

In a letter to Theo around 23 May, Van Gogh detailed his strengthening conception that the Berceuse paintings should form tritptychs with the Arles Sunflowers series. Van Gogh’s idea was that a La Berceuse should sit in between two Sunflowers; and he wanted both Theo and Gauguin to possess versions. A consideration of the colour combinations this would entail – red and green flanked by orange and yellow – emphasises that Van Gogh may have considered his two chair paintings decidedly complementary, rather than somehow opposed or antagonistic. Exhibitions which feature the paintings routinely display the chairs facing away from one another, thereby running with a symbolic interpretation which is in tune with the popular account of relations between the artists. Van Gogh, of course, painted the Arles Sunflowers to greet Gauguin and to decorate the house he hoped they would contentedly and productively share.

Van Gogh’s contemplating on La Berceuse eschews any simple analysis of Gauguin’s Chair. As viewers we may have recourse to look also towards the rhythms and contours of Van Gogh’s painting; and may wonder at the differences which demarcate and define portraits, studies of objects, and paintings of and in nature. There are other paintings too in Van Gogh’s oeuvre which play on contrasts between red and green: for instance, Paul Gauguin (Man in a Red Beret), which Van Gogh is believed to have painted in early December 1888, with its swirls of green in Gauguin’s jacket, his rich red beret set against the lime-coloured walls, and a peculiar grey brushstroke serving as his nose; and The Zouave, whose red cap is backed by a green door, painted in June 1888.

Mike Kelley Retrospective

The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam’s home of modern and contemporary art and design since 1874, was forced to close for renovation in late 2003. Moving into the Post CS building – situated in the docklands to the north of the city centre – for four-and-a-half years, from 2008 the Stedelijk’s collection was without a home, the museum maintaining a presence through a series of smaller, temporary exhibitions and a programme of seminars, lectures and educational events. With the renovation works progressing, and a new wing, designed by Dutch firm Benthem Crouwel Architects, added to the existing structure, the Stedelijk’s reopening on the Museumplein was scheduled for late September, 2012.

The Stedelijk had been planning, for the first major exhibition after its reopening, to show some of the latest works of American artist Mike Kelley. When Kelley died in January 2012, found in his bathtub in Pasadena, just outside Los Angeles, having apparently committed suicide, the Stedelijk’s plans inevitably changed. Instead, a retrospective of Kelley’s career was organised, and opened at the Stedelijk on December 15. It is the largest exhibition of Kelley’s work ever shown, occupying the expanse of the museum’s new wing; and it is the Stedelijk’s first major international exhibition since it reopened last 23 September. The retrospective will run at the Stedelijk until the end of this week, before moving on to the Centre Pompidou in Paris; MoMA PS1 in New York; and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

The retrospective is organised broadly chronologically, rooms on the basement floor showing pieces from the earlier decades of Kelley’s career, while the first floor focuses on his most recent work. Kelley’s artworks span a great variety of media, from found art objects to video installations and performance art, painting, drawing, sculpture, collage, architectural sketches, and pieces which emphasise writing and quotations. The endeavour of any retrospective is to give a full sense of an artist throughout the course of their career, and the Kelley retrospective succeeds in showing and appositely suggesting some of the central themes to which Kelley returned time and again in his work. These themes feel both intensely personal and deliberately social; and demonstrate both figurative and abstract aesthetic concerns.

The first room, a sort of passageway onto the exhibition, shows a group of wall textiles, and a series of drawings which Kelley made after the Sad Sack comic strip – an American comic created during the Second World War, depicting life in the American military. Kelley’s drawings take panels from the comic and remove everything but the rubbish in them, leaving only whatever garbage, dirt and grime appears in the frame.

Opening out, the second room of the exhibition features works from the series Memory Ware Flats (2003). These consist of canvases made up of found objects – predominantly jewellery, but also badges, buttons and bottle tops – and adopt the practises of Canadian folk art. A sculpture of a reptile sits in the middle of the room, reminiscent of Gaudi’s salamander at Parc Güell, but shorn of colourful tiling and looking depressed; and a sound installation hoots away, speakers calling and responding stretched between two boards painted black and white on silver, one depicting a foot, the other something which looks like a toad wearing sunglasses.

Another room shows those related works which make up the assemblage John Glenn Memorial River Reclamation Project (Including the Local Culture Pictorial Guide, 1968-1972, Wayne/Westland Eagle) (2001). There are four facets to the assemblage, which Kelley developed over a couple of visits to Detroit, the city in which he grew up, in 1998 and again in 2001. Kelley’s ‘Artistic Statement’ on the John Glenn Memorial River Reclamation Project ties it to the earlier Memory Ware Flats, through its similar utilisation of found objects, and because it too plays upon philosophical and medical conceptions of memory, figured through the real and reconceived childhood of the artist. The centrepiece of the room is a statue of John Glenn – the first American to orbit the earth, who maintained a long political career after leaving NASA in 1965 – made of shards of coloured glass and ceramics which Kelley obtained by dredging the Detroit River. Glenn’s figure is slightly extended, and Kelley expressed the influence of Alberto Giacometti on the sculpture. Spreading from the plinth on which Glenn stands there are piled deposits of glass and ceramics, organised by colour, and some pushed, stacked or arranged into rising mounds.

Two cabinets bookend the mass of glass and ceramic. These contain vertical drawers, which can be pulled out; and the drawers encase photographs which Kelley took of Detroit local newspaper editions published between 1968 and 1972. On one of the room’s walls, the Black Out project consists of a series of black and white photographs strictly documenting Kelley’s journey down the Detroit River. A further group of colour photographs were intended to show the river’s shoreline, but a camera malfunction left predominantly black images with only slithers of colour.

Kelley ultimately considered this malfunction ‘providential’, feeling the black images served as a point of connection with another project, Educational Complex (1995). Here an extensive architectural model, several rough architectural sketches, and a couple of suspended mobiles endeavour to bring into a single space all of the educational institutions which Kelley attended as a youth; as well as depicting those gaps, those blank spaces and empty sites, which represent facilities and areas which Kelley either does not remember, or does not want to remember owing to upsetting events which occurred there.

The mounds of ceramics; the Sad Sack drawings which were part of Kelley’s Half a Man project, completed in the late 80s; a series of black acrylic paintings of inner organs, painted around the same time and shown elsewhere in the exhibition; and Lumpenprole (1991), a large floor-rug with unidentified lumps: all demonstrate Kelley’s repeated interest in volume and amorphous shapes. That these shapes protrude and exist seems to allow for discovery and for knowledge; yet the shapes consistently subvert knowledge because they are imprecise, posited between different contexts, and cannot be accurately identified. The mounds of the John Glenn River Reclamation Project alternately appear like volcanic rock formations, unplanned yet still somehow designed; or as emergent cities, with the sort of inner logic and ethereality which is expressed in literature in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. In these sculptures, in Black Out, and in Educational Complex, Kelley’s work simultaneously emphasises the importance of place to us as individuals, whilst suggesting its incompleteness, its incapacity to serve as a ground for our memories, feelings and personalities.

More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid and The Wages of Sin (1987) is perhaps Kelley’s most famous work. On a canvas covered by Afghan rugs, there hang numerous stuffed toy dolls and animals. This has variously been interpreted as an homage to childhood; as a comment upon nostalgia; and as criticising the system of labour which results in the production of such toys; whilst Kelley himself most frequently discussed the work within the context of family relations, and their complex patterns of giving and receiving, which for Kelley implicate impossible obligations and unpayable debts. Ah…Youth! (1991) makes similar use of stuffed toys. It features a row of eight portrait, passport-style photographs, seven showing stuffed animals, with Kelley’s face in between. Concepts of animism are evoked, with the stuffed animals appearing more overtly expressive, more full of character, than the portrait of Kelley. Kelley worked with Sonic Youth on several video pieces through the 80s; and the band used one of the portraits from Ah…Youth! for the cover of their 1992 album, Dirty.

Other rooms on the ground floor show collections of photographs which, in the diversity of their subject matter, prefigure an Instagram ‘explore’ page; the corridor from Kelley’s Pay for Your Pleasure (1998), with posters quoting canonical artists and philosophers who repeatedly stress the link between art and crime, but which, as an exhibit, lacks purpose detached from the rest of the Pay for Your Pleasure series; a group of birdhouses which Kelley built out of wood in the late 70s, and named after different architectural movements; and The Banana Man (1983), comprising a costume, drawings and video installations based upon a childhood television character which Kelley never saw himself, but recreated based on the recollections of friends.

On the first floor, the Kandors series involves sculptures and found object art meant to be representative of Krypton, the native world of Superman. The canisters and tubs of Kandor 15 (2007) show the same fondness for bold, discrete colour that is evident in the arrangement of the ceramics in the Detroit River project. In the adjoining room, Day Is Done (2004-05) features 32 installations, utilising video, sound and light. The series was part of a planned but never completed wider project, entitled Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions, which was to comprise 365 pieces which would show as a cycle over twenty-four hours. The Day Is Done installations feature reenactments of scenes which Kelley interpolated from reading high-school yearbooks and local newspapers. As with much of his work, there is a playfulness here that is equally engaging and unsettling; an acting out into excess of what is most layered and difficult to grasp in mundane life.

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Mike Kelley’s ‘Artistic Statement’ concerning the John Glenn Memorial River Reclamation Project (Including the Local Culture Pictorial Guide, 1968-1972, Wayne/Westland Eagle) (2001): http://dia.emsix.com/exhibitions/artiststake/projects/multimedia/kelley_statement.html

A Bomb magazine interview with Kelley from 1993, in which he discusses a number of his earlier projects: http://bombsite.com/issues/38/articles/1502