Vincent van Gogh, ‘Bridges over the Seine at Asnières’ (1887).Image Kunsthaus Zürich
Van Gogh on the Seine, an exhibition of around eighty works by Van Gogh and other Post-Impressionists in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, is a startling exhibition. The Vincent veterans among you will also be regularly surprised. There are some little-known (but good) Van Goghs, some with unlikely places of origin such as Saint Louis or Jerusalem, but that is only part of the surprise. What is most unexpected here is the overarching theme: the northwestern Parisian suburbs, an underexposed area in Van Gogh’s image.
A contemporary of Vincent described the Parisian environment as a region of ‘stunning contrasts’. There were idyllic stopping places such as Asnières, a refuge for tired Parisians, but also gray industrial towns such as Clichy, recognizable by its forest of smoking chimneys. The five exhibited painters were familiar with this area. Signac and Bernard lived there. Seurat and Angrand resided nearby. Vincent also stayed near the suburbs. From his apartment in Montmartre he walked there almost every day in the spring of 1887, five kilometers there and five kilometers back.
Vincent van Gogh, ‘Factories at Clichy’ (1887). Image Saint Louis Art Museum
It’s easy to see what attracted him to the area. It was rich in bridges, telegraph poles, cranes, factories, gas holders, wash boats and other motifs of great interest to a painter of modern life. Perhaps more important than what he found was what it freed him from: city bustle, colossal apartment blocks. In Paris you were always looking at something. On the edges of the city the view reached further.
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Stefan Kuiper is an art historian and journalist. He has been writing for De Volkskrant since 2013.
Vincent’s discovery of the suburbs overlapped with his artistic transformation, a metamorphosis that has been retold forever. That he started working in Paris with unmixed colors and that his handwriting changed from drawing-like to dotted to streaky: you have heard about it before, and if you have forgotten it, watch Jeroen Krabbé’s program again. after. Not Vincent’s colours, which are delightful, but his sense of space had my special attention here. Whether he planted his easel in a muddy stretch of no-man’s land or on a leafy riverbank, his floor was always thoroughly observed. On the Outskirts of Paris, the canvas that kicks off the exhibition, is not a detailed painting, but it feels like one. Your eyes can wander all the way to the horizon if you want.
Paul Signac, ‘Gasholders at Clichy’ (1886). Image National Gallery of Victoria
Signac, who is the real star of this exhibition, also excelled in the representation of space, although he worked more systematically. His Gashouder near Clichy appears to have been painted by a surveyor, it is so carefully constructed. Every landscape painter knows that such extensive buildings pose a technical problem. Only from a distance do they become fully visible, meaning that part of the painting is automatically swallowed up by a vast, often dull foreground. This problem is not a problem for Signac. He paints the ‘boring parts’ as if they were the most fascinating parts. This undifferentiated view of the subject gives Gashouders at Clichy something static. It is not a guilty landscape, but a patient landscape, a landscape in which time does not so much seem to crawl along as to have come to a complete standstill. This feeling is heightened by being devoid of people. What is called human absence is perhaps the main reason for this.
Social life does not play a significant role in this exhibition anyway. You will not find contemporary equivalents of Renoir’s Le déjeuner des canotiers or Manet’s Argenteuil. While the Impressionists apparently took the viewer to where ‘it’ happened, the Post-Impressionists took him to where it did not happen. Not in the café or during fun parties on the water, but at quiet railway crossings and on abandoned factory sites they made their move. While looking, the image emerges of a group of tireless wanderers who preferably observed life from a distance. You are also surprised by that.
Emile Bernard, ‘Two women on the pedestrian walkway of Asnières’, 1887, oil on canvas. Image Musée des Beaux-Arts de Brest métropole
Waterschilders
Although her name appears in the title, the Seine does not play a decisive role in Van Gogh on the Seine. The river does not figure in all paintings, and if it does, it is not necessarily an element of special consideration. Bernard is perhaps the most careless in his portrayal of it. To him, the Seine seemed what a blank wall is to a house painter: something that needed to be sealed over, the smoother the better. Angrand seems more enthralled by the portrayal of it, but not by much. Hold a river scene of him upside down and the sky and water change places without seeing much difference. And Vincent? Could he handle a notoriously difficult motif such as flowing water? Anyway. His streaky handwriting proves to be an ideal translation, including convincing waves and reflections. If prizes were awarded for the best water painter here, they went to him, among others.
Van Gogh on the Seine
Visual arts
★★★★☆
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, t/m 14/1.
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2023-11-12 15:40:27
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