Van Gogh's cruellest cut

So, what did Van Gogh say when they offered him a cup of tea?
“No thanks, I’ve got one ear.”

Today is the 120th anniversary of Vincent's aural amputation. He struggled on for two years before killing himself, whereupon he quickly achieved the fame and fortune he’d missed out on in life.

But not in England. It was a good 20 years before Van Gogh really registered with the British public, thanks to Roger Fry’s Post-Impressionist exhibitions at the Grafton Gallery. The first show, in 1910, was pilloried in The Times. It’s very easy to laugh at critics who completely miss the point of something new, but this review really takes the biscuit [click on the links to read the original reviews].

This is the name given, for want of a better, to a group of painters who have been making themselves talked about in Paris for some years past, and who have now found a committee daring enought to "present" their works at the Grafton Gallery. Visitors to the Salon d'Automne and to the "Independants" of a few years ago know them pretty well, and have probably formed their own opinion already. For such as have not, here is the Grafton, and here is the catalogue, with its cleverly-written Preface, trying to prove that the pictures are not only art, but almost the only logical art, the only possible art, at the present day ...

Now Mr Fry is a distinguished scholar and critic, who has made a name by his writings on Bellini and the older art - writings at once sane and learned. It is to be feared that when he lends his authority to an exhibition of this kind, and gives it to be understood that he regards the work of Gauguin and Matisse as the last word in art, the final expression of the genius of today, other writers of less sincerity will follow suit and try to persuade people that the Post-Impressionists are fine fellows, and that their art is the thing to be admired. They will even declare all who do not agree with them to be reactionaries of the worst type.

There’s a lot more in the same vein, and Van Gogh gets only a passing mention:

There is the Dutch painter, Van Gogh, with his roughly-modelled flower-pieces and his picture of a peasant girl in a green dress so shocking to the normal eye that the effect is plainly meant to be that of some of the dissonances voulues of modern music.

Two years later Fry brought over another show, featuring Matisse and Picasso. Matisse, at least, got a better write-up this time.

M. Matisse has been freely called a charlatan, which means that he is an incompetent or a mediocrity affecting a wilful eccentricity in the hopes that he may be mistaken for a genius. Now, his nude in the first room proves that he is not incompetent. You may think it ugly, but it certainly would not be easy to paint … One may say, if one likes, that Matisse is attempting things impossible to his art, that he is trying to turn painting into music. But one need not therefore fall into a rage and accuse him of incompetence or wilful perversity or a brutal love of ugliness. He is not incompetent, but an artist of great powers, however he may use them ...
The enraged Academic puts a pistol to your head and cries, "Matisse or Michelangelo - choose between them." He implies that if you get any pleasure from Matisse or see any good in him you must despise all the great artists of the past. But it would be impossible to understand or to enjoy him without some knowledge and enjoyment of the art of the past.

Picasso gets shorter shrift:

The art of M. Picasso is a very different matter. He, too, is not a charlatan, but we do not believe that he is an artist of narrow and intense originality like M. Matisse. Rather he seems to us to be by nature extremely imitative, and to have endeavoured to preserve himself from imitation by the pursuit of a theory scientific rather than artistic in its origin.

But the mood had well and truly changed. By 1912 the Post Impressionists were starting to command serious money on the Continent, even if they were still puzzling and annoying traditionalists over here. By 1913, the Times critic is obviously enjoying being one of the converted, and Van Gogh is anything but iconoclastic:

In England we call any modern picture Post-Impressionist which looks as if it would make a Royal Academician angry. This exhibition consists mainly of such pictures; but many of them which would have provoked happy laughter three years ago now look quite ordinary.

There is, for instance, nothing extraordinary about the "Interior of a Cafe" by Van Gogh except its quiet excellence. It is all seen as justly and yet as newly as a character in one of Tolstoy's novels. One feels that anyone could have painted it who had had the luck to see it so. The "Boats at Anchor," also by Van Gogh, is merely a sound but not very interesting Impressionist picture, and his flower piece is even Academic in a delightful way.      

Profound apologies for my brain lapse yesterday, adding 100 years to the anniversary. Blame it on Christmas. Thank you to everyone who pointed it out

Comments

[Samuel Greeth]

Confession: I find these art business too abstract for my mind. Lack of good culture maybe or I am just being honest unlike many people.

Perth

[Paulie]

Talking about art is a bit like dancing about fresh air. Completely pointless.
And I am an art historian.....

[Mark Macho]

Reports of past genius unrecognized are popular as we flatter ourselves that we do indeed recognize him or her. But the truly
creative idea starts with one adherent, its
originator. How many do each of us miss,
deride, strangle at birth?--not in the tallied
past but in our own present, the here and NOW!

[billwalker666@gmail.com]

I am the van Goth of the music world I have no ear.