Live Auction Tuesday, October 30, 2007 at 10AM:
42. Vincent van Gogh’s Letter to G. Albert Aurier, 10 or 11
February 1890, ALS, in French
Nevertheless, in the case of Vincent van Gogh, in my opinion, despite the
sometimes misleading strangeness of his works, it is difficult for an
unprejudiced and knowledgeable viewer to deny or question the naïve truthfulness
of his art, the ingeniousness of his vision.
- G. Albert Aurier, Mercure de France, January 1890
Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist artist. His paintings and drawings include some of the world's best known, most popular and most expensive pieces. Van Gogh spent his early life working for a firm of art dealers. After a brief spell as a teacher, he became a missionary worker in a very poor mining region. He did not embark upon a career as an artist until 1880. Initially, van Gogh worked only with sombre colours, until he encountered Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism in Paris. He incorporated their brighter colours and style of painting into a uniquely recognizable style, which was fully developed during the time he spent at Arles, France.
He produced more than 2,000 works, including around 900 paintings and 1,100
drawings and sketches, during the last ten years of his life. Most of his
best-known works were produced in the final two years of his life, during which
time he cut off part of his left ear following a breakdown in his friendship
with Paul Gauguin. After this he suffered recurrent bouts of mental illness,
which led to his suicide.
The central figure in Vincent van Gogh's life was his brother Theo, who
continually and selflessly provided financial support. Their lifelong friendship
is documented in numerous letters they exchanged from August 1872 onwards. Van
Gogh is a pioneer of what came to be known as Expressionism. He had an enormous
influence on 20th century art, especially on the Fauves and German
Expressionists.
Sunflower Auction is proud to present one of the most important letters written
by Vincent van Gogh, responding to the author of the only review of his work to
appear in his lifetime. He expresses his gratitude to G. Albert Aurier and
discusses his approach to painting, contemporary artists and famed Sunflowers
paintings. The text reads like a window on his soul, revealing clues about his
battered mental condition, making him subject to storms of emotion and
insecurity that would plague him until his suicide just five months later.
The Isolated One: Transcending Heritage?
Thank you very much for your article in the Mercure de France, which
surprised me a good deal. I admire it very much as a work of art in itself, it
seems to me that you paint with words; in fact, I encounter my canvases anew in
your article, but better than they are in reality, richer, more meaningful…
Anyway – what I am trying to say is that things seem to have mistakenly become
attached to my name that you would do better to link to Monticelli, to whom I
owe so much. I also owe a great deal to Paul Gauguin…
- Vincent Van Gogh to G. Albert Aurier, February 1890
G. Albert Aurier’s glowing review of van Gogh’s work in the January 1890 issue
of the Mercure de France asserted that although he had not “transcended his
heritage,” he was not an “unworthy descendant of the old Dutch masters. Van Gogh
was rather uncomfortable with the praise lavished by Aurier, and his letter to
the author was an exercise in artistic self-deprecation.
You may realize now that your article would have been fairer and – it seems to
me – consequently more powerful, if, when dealing with the question of the
future of ‘tropical painting’ and the question of colour, you had – before
speaking of me – done justice to Gauguin and Monticelli. For the role attaching
to me, or that will be attached to me, will remain, I assure you, of very
secondary importance.
In February 1890 van Gogh wrote to his sister, “I thought the article by Mr.
Aurier – leaving out consideration whether I deserve what he says of me – very
artistic and very curious in itself. But it is rather like this that I ought to
be, instead of the sad reality of how I do feel.”
Yet as is often the case with truly visionary and original artists, van Gogh’s
contemporaries understood his work better than its creator did. A letter from
his devoted brother, Theo, dated April 23, 1890, describes how Monet commented
that Vincent’s pictures were “the best of all in the [Vingtistes] exhibition.”
Serrat went to Theo’s house to view more paintings and was enthralled to the
point of saying if had he no style of his own he would change course and ‘seek
what you are seeking.’
Only one of van Gogh’s paintings would be sold during his lifetime. The Red
Vineyard was purchased by Anna Boch (the sister of a friend), after the
Vingtistes exhibition in Brussels in 1890. The sad irony is that barely a
century later the work of Vincent van Gogh, a painter that in his own time
struggled to pay for the paints he used – and even reused canvases for economy,
would command tens of millions of dollars.
Aurier never changed his views on van Gogh’s work and corresponded with the
artist’s devoted brother Theo van Gogh well after Vincent’s death in July 1890.
Theo clearly favored Aurier for having been “the first to appreciate him, not
only on account of his greater or smaller capacity to paint pictures, but you
have read these pictures, and by doing so you very clearly saw the man,” and
asked Aurier to help him with a biography of Vincent, and an “elaborate volume
of illustrations and reproductions of certain letters.”
Symbolism and Sunflowers
And how could we explain that obsessive passion for the solar disk that
he loves to make shine forth from his emblazoned skies, and, at the same time,
for that other sun, that vegetable star, the sumptuous sunflower, which he
repeats, tirelessly, monomaniacally, if we refuse to accept his persistent
preoccupation with some vague and glorious heliomythic allegory?
- G. Albert Aurier, Mercure de France, January 1890
Aurier’s review asserted that van Gogh was almost always “a Symbolist…who
feels the continual need to clothe his ideas in precise, ponderable, tangible
forms, in intensely sensual and material exteriors.”
A year later in 1891, Aurier outlined the role of symbolism in visual arts in a
Mercure de France article called “Symbolism in Art.” In it he recognized and
promoted what was to become known as the “Symbolist” school. He believed the
purpose of visual arts was to be "ideational, symbolical, synthetic, subjective,
[and] decorative.” Symbolism was to be used wherever and whenever possible,
extending its reach even to depictions of the natural world where nature should
be observed “by way of the dream.”
Sunflowers has become one of the world’s best-known works of art. Considering
the challenges van Gogh faced in his life, it almost seems appropriate it has
become his best-known work. Artists have used sunflowers as symbols to express
ideas such as piety. For the one-time cleric van Gogh, they seem to have
symbolized even more:
Let us suppose that the two canvasses of sunflowers which are present at the
Vingtistes have certain qualities of colour, and that they also symbolize
‘gratitude’. Are they any different from so many other pictures of flowers, more
skillfully painted, which are not yet appreciated enough – the Roses tremieres
and the Iris jaunes by old Quost, the magnificent bunches of peonies which
Jeannin produces in such abundance? You see, I find it very difficult to make a
distinction between impressionism and other things. I do not see any use for
much of the sectarian thinking we have seen these last few years,
but the absurdity of it frightens me.
Interestingly, Aurier’s review singled out cypress trees in van Gogh’s work as
images “that expose their nightmarish, flamelike, black silhouettes.” Bearing
this in mind, perhaps the strangest twist in van Gogh’s letter comes in the form
of him promising to send Aurier a study of cypresses “so characteristic of the
Provence landscape” – and at the same time a tree that is often associated with
death. Considering Aurier’s assertion of van Gogh as a Symbolist painter and van
Gogh’s bouts with mental illness, it is tempting to view the curious choice of
cypresses almost as a premonition of his own death.
Raison d'être
The historical significance of van Gogh’s letter can scarcely be overestimated.
Not only does van Gogh use the opportunity to discuss his approach to art, he
also praises his contemporaries, references his Sunflowers canvases,
and lays bare his approach to his work with a brutal frankness. It illuminates
van Gogh - the artist and the man; a man wracked by feelings of inadequacy and
inferiority.
The timeless appeal of van Gogh and his work is evinced by his work periodically
making headlines today. Recently, the discovery by X-ray of another painting,
Wild Vegetation, underneath The Ravine, at the Museum of Fine Art, Boston, made
headlines all over the world.
This is a rare opportunity to make a remarkable addition to any van Gogh art or
letters collection.
Condition Report: Good with small bits missing from the header and footer, minor
edge tearing, negligible impact on the text
Size: 10.6 x 8.3 in. (26.9 x 21.1 cm.)
Provenance: Profiles in History, Sotheby’s , J. Williame Chateauroux
Estimate: $250,000 +
Back to Short Lot Listing with Lot Detail Links