Brian Sewell on Van Gogh

Our legendary art critic returns via AI

Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers at the National Gallery is yet another insipid exercise in sentimental hagiography. This exhibition, which purports to explore the artist’s “intimate” relationships through a series of portraits and floral studies, is in fact a shallow indulgence in romanticism — the worst kind, pandering to the emotions of the casual visitor while glossing over the profundities of Van Gogh’s art. It seems the National Gallery has decided to package him as the patron saint of unrequited love, his works reduced to greeting cards for the emotionally overwrought.

The title itself — Poets and Lovers — reeks of mawkishness. One expects poetry in Van Gogh’s brushwork, but what does “lovers” add, save to titillate those who prefer their artists to suffer romantically as well as mentally? This framing does a disservice not only to the works on display but to Van Gogh himself. The artist’s portraits — L’Arlésienne and Joseph Roulin among them — are not declarations of sentimental attachment, but rather exercises in psychological and emotional depth, framed with a startling precision of colour and line.

But in this exhibition, their complexity is reduced to footnotes in a trite narrative of affection, with Van Gogh cast as a lovelorn figure pining for recognition.

Of course, we are presented with the inevitable floral still lifes — Irises and Roses, works of dazzling chromatic intensity. Here, too, the exhibition insists on an unnecessary emotional overlay, as though Van Gogh’s use of colour needs to be explained away as an expression of yearning or loneliness. How tiresome. The accompanying texts are riddled with florid prose, invoking the usual clichés about Van Gogh’s “inner turmoil”.

Myth of the doomed lover

The exhibition goes further to dredge up the most vapid of psychological readings: that Van Gogh’s vibrant palette somehow mirrors the heat of his emotions. What arrant nonsense. Yes, his reds are fiery, his blues piercing, but these are choices made by an artist with a keen understanding of colour theory, influenced by the bold flatness of Japanese prints and his own study of Delacroix. The curators, however, see fit to interpret every vivid stroke as some sort of psychological rupture, denying Van Gogh his agency and reducing him to a mere conduit for emotional excess.

The portraits in this exhibition fare no better. Take, for instance, The Postman Joseph Roulin, a work of singular power, where the intensity of Roulin’s gaze and the almost sculptural handling of his beard create a commanding presence. Yet here, the curators insist on positioning this as a reflection of Van Gogh’s “need for male companionship” — as though Roulin’s individuality is secondary to the artist’s social anxieties. This facile psychologising reduces the sitter to a mere cipher for Van Gogh’s insecurities, ignoring the artistic relationship that created this masterful depiction. The selection of works is predictably safe, calculated to draw in visitors with familiar titles and a handful of overwrought narratives. There is nothing wrong with popular exhibitions, but to present this as an exploration of Van Gogh’s personal relationships, while failing to offer any critical insight into the art itself, is an act of cultural laziness. It is as though the curators are content to let the myth of Van Gogh, the doomed lover, do all the heavy lifting, while the works themselves are left to languish under the weight of an all-too-familiar story.

Furthermore, one must lament the absence of any real engagement with Van Gogh’s influence on later generations of artists. Instead, we are treated to a soap opera of Van Gogh’s personal life, as if that alone were enough to sustain the interest of serious art lovers. How much richer this exhibition could have been had it examined, even in passing, the way his bold brushwork and daring chromatic choices paved the way for Expressionism, Fauvism and beyond. Yet, the curators seem to believe that such details are too academic for the general audience — an unforgivable condescension.

One leaves Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers not with a greater understanding of the artist, but with a sense of frustration. Van Gogh’s art deserves better than this flaccid, romanticised interpretation. His portraits, still lifes and landscapes are far more than emotional outpourings; they are meticulously constructed compositions, imbued with technical mastery and innovation.

To end on an inevitable note: this exhibition is not for lovers of art, but for lovers of the myth of the tortured genius, the romantic who suffers so that we, in our comfortable 21stcentury detachment, might project our own inadequacies upon him. What a disservice to the artist, and what a betrayal of his legacy.

One can only hope that future curators will have the courage to wrest Van Gogh from

VAN GOGH’S WORKS HAVE BEEN REDUCED TO GREETING CARDS FOR THE EMOTIONALLY OVERWROUGHT

the clutches of sentimentality and present him as he truly was — a master of his craft, whose contribution to the art world transcends the melodrama in which we continue to entangle him.

And here’s what Brian Sewell actually said about Van Gogh …

“The Royal Academy’s Winter Exhibition is devoted to ‘The Real Van Gogh: the Artist and his Letters’. Real? What an odd adjective to use of a man who died 120 years ago … The real

Van Gogh, the Academy would have us believe, was “a truly great intellect”, but in his 902 surviving letters, 1,200 drawings and 800 or so paintings I perceive no towering intelligence in any conventional sense but an overflowing torrent of ideas and images and the obsessive energy of, if not the lunatic, then certainly the savant in the wry contemporary sense of an unruly and inexplicable intellectual phenomenon. Too soon he was exhausted by the driving of this demon.”

Extracted from a review of The Real Van Gogh: the Artist and his Letters at the Royal Academy, printed in the Evening Standard in January 2010