Visitors to the ‘Van Gogh and Britain’ exhibition, currently at Tate Britain, are welcomed to the show by a painting of a middle-aged woman, wearing a white blouse and a black dress, seated at a dark green table with two pale green books in front of her, against a rose coloured background. She stares back at the viewer, her head resting on her left hand, her left arm resting on the table, her expression neutral but engaged. This version of L’Arlésienne, painted in 1890, is on loan from the Museu de Arte de São Paulo. There is a similar painting, also made in 1890, held by the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, in which Madame Ginoux smiles. In another version from the same year, now in a private collection, the wallpaper is pale yellow with a floral pattern, the blouse is pale green, the dress pale pink and the books on the table are red.
In June 1912, Robert Walser saw yet another version of l’Arlésienne, this one painted in 1888 and now held by the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Madame Ginoux, in three-quarter profile, stares ahead, avoiding the viewer’s gaze; a black ribbon falls from her hair onto the back of her chair; the wall behind her is bright lemon-yellow. A book lies open on the table before her and she appears lost in thought: but what is she thinking?
In a short article, published in Kunst und Künstler, Walser struggles to find anything substantive to say about the painting, despite his obvious admiration for it. It is, he says, “just a picture of a woman in everyday life”, but the mysterious quality of the brushwork has a “grandeur that grips and shakes you”. Six years later, in an article published in Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Walser remembers the painting and his reaction to it. He thinks at first that we should “pity the artist who had squandered such great industry on so low and charmless a subject”, but then says that the painting is a sort of masterpiece: “The colours and brushwork possess the most extraordinary vitality, and formally the picture is outstanding.”
Then Walser imagines Madame Ginoux speaking to him, telling him about her childhood, her family, her schooldays and her friends. He considers her life: ordinary activities, quotidian experiences and emotions, the passing of the months and years. And then, he continues:
One day a painter said to her – himself just a poor working man – that he would like to paint her. She sits for him, calmly allowing him to paint her portrait. To him she is not an indifferent model – for him, nothing and no one is indifferent. He paints her just as she is, plain and true. Without much intention, however, something great and noble enters into the simple picture, a solemnity of the soul it is impossible to overlook.
Walser’s process of creative imagination – what Madame Ginoux’s life was like, what van Gogh saw and felt, which he tried to capture in his portrait – is one form of active looking, one form of sensory engagement that fine art, at its best, provokes.
There are other ways of seeing. Writing in the Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1935, Daniel Catton Rich described the influence of Japanese print makers on van Gogh’s painting style. He says: “Van Gogh’s greatest work in the Japanese manner is undoubtedly the startling portrait of Mme. Ginoux…” and goes on to describe the version of this portrait that had so impressed Walser, noting the probable influence of Sharaku’s work:
Sharaku, through his heightened simplifications, his distortion of feature for emotional effect may easily have suggested similar qualities for “L’Arlésienne”. At any rate the use of a vivid background (here yellow; in Sharaku yellow, mica or silver) which, instead of absorbing the figure thrusts it forward; the brief strokes for eye, deliberately lengthened nose, and mouth – all these altered in proportion to gain new power – the angular, rhythmic silhouette, the play of flat masses of colour (note the expanses of black and white, visibly stressed) all suggest that the Dutch artist may have consulted one of Sharaku’s amazing prints.
When Catton Rich looks at the painting, he does not imagine Madame Ginoux’s childhood experiences; instead, he sees how techniques characteristic of one form of image making in one culture, have been borrowed and adapted for a different form of image making in a different culture.
Walser and Catton Rich both admire the version of L’Arlésienne that now belongs to the Met. despite the very different ways in which they describe their experience of looking at the painting. Their interpretations are not rivals but complements and, taken together, they illustrate an important truth about looking – both looking at art and looking at the world – namely that “we live and move in what we see, but we only see what we want to see” (Paul Valéry). Paradoxically, what we know about the world is principally determined by what we see in the world, but what we see in the world is principally determined by what we already know about the world. All our visual perceptions are judgments and – just as in the best traditions of case law – each judgment is grounded upon a set of pre-existing beliefs and assumptions. We never look unprecedentedly.
In the 1860s – around the time that large numbers of Japanese prints started to arrive in Paris and other European capitals – changing forever the way that Western artists saw the world, and changing the way they painted the world that they saw – leading British artists and art historians were almost universally dismissive of the work of Sandro Botticelli: “puerile ostentation”; “bad drawing and worse painting, and such revelling in ugliness”; “coarse and altogether without beauty”. Walter Pater, whose collection of essays, The Renaissance (1873) is seen as a landmark of modern aestheticism, devotes a chapter to Botticelli and writes that, “his name, little known in the last century, is quietly becoming important”, but even he describes him as “a secondary painter” (see Frank Kermode, Forms of Attention, 1985). One hundred and fifty years later this all seems to be nonsense. Botticelli’s place in the premier ranks of Italian Renaissance artists seems assured: but only because tastes have changed, and because few of us think about the history of the canon. Standards of beauty are not timeless: what we see is mostly what we are taught to see.
It would be easy – but wrong – to assume that Catton Rich looked at van Gogh’s painting only from the point of view of an art historian, whereas Walser looked only as a storyteller; easy – but wrong – to think that scholarship is an obstacle to emotional response. Knowledge of art history helps us to contextualise a painting – the visual content, its symbolism, the structural features of the image and their meaning for the artist’s contemporaries – and this in turn allows us to judge both its success in formal terms and its merits compared against the wider canon. So too, our emotional responses to paintings are always – yes, always – conditioned by what we think we know about the object in our view, by our upbringing, our culture and our prejudices. We can change the way we look at art, just as we can change the way we look at the world, but to do so we must educate our sense of sight: we must train ourselves to see better.
Two years ago, I sat in a room in the Kunsthaus, Zürich with my oldest friend (by which I mean, the person who has been my friend longer than anyone else). We were looking closely at two Claude Monet ‘water lily’ paintings, both very beautiful. It was a weekday in February and the gallery was quiet. We sat, undisturbed, for many minutes, staring at the huge canvases. We talked about how we each felt when we first discovered Monet’s painting when we were teenagers; about the way in which the popularity of impressionism and the ubiquity of its most famous motifs have jaded our reception of them; and about the thrill or our unanticipated re-discovery of them – their complexity and grandeur – in this room, together on this day.
Art is a shared pleasure: we learn to look more carefully when we look in company, drawing on the insights and emotional response of others, whose judgments and honesty we trust. It is not possible to educate our sense of sight alone, because the world that we see is a shared world, it’s objects and their meanings – and their representation, directly or abstractly, in painting – themselves the product of collective undertakings by many people over many generations. There can be no solitary, private visual language because paintings are full of signs, and “every sign supposes a code” (Roland Barthes). And what is true of painting is true of the world: it can be seen truly only when in company.
Recently I have visited exhibitions of work by Patrick Heron (at Tate St Ives) and Pierre Bonnard (at Tate Modern), both of whom painted gardens as a way to test the possibilities of the dissolution of form, the abandonment of perspective and generation of pictorial intensity through the adjacencies of colour. Some of this I know because I read the catalogues, some I understand because of what I see when I look attentively at their canvases; some I remember from gardens I have visited, when the light is clear and sharp, but the borders of the flower-beds are not. In each exhibition, I was reminded of that day in Zürich – of a shared experience of beauty and of a long and valued friendship – because Monet’s presentation of the water lilies in his garden pond at Giverny, seems to me to be a significant harbinger of colour field painting. And, in consequence, a significant contribution to my understanding of and emotional response to the natural world: as painted forms dissolve, so the physical world manifests its complex reality.
The education of the eye is not just about the accumulation of art historical knowledge and cultivation of aesthetic taste; it is also the foundation of ethical judgement. By learning to look carefully at the world we can teach ourselves and others to see the social world differently, leading us to treat people better, with greater sympathy, with more respect. I think of Lucian Freud, the preeminent portrait painter in recent British art history, whose quest to capture ‘the truth’ of those who sat for him in his studio was legendary, and whose large canvases present the human form with candour, without illusion. He is rightly admired for his work. But … but when I remember his major retrospective at Tate Britain in 2002, when I look through art books devoted to his work, I do not see my social world: I do not see London, I do not see Notting Hill, where Freud lived. I see only pale flesh.
Next summer Tate Britain will host a major show of work by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, also a British portrait painter. Her paintings are of fictional people in neutral nondescript spaces. What makes her paintings ‘true’ is not the resemblance of the image to the person, for there is no person to resemble. Rather they depend on the plausibility of the image: the look, the stance, the gesture, the colours of face, clothes and background. All her portraits that I have seen are of people of African heritage, and in this sense her work challenges the dominant aesthetic of British art galleries, and the dominant ethic of British society. She paints people who are mostly unseen, unrepresented, unheard and unwelcomed. She is less acclaimed than Freud for her technical prowess, and I think this assessment is fair: her work at its best is very strong, but the quality is mixed. But she presents a truth of our society that Freud shied away from, for which reason I look forward to her show next summer and the chance to look and learn more about the people who populate my world, my London.
Van Gogh was commercially unsuccessful, suffered from mental illness and killed himself in his late thirties but he changed the way we see the world: not just how sunflowers look in a vase, or how stars shine in a deep blue Mediterranean sky – although he helped us to see both of these natural phenomena anew – but also what an ordinary working woman might look like as she sat at a table, reading and thinking. He died poor but he has enriched our view of our natural and social worlds, if only we take the time and trouble to see.
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