Original subtitles

There's a reason Van Gogh is one of the most famous artists of all time.

Well, there are many reasons.

He was uniquely gifted and stands out even among the exceptionally talented group of post-impressionists

we discuss in this course.

He had a different upbringing, different influences, different struggles, and above all, a different

type of mind.

He was a perpetual outsider, but unlike Cézanne, who preferred to be alone, Vincent craved

love and friendship and community.

But he couldn't get it, and he was rejected by everyone who he didn't reject first.

He would be literally run out of town at one point.

He lacked people skills and argued with everyone about everything, and he was incredibly stubborn.

Unlucky in love and rejected by the women in his life, too, Vincent sought companionship

with sex workers and in the brothels.

Contrary to popular belief, Van Gogh's family wasn't destitute, they were well-connected,

and his uncle was a successful art dealer at the largest gallery in Europe.

While it's possible he could have lived a quiet and comfortable existence through the

support of his family, his restless mind drove him out into the world, moving every few years,

constantly searching for people, beauty, love, and community.

He was a genius who had a quick mind that was intensely curious about everything around

him.

He experimented with and mastered any style he encountered, and he incorporated elements

of them all into his own work, which is so unique and distinctive.

But the great tragedy of Van Gogh's story is that he never found what he was looking for,

nor received the recognition in lifetime that he so craved.

He struggled with mental health his whole life.

Some issues were likely genetic, others perhaps brought about by his personality and lifestyle.

He ended his life at just 37, and his life as a misunderstood genius has intrigued people

ever since.

His life was so dramatic, and his work so incredible, that you could easily dedicate a whole course

on Van Gogh.

While I will certainly discuss his life, what I want to do in my pair of lectures is to

focus on his artistic style and work in the context of the post-impressionist movement.

Because as much as he was a singular talent, he was also very much influenced by and influential

on other artists of his generation, and he helps us to define what post-impressionism is, even

today.

In this first lecture, I want to explore some of the influences that shaped Van Gogh growing

up, and talk about some of his lesser-known works, which provide important clues into his

development as an artist.

In the second, we'll investigate the maturing of his style, and explore the skills and nuances

that made his later works masterpieces.

Born in Zundert in the Netherlands in 1853, life began on a grim note for Vincent.

He was the second Vincent born to the family, the first had died in childbirth a year before.

And whenever young Vincent walked by the church where his father was a minister, he saw his

own name there on the headstone for his pre-deceased brother.

That must have been a cheerful reminder every Sunday.

It wasn't all dark though, Vincent's mother was a talented amateur artist, and she would

frequently take her children out on walks to sketch and paint from nature.

Vincent loved this, and he brought home all kinds of creatures and plants and would study

and draw them.

From the very beginning, he seemed to have an innate understanding of form, shape, light,

and shadow, and movement.

His childhood drawings are more advanced than what most college art students can produce.

Remarkably, Vincent didn't receive much more training than this.

Financial pressure took Vincent out of school early and sent him into the workforce at the

age of 16.

His uncle, also named Vincent, who they called Uncle Scent, had a great career at Goupil & Company

in The Hague, the largest art dealer in Europe.

This is when Vincent was introduced to the work of many of the masters.

He was enthralled in the gallery, soaking up everything he saw.

He loved going to museums and seeing as much art as he could.

He was good at his job.

He got promoted and sent to London.

He had a knack for language and fluently spoke four.

So within six months of arriving in London, he was reading Dickens in English.

It looked as if Vincent's career was off to a solid start, making good money, living overseas,

and doing something he loved.

But life had something very different in the works for him.

Vincent's troubled mind began brewing, and we know today many mental illnesses start

manifesting in people in their late teens to mid-twenties.

Vincent seems to have followed this pattern.

His hormones were on fire, and he had an insatiable appetite for life and love.

But there was a huge barrier, a huge gap in his understanding of social norms, and how

to have comfortable and calm conversations.

Vincent would argue with anyone.

He was extremely opinionated and stubborn, and frankly, most people couldn't stand to

be around him.

He has terrible hygiene, he's become an alcoholic, and he eventually had 10 teeth pulled after

they rotted out.

There's a bit of an urban myth that his bad teeth are the reason he's never smiling

in portraits.

It would be unusual, though, to paint a self-portrait with smiling teeth.

Imagine trying to smile for two days straight, sitting for a portrait.

Your face would go numb before the gesso dried.

While in London, Vincent starts collecting prints and is inspired particularly by the works of

artists like Gustave Doré, who are illustrating dystopian scenes of Dickensian London in the

Victorian era.

He's deeply moved and feels a calling to these people, and increasingly resentful of

the system that oppresses them.

Like all the post-impressionists, Vincent is watching incredible change in the world before

his eyes.

In just a couple of years in London in the 1870s, he would have seen the trams and subways

arriving, new factories sprouting up almost daily, and even the River Thames itself being

dredged and rebuilt.

Yet at the same time, incredible poverty and suffering caused its side effects.

In 1873, the year Vincent arrived, a particularly bad fog caused by all the pollution from coal

burning blotted out the city and killed almost a thousand people.

Along with the poor, he was also preoccupied with Eugenie, the daughter of his landlady.

He asked to marry her, but she says no, she's engaged to someone else.

He begs and pleads.

He's such a pest.

They tell him to move out.

He's deeply stung at the rejection, and this becomes a pivotal moment in Vincent's life.

Now he starts arguing with his employers, telling customers not to buy certain artworks,

and railing against the company for being too commercial.

He's eventually fired at the age of 23.

So, he's done selling art, and now he completely refocuses life.

He wants to do something meaningful and important.

He wants to help people.

So he leaves one family business and enters another.

He really gets into religion.

He wants to preach.

He wants to make a difference.

He enrolls at the Methodist Seminary, and while there, he's super hard on himself,

punishing himself in various ways, like sleeping out in the hallway instead of his room

for not studying properly.

But after all that, when he completes his studies, he refuses to take the final exam

because it's in Latin, which he says is a useless and dead language, and poor people

don't speak Latin.

Remember, he is a wizard with languages.

This would have been no problem for him, but he's got a point.

His whole focus was to help poor people.

What use was Latin to him or them?

But this is also classic Vincent.

He seems to love to take self-righteous stands that end up alienating him from everyone.

He is denied ordination at several churches due to his stubbornness about Latin and various

other rules he doesn't want to follow.

Determined to preach, he goes as a missionary to an impoverished coal mining area in the south

of Belgium in 1879, an area where none of the other preachers wanted to go.

He would continue to draw incessantly as he preached.

He gave up his home to a woman who was desperate and moved into a dirty miner shack.

Nicknamed, Christ of the coal mine, he got a sense of joy out of suffering.

He felt that his suffering relieved others of theirs.

The church was horrified when they found out how he was living and rejected his contract.

He felt completely destitute and depressed.

Religion was too hypocritical for him if he couldn't be honest as a preacher.

He's starting to feel his life fall apart.

He moves back to the Netherlands to live with his parents.

He's still drawing as a hobby, though, and even in these very early works, we can start

to see sparks of who he will soon become, like in this one of a road in his parents' town.

He's very reserved with just a tiny hint of orange in the horizon for a roof, a little mixed into the road,

and subtle earth tones that he would have been familiar with dealing with traditional

masterworks working at Goupil and Company.

With no prospects and longing for companionship, he decides to make things awkward for the family

by falling in love with his cousin, Key, who is visiting the Van Goghs after losing her husband.

Within days, he proposes to her.

She's like, oh, my husband just died, and so she flees back to Amsterdam.

Vincent pursued her to her family's house there.

I put my hand in a lamp and said, let me see her for as long as I can keep my hand in the flame, he said.

But they turned off the lamp and kicked him out.

He leaves and never returns.

No one seemed to understand him.

And he could not find a woman to love, and so he decides there's only one way he can truly be free.

To truly love passionately with abandon, where he wouldn't have to take exams or answer to a boss.

He would become an artist.

He directed all his focus and passion on becoming an artist.

At 27 years old, no formal art training, Vincent has some guts.

But like his contemporaries, Cézanne and Gauguin, it seems to have taken a while to settle into the idea of becoming an artist.

Of course, he needs to somehow support himself while he becomes an artist.

And this is where his little brother Theo comes in.

Theo had followed his older brother and uncle's footsteps and was doing well at Goupil and Company.

He wasn't rich by any means, but if he lived simply and cut costs, he could send his brother enough to live off of each month.

Vincent hadn't even painted anything of note at this point.

What an extremely supportive and loving brother.

There aren't many who could do that.

And Theo would turn out to be the most important person in Vincent's life, supporting him in various ways for the rest of his life,

and eventually being the keeper and promoter of his art.

We might never have heard of Vincent if it weren't for Theo.

Vincent now goes back to The Hague, back where he began his art career, and he starts painting.

Vincent lived simply and kept his expenses low, besides art supplies.

He would work so intently he would forget to eat, often starving himself for days at a time.

But he's unnatural, and his work improves very quickly.

He has a great eye, and he gives himself a rigorous and focused education, drawing every day from life.

While in The Hague, he receives his first commission from his uncle to do drawings of different views of the city.

Here, I think Vincent steps up his game, discovering intriguing compositions.

We start to see the wide variety of mark-making that give the surface an uncanny texture and lifelike resemblance.

Look at the river up front with its sophisticated reflections.

The trees are cartoony, but spatially accurate, and in higher contrast than the buildings in the background.

As beautifully rendered as this drawing is, it's still very dark and gray and sullen.

Everything is dead. The birds don't look too friendly, and the buildings look menacing and institutional.

The subtle white and the clouds on the top and the grass at the very bottom complete a huge range of value,

creating a very dynamic drawing, despite its melancholy mood.

And when he wasn't being paid, he wanted to depict the ordinary people around the city,

the laborers, the poor, and the peasants.

Look at the way he depicts these folks, making sure to draw sharp attention to the back-breaking labor.

These are not comfortable working positions.

Here, he seems to be drawing a one-to-one comparison with the twisted old apple tree to the tired body of the gardener.

Grandiose titles like this one, At Eternity's Gate, remind us that his original conviction was religious,

and here he is looking for the divine in his artwork.

This close-cropped composition forces the man's head back down within frame, giving a claustrophobic and trapped feel.

Vincent emphasized heavily with this feeling.

Although his was not from physical labor, his was from mental anguish.

The woman, while she has a young face, at first glance appears to be an elderly woman in a wheelchair.

It's actually a wheelbarrow, but perhaps he's emphasizing this premature aging,

this kind of labor working in poverty will do to a person.

He keeps returning to the hunched-over figure, crying in pain.

It's less important that we know who this woman is, rather that we can empathize with her suffering.

It's an accomplished drawing, even in a more traditional, academic standard.

Beautiful contrast, excellent depiction of space, great use of light and shadow.

I love the almost architectural structure he has turned her dress into.

He creates a dynamic form, propping up the slumping torso.

Perhaps not as smooth or blended as a more traditional drawing,

Van Gogh's line work breaks through as his characteristic style.

Sad women like these seem to be exactly the type of girl Vincent was into.

And, while in The Hague, he falls in love with Klesina Hornig,

a seamstress who struggled with alcoholism and supplemented her income with sex work.

She has a five-year-old daughter and is pregnant with another man's baby.

An ugly, faded woman in my eyes beautiful, Vincent said of her.

He felt sorry for her and wanted to save her, so he takes her in as his companion mistress and model.

Van Gogh gets gonorrhea and is hospitalized.

She goes back to work on the streets.

His family is horrified and scandalized when they find out.

His father cuts off his allowance and Theo threatens to cut off the money he's sending as well,

until he breaks it off with her.

He complies and leaves town, and by 1883, he's back living with his parents,

who are now living in Nuenen, a very rural area of the Netherlands.

He'll stay here for three years.

It's around this time that he starts to progress very quickly in his art,

and he starts working in watercolor and oil.

There is a tremendous amount of subtlety and restraint in this early work from 1883,

but also beautiful, abstract, random, juicy watercolor marks.

He's getting messy with it, letting it pool up and swim around with other pigments.

He creates a very convincing atmospheric perspective,

with subtle grays and just a hint of orange in the sky.

A bit of activity on the horizon, maybe a bridge of some sort.

The fog is too dense to say for sure.

Now, this painting, on the other hand,

before he went to Paris, this is about as colorful as Vincent got.

I was surprised when I first learned that Van Gogh made this painting.

It's really not very good.

I'll admit it has a few redeeming qualities,

but comparing it to where he will be a few short years from now,

or even the watercolor he did just a year later, it's quite astonishing.

It's like he heard a rumor of Impressionism and made a very hesitant and weak-willed attempt.

Which is very unlike Vincent.

He usually dove head-first into anything he was interested in.

This drawing is a far more successful and interesting work of art in my opinion.

This one looks like he's reaching for something higher,

with the divine rays radiating out from the sun in the otherwise dreary and colorless landscape.

But his signature line work is brought to the forefront.

Here's another piece I would never have guessed as Van Gogh,

but we see some important aspects to his style that he's still developing and still working out.

This painting is unusual to me as it has such a strong emphasis of atmospheric perspective,

classically rendered as the buildings get smaller, less in focus and lower contrast.

The city begins to take on the color of the sky as it goes back in space,

and we would see more atmosphere between our eyes and the landscape.

The bottom of the canvas features more detail, stronger contrast and larger forms,

all as one would expect with traditional perspective painting.

This approach is completely at odds with the style we know him for.

It's almost completely desaturated.

The colors look very dull and natural, as they would on a cold gray day such as this.

There's also a density and level of detail to the city which we rarely see from Van Gogh.

Despite its looseness, he does seem to be committed to painting every single building he can see.

Later, he will abandon such detail as he trades it for simplification of form and exaggeration of color and mark.

The simplification of the space will eventually allow him greater freedom to innovate and paint from his intuition.

In 1885, Vincent starts on his most ambitious painting to date, The Potato Eaters.

He took this painting extremely seriously.

The last five years or so were preparatory.

He was teaching himself and learning as much as he could, but now he was ready for a real work of art,

and he had very grand intentions and ambitions for this painting.

He wanted Theo to enter it into the salon in Paris.

He makes dozens of drawings and lithograph studies and paintings of the individual portraits,

really trying to understand his subject.

Here we have a study of one of the figures at the table.

I love seeing preparatory sketches.

They can be very enlightening and show you how the artist's thought process evolved over the course of the work.

And here we have an early version of what will become The Potato Eaters.

In the final work, he's going to flip the seating arrangement and everyone will be in the reverse position,

except the smaller person in front in silhouette.

The main man and the woman pouring coffee will be on opposite sides of the table.

The coffee is hidden in the drawing, but you'll see in a moment how prominently it figures into the final painting,

which tells me that Vincent was not satisfied with this early composition, and the coffee was an important element for him.

The space is also a little bit more convincing in this sketch than it will be in the painting.

He has better control of the values and the details with the pencil than he does with the paintbrush.

With his final version in oil, you can feel he wants to harken back to the classic and important paintings of the past,

and emphasize the darkness like Rembrandt and other Dutch masters did.

He's using an extremely limited color palette.

While it does have bits of blue and green in certain areas, it's primarily a painting in brown and gray and black.

We have a very tiny and weak light source in the lamp.

He wanted to show the honesty of the labor of these people,

eating the potatoes that they had planted and dug out of the ground with those same bare hands.

They are rough and knotted, their faces not smooth and pleasant, but a bit coarse and weathered.

He wanted them to look like they too came from the dirt,

that a lifetime of this work had turned their bodies into potatoes.

He was also probably creating a scene in which he felt like he belonged.

He really identified with these folks.

He wanted to be a peasant himself, and while not official,

he has basically taken a vow of poverty, as he lives an extremely simple and somewhat brutal existence.

He very much views himself as an outcast, one who has been beat up and treated unfairly by the world.

This is a family he feels some kind of kinship and belonging to.

There are many fascinating things about this painting I want to point out.

First, they are all a bit like goblins.

Look at this guy on the left, the one with the exaggerated cropped forehead,

almost looking more like a caricature than a believable person.

Whether he wasn't sure of the proper human proportions or he didn't care,

I'm not quite sure.

Without the formal training, it's likely he just struggled to keep things proportional.

It's also possible he's exaggerating for the effect.

The space is awkward.

It doesn't look like things fit within the space very well, or that they fit under the table.

Again, check out the guy on the left and how, up front, his knees don't even go under the table cleanly,

while the person behind him, to his right, is comfortably low down and right under the table.

Are the chairs dramatically different heights?

Is he trying to emphasize something?

And take a look at this person pouring the oil black coffee, which is pretty austere in itself.

The arm closest to us is about twice as long as the arm pouring the coffee.

Perhaps it's the foreshortening that's throwing him off,

but compositionally it actually fits into the space quite well and makes a lot of sense that way.

He's exaggerating facial features and proportion there, so who knows?

This smaller child in front has a white aura seemingly coming off her,

which is actually the steam coming off the potatoes.

He sends this painting to Theo.

And Theo's like, yeah, it's good, but it's so rough and unfinished and clumsy compared to the academic painters,

so it's not a clear fit for the conservative salon.

On the other hand, it fits better with the new Impressionists to some degree,

but you have all these browns and blacks and grays,

and it's way too boring for them and their obsession with color.

Theo had a point.

While we can maybe appreciate this painting now for an incredibly emotional and moving,

empathetic work made by one of the great geniuses of the world,

at the time it was sort of stuck between the two different art worlds,

and no one else knew what to make of it.

Van Gogh isn't totally ignorant, of course.

He's heard of Impressionism, but he doesn't get it yet.

He's never seen it in person.

He's never seen these new artificial paint colors that artists were using.

Remember, nearly all the Impressionists and post-Impressionists came from France,

in part because that is where you could see the latest trends,

meet other artists, exhibit your work to an interested public.

In 1885, the world was getting smaller,

but there still wasn't an easy way for you to see art in other places.

There's no photography in newspapers yet, no glossy art magazines.

Even though he was only 250 miles from Paris in Nuenen, it's like a totally different world.

So Theo says, you've got to come see what's going on with all these new artists like Monet, Cezanne, and Gauguin.

This is also the time when his father passes away.

He paints a loving tribute to his father's faith by painting his Bible.

He also includes Emile Zola's book La Joye de Vivre next to the Bible,

maybe as a way to express his own beliefs and values sitting next to his father's.

This will prove to be a big turning point in Vincent's career.

With the death of his father, he seemed to have the confidence to become his own man.

As he moves to Paris, with all the new skills he's been learning and a more independent outlook on life,

he's now ready to transform into the artist we know today.