Van Gogh occupies a unique place in Art World mythology. Listen to this little snippet...
(The words are taken from a famous essay by Rene Ricard, an influential 1980's art writer, and the movie it was taken from was directed by Julian Schnabel, who is an actual bona fide painter himself.)
Van Gogh didn't sell in his lifetime, except once. And that was not a sunflower.
Writing about Van Gogh is difficult. He has to be portrayed as a great artist who happened to have some mental health issues that lead to him committing suicide. There cannot be a connection between his painting and his mental health, because that would cast him as an "Outsider Artist", which would reduce his auction prices considerably, if not change the way we see the paintings themselves.
The art-history / market problem is that "great artists" usually do very well in their lifetimes and have robust mental and physical health. They may get forgotten immediately after their death because fashions have moved on(this tends to happen to composers), but they get re-discovered. The greats of the Renaissance were never forgotten, partly because their work was all over the Vatican and other Catholic churches and monasteries, and because a cult grew up around them, helped by the descendants of their patrons.
The usual course is that an artist does well when alive, because they are of the times, and then falls into obscurity and the darker parts of the museum repositories. When someone does write a book on them, it is clear that, technically competent though they were, the images do not speak to us now, but inform us of what then was like. The exceptions tend to be on the museum walls already.
Van Gogh is an exception to all these rules. If he had died in a duel, he might have been the Galois of painting, but he didn't. He died after extended periods in an asylum, and nobody ever explains why (though there is a scene in Schnabel's movie about him that suggests he was mildly unhinged).
Ricard blames Van Gogh's life for perpetrating the undiscovered-artist-in-a-garret myth, and then asserts that, contrary to that myth, part of the artist's job is to get the work where I will see it. Charles Saatchi in his collecting heyday used to do a Saturday morning round of small galleries and artist's studios, which seems to make Ricard sound a bit lazy, but I'm assuming that Ricard did his rounds as well. He just didn't knock on every garret door. He listened to the gossip, and getting gossiped about is part of getting one's name out.
Van Gogh's life is also to blame for the myth that genius-is-madness. This is very popular with artistic hacks and ordinarily-competent problem-solvers everywhere, but the evidence is to the contrary. Tesla was eccentric, not actually bonkers. The great painters were mostly competent businessmen who ran studios the size of a small movie production house, and negotiated contracts with Popes and Dukes (or at least the secretaries of the Popes and Dukes).
Personally, I late paintings a little overbearing. All those neurotic lines and strong colours, especially the sunflowers. I'm not a big fan of impasto, and yellow is not a Top Five colour. The Starry Night painting has become a meme. I'm sure there are people who genuinely like his work, and wonder how I can admire Sargant, Leighton or Velasquez.
In the end, the auction prices make any criticism irrelevant. His buyers are well-funded museums and very wealthy private collectors. I don't have the cash to argue with anyone paying $62m in 2014 prices for a vase of poppies and daises. That's as much as a decent footballer. But then, nobody actually buys footballers for that money: it's a complicated funding scheme by rich clubs for small ones. Everyone has long suspected that high-value art transactions are also disguised business deals, and one or two are known to have been.
I'm hoping the book, The Sunflowers Are Mine by Martin Bailey, will explain these valuations and the buyers' motivations.
Van Gogh didn't sell in his lifetime, except once. And that was not a sunflower.
Writing about Van Gogh is difficult. He has to be portrayed as a great artist who happened to have some mental health issues that lead to him committing suicide. There cannot be a connection between his painting and his mental health, because that would cast him as an "Outsider Artist", which would reduce his auction prices considerably, if not change the way we see the paintings themselves.
The art-history / market problem is that "great artists" usually do very well in their lifetimes and have robust mental and physical health. They may get forgotten immediately after their death because fashions have moved on(this tends to happen to composers), but they get re-discovered. The greats of the Renaissance were never forgotten, partly because their work was all over the Vatican and other Catholic churches and monasteries, and because a cult grew up around them, helped by the descendants of their patrons.
The usual course is that an artist does well when alive, because they are of the times, and then falls into obscurity and the darker parts of the museum repositories. When someone does write a book on them, it is clear that, technically competent though they were, the images do not speak to us now, but inform us of what then was like. The exceptions tend to be on the museum walls already.
Van Gogh is an exception to all these rules. If he had died in a duel, he might have been the Galois of painting, but he didn't. He died after extended periods in an asylum, and nobody ever explains why (though there is a scene in Schnabel's movie about him that suggests he was mildly unhinged).
Ricard blames Van Gogh's life for perpetrating the undiscovered-artist-in-a-garret myth, and then asserts that, contrary to that myth, part of the artist's job is to get the work where I will see it. Charles Saatchi in his collecting heyday used to do a Saturday morning round of small galleries and artist's studios, which seems to make Ricard sound a bit lazy, but I'm assuming that Ricard did his rounds as well. He just didn't knock on every garret door. He listened to the gossip, and getting gossiped about is part of getting one's name out.
Van Gogh's life is also to blame for the myth that genius-is-madness. This is very popular with artistic hacks and ordinarily-competent problem-solvers everywhere, but the evidence is to the contrary. Tesla was eccentric, not actually bonkers. The great painters were mostly competent businessmen who ran studios the size of a small movie production house, and negotiated contracts with Popes and Dukes (or at least the secretaries of the Popes and Dukes).
Personally, I late paintings a little overbearing. All those neurotic lines and strong colours, especially the sunflowers. I'm not a big fan of impasto, and yellow is not a Top Five colour. The Starry Night painting has become a meme. I'm sure there are people who genuinely like his work, and wonder how I can admire Sargant, Leighton or Velasquez.
I'm hoping the book, The Sunflowers Are Mine by Martin Bailey, will explain these valuations and the buyers' motivations.
