| PORTRAIT DE L’ARTISTE | VAN GOGH |
Landscapes he liked, and he took pleasure in doing copies of other men. In such works there was no hard and set reality to follow as in still-lives and portraiture. Here the colour could be splashed on almost haphazardly. He himself said that still-life was a relaxation. He felt this because to paint still-life his enthusiasm was restricted. Anything served for a subject—an old boot, a single vase, a coffee-pot. One imagines he tossed these models onto a table from the opposite side of the room, and painted them in whatever position they fell. In this carelessness the public sees “inspiration.” And indeed his canvases were inspired, but only in the same way a starving man is inspired to throw himself upon a sumptuous meal. He painted because he was forced to, and when painting is merely a physical necessity indulged in to express an unordered religious mania, it ceases to interest the æsthetician who searches for a complete cosmos bodied forth in subjective form.
As a decorator Van Gogh is too turbulent and forward; as a painter of easel pictures he is too chaotic and unintelligible; but as a blast of misdirected enthusiasm he is not without power. His symbolism, while not being of the variety which presents Grecian figures as abstract virtues, is nevertheless of the same order. He tells us that in painting a young man he loved, he would make the head a golden yellow and orange, and the background a rich and intense blue, as well as transcribing the physical likeness to epitomise his love. Thus depicted the young man would be “like a bright star in the boundless infinite taking on a mysterious importance.” Again he writes: “Had I had the strength to continue, I would have done saints and holy women from nature, who would have seemed to belong to another age. They would have been the bourgeois of the present, having many parallels with the old primitive Christians.” We see what he was after.
Van Gogh possessed all the modern socialistic ideals. He held that individuals could do nothing alone, but should work in communities, one doing the colour, one the drawing, another the composition, etc. In his desire for this democratic art factory is seen his absence of self-confidence. It is not strange when we consider his adherence all his life to so childish a technical programme as Divisionism. This adherence marked the main difference between him and Gauguin. The latter detested the Divisionistic method. He wanted to adapt nature’s colour and effect to decoration, while Van Gogh wanted to make only abstract dramatic tapestries. They both succeeded; and though the canvases of Gauguin have the peaceful utilitarian destiny of interior decoration awaiting them, Van Gogh’s work, once we are rid of the modern habit of welcoming all disorganised and purely enthusiastic work as profound, will be laid aside forever. He was psychiatric and expended the greater part of his feverish energy through the channel of painting. But he did little more than use a borrowed and inharmonious palette to express ideas wholly outside the realm of art.