The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters

Having often pondered how altered perceptions or mental conditions might affect the experience of viewing or making art, the splitting headache that accompanied me to the year's first big blockbuster left no doubt as to the restorative powers of art. While I left clear-headed and relaxed, questions have always lingered over Vincent Van Gogh's own state of mind when he checked out, violently with a gun in his hand, in a French field in 1890.

Was he bonkers? Emphatically no, says this recuperative exhibition of the real Van Gogh: he was erudite, serious, learned and studious. No country bumpkin or deranged simpleton would write as passionately and engagingly about literature, art and the pursuit of truth as the Dutchman did in his cache of almost a thousand letters to friends, colleagues and his beloved brother and patron, Theo.

'It's as difficult to say a thing well, as it is to paint it,' remarked Vincent, who soon mastered both skills, although his early efforts on canvas here reveal the struggles of a self-taught landscape painter doing the grunt work that comes when learning line and perspective. One letter includes a thinly disguised self-portrait sketch of the artist as lonely peasant pulling a plough, 'doing his own harrowing', as he says to his sibling correspondent.

He obviously empathised with nobly downcast farm workers, the weavers and seamstresses he went on to depict, although when he left Holland for Paris he revealed that his earthy palette was 'thawing' and that 'the bleakness of earliest beginnings is gone'. Despite his new artist acquaintances - Bonnard, Signac, Gauguin and the rest - Van Gogh would retain this authenticity and simplicity, adding to these qualities his newfound aesthetic vim and vigour.
Van Gogh's remarkable commitment to the artistic cause - at least as strong as his early religious fervour - telescoped his painting career into a brief ten-year window and arguably led to the intense bouts of mental anguish he suffered in the latter stages of his life, with the scenes painted around his temporary stays in an asylum being particularly frenzied.

The letters reveal this occasional over-exertion keenly, especially those that lead up to the long-awaited visit of his hero Gauguin, who proved to be disappointingly human and fallible, perhaps driving Van Gogh to mutilate his own ear.
With my own head pounding (not absinthe-induced, in case you were wondering), the addition of strong background colours to each room does little but compete with the fizzing and popping paint marks on canvas, an-all yellow room being particularly deadening for Van Gogh's golden fields of swirling corn and uncannily close to the exact hue of a migraine.

Without any of the street scenes or starry nights and despite all the bobbing heads and sharp elbows any such oversubscribed show entails, this is a calming display of Van Gogh. His vision cuts through the crowds, the works speaking as clearly as the words.