Van Gogh Metropolitan Museum of Art Poster Grove of Trees
Vincent van Gogh, Olive Grove With 2 Olive Pickers, 1889
past Ted Snell
Republished fromThe Conversation
In April 1889, Vincent Van Gogh booked himself into the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole Asylum in Saint-Rémy, in the South of French republic. The previous months had been a tumultuous period for the artist.
His dream of establishing an artist's colony in his Yellow Firm in Arles was in tatters following his violent attack on his friend Paul Gauguin and his now legendary act of cocky-mutilation. Although Van Gogh'south 444 days in Arles had been a catamenia of unrivalled creativity, by Apr, he was severely depressed and in agony sought refuge nether the care of Dr Félix Rey.
The strict regimen of the hospital provided him with structure and security, enabling him to produce about 150 paintings over the next 12 months. Initially, he was able to pigment in an adjoining cell and inside the walls, but when finally allowed to pigment in the countryside surrounding the asylum, Van Gogh became enthralled by the gnarled, scarred olive trees that were just beginning to behave fruit. In the next six months, he painted this grove of olive trees on 18 carve up occasions.
In his fragile condition, the strong, enduring copse with their anguished limbs seemed to echo Christ's suffering and, unsurprisingly, they also became a metaphor for his own struggles. A symbol of life eternal, the olive copse' gnarled trunks and twisted limbs recorded every ordeal of their long existence.
Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait, 1889
Each tree became the bailiwick of a sermon, their individual messages illustrated in paintings and drawings and illuminated in a stream of messages to his blood brother Theo, his mother and sister and his artist friends Paul Gauguin and Emile Bernard.
In a letter to Theo written on the 19th November 1889 he explained,
If I remain hither I wouldn't try to paint a Christ in the Garden of Olives, just in fact the olive picking equally it'southward still seen today and then giving the correct proportions of the human figure in information technology, that would perhaps brand people retrieve of it nevertheless.
Van Gogh did remain and well-nigh immediately began a series of paintings of olive pickers, working in luminous groves that sparked with free energy. He produced three versions of the same subject, iii women using a ladder to selection the higher berries, mayhap for their own employ.
The get-go version was in the artist's words "coloured with more somber tones" as winter approached and the last fruit gathered. The second version of this painting was painted in the studio in "a very discreet range" of colours, while the final version, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which he painted for his mother and sister would, he hoped, "be a piffling to your taste."
Without explicitly showing Christ amongst the olive copse, Van Gogh embeds the bulletin of the Garden of Gethsemane that salvation is available to those that accept God's will, as the central theme of his painting.
A drawing of the subject area had the approval of Paul Gauguin, with whom he was notwithstanding respective, and information technology echoes his friend'due south simplification of form. What identifies it immediately equally a Van Gogh is the pulsing brushstrokes that inject a vibrating free energy to energise the entire surface.
Vincent van Gogh, Women Picking Olives, 1889
The final version in the Metropolitan Museum of Fine art in New York, Women Picking Olives shimmers with lite. As Vincent described to Theo in some other letter written on the 19th December,
… I'm working on a painting at the moment, women picking olives … These are the colours: the field is violet, and farther away yellow ochre, the olive trees with bronze trunks have grey-green foliage, the sky is entirely pinkish, and small figures pink also. At that place are only ii notes, pink and greenish, which harmonize, neutralize each other, oppose each other. I'll probably do two or three repetitions of it, for, in fact, it's the result of a one-half-dozen studies of olive trees.
The nuanced utilise of colour and its symbolic purpose to reinforce the sense of the divine and the bicycle of life was also the goad for Olive Grove with two olive pickers. This painting, on loan from the Kröller-Müller Museum, is a more dynamic composition showing a man and a woman locked into the shadows below an irradiated sky.
Once more the complementary nodes, in this case, yellow and blue, create a harmony of opposites. The adult female in the foreground is outlined in the same thick, black lines that describe the contorted copse while the human merges with the blue shadows. The pickers and the sinewy olives all strain upwards towards the promise of spiritual salvation promised in the fiery yellow and orange brushmarks that singe the tree line.
Only vi months later in the centre of summer, Vincent Van Gogh walked out into a wheat field and shot himself in the stomach. The hope these paintings embodied was no longer able to sustain him.
About the Author
Professor Ted Snell, AM CitWA, is Honorary Professor, School of Arts & Humanities, Edith Cowan University. Over the past 3 decades he has contributed to the national arts agenda as Chair of the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council, Artbank, the Asialink Visual Arts Informational Committee, University Art Museums Australia and as a lath member of the National Clan for the Visual Arts. He is currently Chair of Regional Arts WA, on the board of ANAT and the Fremantle Biennale. He has been a commentator on the arts for ABC radio and idiot box, Perth art reviewer for The Australian and is a regular correspondent to local and national journals.
Publication Rights
First published in The Conversation. Republished here under a Creative Eatables Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC By-ND four.0) licence.
Source: https://www.berfrois.com/2022/03/van-gogh-became-enthralled-by-the-gnarled-scarred-olive-trees/
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