The other day I swung by the Van Gogh museum on my way home with Paul. Since the school paid for all our museum entry I figured why not. The museum has a few great pieces from Van Gogh’s contemporaries as well as a great street photography exhibit. I’m not a huge fan of Van Gogh really. He rejected all formal training, rather painting untutored trying to capture the essence of vision and light. While it produces interesting results, I’m more impressed with his contemporaries and influences like Toulouse-Lautrec and Seurat. Their work seems much more impressive both technically and stylistically. I don’t believe that Van Gogh truly understood perspective, so the liberties he takes when constructing his early work bother me. His later works, particularly the portraits, flatten the plane and ignore perspective to emphasize the subject. But in earlier ones like “The Potato Eaters” his perspective is distorted and it seems to be a lack of skill.
However, I did really enjoy some of his earlier works, particularly the Dutch peasant series. The smaller paintings depicting peasant life were interesting both in color and composition. I really liked this one of a peasant woman in the field with large hands and feet. He chose to emphasize her as a worker, blurring her face. The dark colors and bleak landscape set a grim tone. It reminds me of Kathe Kollwitz’s prints that criticized the war as well as the social conditions during the late 19th and early 20th century.
The museum divides his work up showing each year and location in a separate space. I was rather unimpressed with his Parisian period. His experiments with pointillism seem harsh and less thoughtful than those of Seurat. The colors seem unatural. They don't seem to reflect the natural light or movement, but rather imagined light. Perhaps thats's what bothers and intrigues me. It's as though I don't want to accept Van Gogh's impression of light. The intent is different but I still don’t really appreciate Van Gogh’s work.
I did like the landscapes he produced late in life. His view of the world seems to become more and more apocalyptic. The landscapes are barren and the colors are not of this world. By arranging the collection chronologically you can really seem the progression of his work and his illness.
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