Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers review – a riveting rollercoaster ride from Arles to the stars | Vincent van Gogh

Nboth The Poet nor The Lover, whose portraits open the this heart-stopping Van Gogh exhibition, had been fairly what they appear. The Lover’s eyes gazes dreamily from a face of blue-green tints, sporting a pink cap flaming towards an emerald sky, by which a gold moon and star twinkle. In actuality, he was a military officer known as Paul-Eugène Milliet, whose affairs had been much less ethereal than the portray suggests. “He has all of the Arles ladies he needs,” wrote Van Gogh enviously. The Poet’s face, in the meantime, is anxious and gaunt, its ugliness badly hidden by a skinny beard, because the night time round him bursts into starshine. He was a Belgian painter known as Eugène Boch whose work Van Gogh thought so-so. However beggars can’t be choosers. They had been among the many few pals Van Gogh had in Arles, after he arrived in February 1888 to resume himself.

Why does this exhibition begin with these two work, as an alternative of the blossoming timber or golden fields he painted that spring? The reply lies within the portraits’ very lack of prosaic truth. Van Gogh is an artist we’re nonetheless catching up with. Everyone knows his turbulent story – that lower than a yr after arriving in Arles, he would lower off his ear, and be narrowly saved from bleeding to loss of life – however we’re not so clear what made his artwork so extraordinary. Wasn’t he simply an particularly intense observer of sunflowers?

The Van Gogh this nice present explores, with transferring and addictive aplomb, is barely an observer in any respect. He transfigures what he sees. It begins with these portraits of strange blokes in whom he sees everlasting romance and poetry, proof of how totally he remade the world round him. It is a journey to not the precise city of Arles, the place in case you go searching for The Yellow Home you’ll discover only a plaque, however the Provence in Van Gogh’s thoughts – or, I wish to say, his soul.

It’s a journey by means of the shady walks and undergrowth of a gnarly, greened creativeness. Between the 2 portraits hangs The Poet’s Backyard, a view of a small park throughout the street from The Yellow Home. It was an strange spot the place individuals sought shade, however in his repeated work its timber tackle mysterious expansive shapes, and strolling individuals grow to be charged with feeling as he pours out his love of everywoman and everyman.

You snuffle on by means of the undergrowth, looking Van Gogh’s truffles of genius. And you’re instantly not in Arles however the enclosed backyard of the close by asylum in Saint-Rémy the place he turned a affected person in Might 1889. In his nice portray Hospital at Saint-Rémy, inmates stroll sadly previous the low yellow constructing whereas above it, spiralling timber creep into the heavens, their spiky inexperienced waves of foliage mixing right into a sky that turns into an ever-deepening blue because it ascends.

That is the place the daring of the exhibition hits you. In a standard telling, Van Gogh’s life in Provence was brutally break up, as his first ecstatic months led to self-harm and hospitalisation. Right here, the interpretation to Saint-Rémy isn’t a tragedy in any respect. You see how his type acquired ever extra free there. A later room is stuffed with landscapes he painted round Saint-Rémy that teeter on whole abstraction: in The Olive Timber, the earth erupts in waves like the ocean, timber dance, and a cartoon cloud is so free from guidelines it might be by Picasso.

Van Gogh, right here, is the primary fully rule-breaking modernist and he simply will get ever extra radical. He’d toiled for years doing brown research of northern life earlier than he met the avant garde in Paris: inside weeks of his arrival in Arles, he took the impressionist concepts he’d encountered to the following stage. Describing his portray of a person sowing, he wrote in June 1888: “There are various touches of yellow within the soil … however I couldn’t care much less what the colors are in actuality.”

The Sower is right here, silhouetted towards a godlike solar in a subject streaked with purple. Subsequent to it hangs Starry Night time over the Rhône, a portray that lifts you into the air and leaves you floating: the sheer brightness of the celebs, which appear so shut, make the earth beneath dreamy and obscure. Actuality isn’t actual. The visionary is.

These work take you exterior your self. They hold in essentially the most extraordinary room of the present. Don’t look too lengthy at Van Gogh’s 1889 Self-Portrait, by which he seems to be again at you with these sapphire eyes, in his blue smock in a wavy blue sky. This room does one thing an immersive Van Gogh “expertise” would like to emulate: it places you inside The Yellow Home.

You see this little sq. home from exterior in Van Gogh’s portray of it. You then enter by means of its inexperienced entrance door. Vincent’s Chair is an aching, symbolic self-portrait : a picket straw-seated chair, together with his pipe and tobacco resting on it. You then get to The Bed room, Van Gogh’s tender depiction of his personal room with its immeasurably strong and welcoming picket mattress.

Everyone knows how badly it ended. The beliefs Van Gogh invested in his little house couldn’t stand up to the shock of sharing it with Gauguin, and after his ear-cutting and additional crises he determined he was higher off in an asylum. However right here, that by no means occurs. We expertise not the sordid information, however Van Gogh’s dream of The Yellow Home. It nonetheless exists, at all times, on the market among the many painted stars.

We should always actually name him Vincent. That’s how he signed himself and it’s how shut you’re feeling to him on this present. Ultimately, it isn’t sufficient to analyse Vincent. It’s a must to love him. He craved it and he earned it – and this present loves him as he deserves.

Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers, on the Nationwide Gallery, London, opens 14 September