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Europe 1800 - 1900
Course: Europe 1800 - 1900 > Unit 5
Lesson 4: Post-Impressionism- Introduction to Neo-Impressionism, Part I
- Introduction to Neo-Impressionism, Part II
- Neo-Impressionist Color Theory
- Seurat, Bathers at Asnières
- Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte
- Seurat, “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte – 1884”
- Van Gogh, Self-Portrait Dedicated to Paul Gauguin
- Think you know van Gogh? The Potato Eaters
- Van Gogh, Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear
- Van Gogh, The Bedroom
- Van Gogh's Irises: Getty Conversations
- Van Gogh, The Starry Night
- Van Gogh, The Starry Night
- The Pont-Aven School and Synthetism
- Paul Gauguin, Self-Portrait with Portrait of Émile Bernard (Les misérables)
- Paul Gauguin, Vision after the Sermon, or Jacob Wrestling with the Angel
- Gauguin, Nevermore
- Gauguin, The Red Cow
- Gauguin, Spirit of the Dead Watching
- Gauguin, Oviri
- Gauguin, Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?
- Gauguin and Laval in Martinique
- An introduction to the painting of Paul Cézanne
- Why Is This Woman in the Jungle?
- Cézanne, The Bather
- Cézanne, The Basket of Apples
- Cézanne, Still Life with Plaster Cupid
- Cézanne, Still Life with Plaster Cupid
- Cézanne, The Red Rock
- Cézanne, Still Life with Apples
- Cézanne, Turning Road at Montgeroult
- Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire
- Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire
- Cezanne, Card Players
- Cézanne, Bathers
- Cezanne, The Large Bathers
- Toulouse-Lautrec, At the Moulin Rouge
- Post-Impressionism
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Think you know van Gogh? The Potato Eaters
A conversation with Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker in front of Vincent van Gogh, The Potato Eaters, 1885, oil on canvas, 82 x 114 cm (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Vincent van Gogh Foundation).
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Video transcript
(light piano music) - [Steven] We're in the van
Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and we're looking at The Potato Eaters. This is the first really
ambitious painting that van Gogh made. - [Beth] And it's so different
than what we normally expect of van Gogh, where we expect a landscape. Here we have a figure painting and we also expect brighter colors, and here we have a painting
that's intentionally dark. - [Steven] Look at how
narrow the tonal range is. You've got these cool gray, green blues, and then only the palest light coming from that lantern warming
the faces of these peasants. This is 1885. It's more than a decade after the first impressionist exhibition so brilliant colors are nothing new. - [Beth] That's true,
but he's really hooked into instead a tradition
of peasant painting and we might think about earlier
Dutch artists like Israels or French peasant painters like Millet. - [Steven] And this clearly
self-conscious linking of the browns and the
darkness to the subject, to the very meager life that these people that is so closely bound to the earth. - [Beth] So here they are, five figures. The woman is pouring coffee,
they're serving potatoes, this is all they have to eat-- - [Steven] But it's also
importantly a bounty that they've grown themselves presumably, so that there is this
very close relationship between their labor and their food. - [Beth] The space is
rather indeterminate. The space behind the figures
don't completely make sense. There's a sense of the
perspective not being quite right. There's a sense of the
anatomy bring not quite right. - [Steven] Almost caricature. - [Beth] Yeah, where shoulders
don't seem correctly attached to torsos and things like that. - [Steven] Clearly the artist
is struggling with anatomy. If you look for instance at the hand of the man who holds the cup, there's a really problematic relationship between the cup and the hand. It's not sitting in the palm. - [Beth] And so van Gogh
really looks like someone who doesn't know how to paint here, and in fact this is still
very early in his career and he is struggling with
things like perspective and foreshortening in the human body. - [Steven] But what seems to
be primary for him here is to create this authentic relationship between the rough application of paint and the rough qualities of his subject. - [Beth] Right, it's a kind
of sincerity and a sincerity about the lives of the peasants, but also a sincerity to himself, and remember he's coming from
a religious place in a way. His father was a parson,
he himself had studied to be a minister although
had failed at that, and there's something
for him about this life of a peasant that is not just authentic and tied to the land but
somehow more truthful, more-- - [Steven] It's more spiritually truthful. - [Beth] And more connected
to something deeper about the human condition that related to religious ideas for him. And you can see he's
really worked the painting, there are layers and layers of paint here. - [Steven] In fact he says
in one of his letters, "I am plowing on my canvases
as they do in their fields." So there really is this way
in which he's willing himself into what he sees as this simpler and more spiritually-authentic world. - [Beth] Clearly his
ambition at this moment is to be a peasant painter, and not only to be a peasant painter
but to be a peasant. - [Steven] An idea that
certainly horrified his family. - [Beth] Yeah, you
raise a son to be a kind of respectable middle class,
upper-middle class person who in fact should aspire higher class-wise and here was van Gogh coming
and aspiring downward. - [Steven] I think that the
myths that have grown up around van Gogh that he was
poor overshadows the fact that he comes out of a much
more prosperous background. - [Beth] In fact his uncle
was an incredibly wealthy and successful print dealer. - [Steven] And van Gogh had
earlier in his life tried to become a dealer. - [Beth] But we're not dealing with a person who is really able to cope with the world in many ways. Van Gogh always saw
himself as an outsider. He was not a stable personality. - [Steven] And so here he
is creating a contained, closely-knit family environment, a place in a sense where he belongs. - [Beth] And that was true
for a huge part of his life, that he was wanting to
always recreate the family that he felt estranged
from and exiled from, and I think van Gogh's
interest at this moment in being a peasant painter,
although it's different than what was going on in
impressionism in Paris, was really allied to other
post-impressionist artists like Gauguin, a desire
to leave behind the city and its fashions and its
perfume and its fanciness and to do something really authentic. - [Steven] So in that way
more allied with the work of say Courbet earlier in the century, an artist who shooed
the polish and elitism of the capitol city and very
self-consciously painted his rural home town. - [Beth] I think there was
something artificial seeming about the paintings that were
made for the art audience in Paris, the official
exhibitions at the salon. - [Steven] What's so interesting is Theo, the artist's brother,
had offered to take one of van Gogh's paintings and
submit it to the salon for him, and this was the painting that
van Gogh sent Theo for that and yet this is so in
opposition to everything that was expected of a salon painting. - [Beth] Well can you imagine Theo's face when he opened the box that
contained this painting? Salon paintings for the most
part had a sense of finish. They were carefully painted,
there was an understanding of space and how to create
an illusion of space, there was an understanding
of the human body, and here van Gogh was struggling really with both of those things. - [Steven] Right, van Gogh
was much more interested in creating as you said a
kind of authentic relationship between these figures
and their environment. - [Beth] Here's what van Gogh said about this painting in a
letter to his brother Theo. He wrote, "It would be
wrong to give a painting "of peasant life a conventional polish. "If a peasant painting smells
of bacon, smoke, potato steam, "fine - that's not unhealthy. "If a stable reeks of manure - all right, "that's what a stable is all about. "If a field has the smell
of ripe corn or potatoes "or of guano or manure -
that's properly healthy, "especially for city dwellers. "Such pictures might
prove helpful to them. "But a painting of peasant
life should not be perfumed." - [Steven] And this painting is not. - [Beth] No and this idea of
painting something healthy for city people I think is something that he has in common with Gauguin and other post-impressionist artists, the idea of righting the wrongs of the industrial, modern world. - [Steven] This idea that
art has a kind of agency, has a kind of political agency, a kind of moral agency in the world. - [Beth] And that the world
that the Paris art scene catered to was this upper-middle class world-- - [Steven] That was stifling but in this way van
Gogh shares quite a bit with everybody from Courbet through Manet and through the impressionists-- - The avant garde--
- Here in the 19th century. (light piano music)