style="font-size:15px;"> His letter to his brother, Theo, sets out his vision:
I had a new idea in my head and here is the sketch to it … this time it’s just simply my bedroom, only here colour is to do everything, and, giving by its simplification a grander style to things, is to be suggestive here of rest or of sleep in general. In a word, to look at the picture ought to rest the brain or rather the imagination.
The walls are pale violet. The ground is of red tiles. The wood of the bed and chairs is the yellow of fresh butter, the sheets and pillows very light greenish lemon. The coverlet scarlet. The window green. The toilet-table orange, the basin blue. The doors lilac. And that is all — there is nothing in this room with closed shutters. The broad lines of the furniture, again, must express absolute rest. Portraits on the walls, and a mirror and a towel and some clothes.
The frame — as there is no white in the picture — will be white. This by way of revenge for the enforced rest I was obliged to take.
I shall work at it again all day, but you see how simple the conception is. The shading and the cast shadows are suppressed, it is painted in free flat washes like the Japanese prints …6
Van Gogh stresses rest. Up close this is clearly wrong. This is a disturbed painting and anyone sleeping in this seething bedroom under tilted walls would either be careening from LSD or the world’s most roiling hangover.
The bed’s frame, which Van Gogh describes as “the yellow of fresh butter,” is in fact an uneasy, ribbed, heavy impasto, dabbed colour, the pillows “very light greenish lemon” are a study of turmoil. The matting on the chair is alive, an infested blob. “The walls are pale violet,” no, they’re psychedelic, pinching the viewer as they tilt in fighting the fury of the bed. Van Gogh said, “Looking at the picture ought to rest the brain, or rather the imagination.” No, it’s a psychiatric Ping Pong game.
Pissarro, a companion artist, said, “Many times I’ve said that this man will either go mad or outpace us all. That he would do both, I did not foresee.”
When furnishing the yellow house in Arles, he bought twelve chairs. He never entertained and had no disciples. He had intended to establish a community of artists in the south of France, but only Gauguin visited, a disaster ending with Vincent’s razored ear.
Julian Barnes, the novelist and art critic, says of Van Gogh:
He isn’t one of these painters like, say Degas or Monet, who over the years refine and deepen our vision. I am not sure Van Gogh’s paintings change for us very much over the years, that we see him differently, find more in him at 60 or 70 than we did at 20. Rather, it is the case that the painter’s desperate sincerity, his audacious resplendent colour and his intense desire to make paintings a “consolatory art for distressed hearts” take us back to being 20 again. And that is no bad place to be.7
I think this is both valid and profound.
He was a voracious reader: Dickens, Shakespeare, Flaubert, Longfellow, Whitman, Charlotte Bronte, and Aeschylus.
JP
28. American Gothic (1930)
Grant Wood (1891–1942)
Grant Wood, American Gothic, 1930
Oil on beaver board, 78 x 65.3 cm
Friends of American Art Collection (1930.934)
The Art Institute of Chicago
© The Estate of Grant Wood / SODRAC, Montreal /
VAGA, New York (2017)
Photo credit: The Art Institute of Chicago / Bridgeman Images
As in a dream, the beholder is taken to another place as we try to unravel the ambiguity of Grant Wood’s most famous painting, American Gothic .
Who are these people? Parodied, mocked, damned with familiarity.
Wood’s subjects, farmer and daughter, were modelled after Wood’s sister, Nan, and his dentist, Dr. Byron McKeeby. The daughter seems anxious, as if reflecting on a past love or trouble sitting uneasily on her mind. Her sophisticated clothing suggests something of a different time, but the tiny, loose curl hanging from her right ear hints at hidden sensuality, in contrast to the Midwestern propriety. The father is defiant and stolid but seems refined also — as shown by the gold button beyond his class and time. Wood chose these models because they could easily be the inhabitants of the “American Gothic–style” house of the title. They are also the perfect couple to represent his depiction of rural America and the Great Depression, survivors in a time of chaos.
An advocate for the Regionalist movement, Wood refused to paint any large urban spaces. He spent his time reimagining and interpreting rural America on canvas. As part of his quest for regionalism, he returned to Iowa in the summer of 1930, where he stumbled onto this home, still standing today in Eldon. Gothic-styled homes mimicked the timelessness of the great European cathedrals, beautiful in their architecture and detail. This specific home Wood chose to paint has the pointed church window. It looks pasted onto the structure but, aesthetically, cements the painting.
Pop culture has embraced American Gothic for years by adapting it, over and over, for its intended audience. Simple changes to the characters, clothes, props, and background make for an easy, successful manipulation. On a doormat, a caption says: “One nice person and one old grouch live here.” It has been on magazine covers and TV show title pages, in newspaper articles, posted on the street. The media has been successfully using it to express all kinds of cultural, environmental, and social issues in a fresh, humorous way. Many of this generation recognize the work from its countless iterations, offering immortality in its own, if ironic, way.
SG
Museum of Contemporary Art
29. Study for a Portrait (1949)
Francis Bacon (1909–92)
Francis Bacon, Study for a Portrait, 1949
Oil on canvas, 149.4 x 130.6 cm
Gift of Joseph and Jory Shapiro (1976.44)
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
© The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS/SODRAC, 2017.
Photo credit: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago
Francis Bacon’s existential angst is so palpable, so raw, so transfixing it is irresistible. His early exposure to war and alienation from his family (because of his homosexuality) clearly presaged the demonic paintings he would later create. They remain transformative on many levels, not the least aesthetically.
Already influenced by Surrealism and Cubism, by the mid-forties Bacon had come to a very pivotal point in his work, creating Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) at the Tate Britain. These paintings integrated movement, a constant and driving theme throughout the rest of his works. In Study for a Portrait (1952), also at the Tate Britain, he cries in pain or horror, howling in outrage at the human condition. Throughout his later work, Bacon
