Facing the Flowers
Shankar Nair
At the first glimpse of the Tournesols at the National Gallery, I do not know why I remembered my grandmother and burst into tears. Never before in my life have I been so moved, so overcome with melancholy and loneliness as I was at that moment––curiously, not even when my grandmother died, and as a boy, I had to endure the notion of death as a final and irreversible reality.
Was it the stark monochromatic simplicity of the image that had provoked this sudden, poignant memory of a plain and simple woman who, regardless of the occasion, dressed only in white? Or was it the scrawl––Vincent––that embodied, more than the glorious achievements and prodigious genius, a life of selflessness, honesty and probity that I could equate with her? Was it the humbleness of the subject itself––an unqualified declaration of universal devotion and loyalty both for man and nature? Was it the state the flowers were in? Withering, drooping, about to end––a delicate reminder of the inevitable and immutable reality of death?
Was it the artist himself? The instantly pitiable archetypal image of a tortured, misunderstood, mad genius who created masterpieces at the cost of his sanity and recklessly pursued his passion at the cost of his life? Or was it me? And my personal inadequacy in being face to face with the man I had copiously read about, learned from, admired, even idolised all my life?
Tournesols are what they are. Sunflowers. A yellow, dying bunch; in a yellow jug; against a yellow wall. His famed obsession with yellow; chrome, citron, zinc yellow, cadmium, straw yellow––dozens of shades and hues and tones swirling and blending effortlessly; rhythmically; like musical notes in a symphony. Then a magical touch of brilliant contrast with viridian and emerald green. Different brushstrokes for different elements; the yellow background in a basket-weave pattern; the flower centres formed by circular brushstrokes; loose horizontal strokes for the table. Impasto petals.
And to think that this was what the Belgian painter Henry de Groux called "a laughable pot of sunflowers by Mr. Vincent", and threatened to pull out his paintings from an exhibition in Brussels in 1890 because he did not, "wish to be in the same room”. Well, I was in the same room as Mr. Vincent and I was falling apart like a teenager at a rock concert.
This work I was quivering in front of was painted in Arles in 1888, and formed one element of the ambitious 'Décoration for the Yellow House' that began with a series of sunflowers in August and ended with that macabre incident with Paul Gauguin in December. That house where he lived, and expected Gauguin to live, was painted yellow by Van Gogh perhaps as a homage to sunflowers, the colour of the south, and everything in it was to be a work of art, including the house itself––the spoons, the pans, the furniture; all were to denote, according to him, a "real artist's house". "Nothing contrived, quite the opposite, nothing should be at all contrived, but everything––from the chairs to the pictures––should have character"; he had written to his brother Theo. There's hardly any doubt that a grand unity of Life and Art in the heroic dream of Gesamtkunstwerk swirled in his imagination where it largely remained, unfortunately, despite his best efforts.
But the sunflowers bloomed––four of them––and this is the fourth in the series. Another painting from this period––Van Gogh's Chair––adorned the same wall in the gallery, which together with its companion painting Gauguin's Armchair (Rijksmuseum Vincent Van Gogh, Amsterdam) continues to be the subject of much scholarship and analysis for their symbolic value and metaphorical insight into the relationship between the two artists, especially during those turbulent months in southern France.
Vincent's time at Arles––from 1888 to 1889––with its bewitching countryside, the luminous sun and the ever-changing Mediterranean sea––"the colour of Mackerel"––was one of extraordinary fecundity, which saw two hundred paintings, two hundred drawings and watercolours; each one a priceless masterpiece of European art. He also wrote more than two hundred letters during this time; the shortest, six pages long. This frenetic pace and the caliber of work that resulted from it, indicates an extraordinary level of accomplishment, unprecedented in the history of art. And not emulated ever since. Clearly, an artist at the pinnacle of his creative power, and at his expressive best.
As an art student, I had grown up in the company of great masters of Western Art, and many a times I had found it difficult to grasp the magnitude of their grand achievements, and had felt intensely overwhelmed, both by the eminence of their craft and the force of their personalities. From the 'ugly' Giotto to the flamboyant and religious Warhol, from the 'anti-classical' Mannerists to the mischievous Dadaists, all of them have, in their own way, channeled the flow of western thought and culture, questioning, challenging, provoking, over centuries. Most of them were resident in the building. I had, like a devout pilgrim, visited each and every one of them, paying obeisance, offering myself in subservience to their intellectual brilliance and artistic vehemence. All those great men and their masterpieces that I was deeply acquainted with through books and plates were finally face to face.
Masaccio's Madonna and Child; Tintoretto's The Origin of the Milky Way; Titian's Allegory of Prudence; Michelangelo's Entombment; Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus; Rembrandt's self-portraits at the age of 34 and 63; The Judgement of Paris by Rubens; The Madonnas of Raphael; Vermeer; Ingres; Goya; Delacroix; Renoir. The massive Bathers at Asnières by Seurat; Monet's inimitable Waterlilies; It was difficult to remain calm.
So when I finally arrived at the Sunflowers, it was all a bit too much. This was one of his most renowned 'progenies'. There's perhaps no other painting––probably with the exception of Mona Lisa––that's as famous as this one, and definitely none more strongly associated with an artist as this one. "You know that Jeannin has the peony, Quost has the hollyhock, but I have the sunflower" he had written to Theo, laying claim to the flower as his and his alone, something as distinct as an artist's signature. Gauguin also identified his friend with sunflowers; the only work he did at the 'Yellow House' was The Painter of Sunflowers, a portrait of Van Gogh, to which Vincent remarked "My face has lit up after all a lot since, but it was indeed me, extremely tired and charged with electricity as I was then."
Sunflowers were central to Vincent's relationship with Gauguin, and they go back to the first series he had painted in Paris in 1887, two of which Gauguin had kept for himself. This new series which he set about in thrilling anticipation of his friend's visit, who he greatly admired, were the first ones pictured in vases. Wanting to impress Gauguin with some new work, and also perhaps underline his own competence as an artist, he went about with a fanatic zeal, racing to finish them before the flowers wilted and the light changed, "painting with the gusto of a Marseillais eating bouillabaisse", taking just six days to do all of them, allegedly sustaining himself only on coffee and alcohol. Initially, he had envisaged twelve canvasses, a "symphony in blue and yellow". But only four materialised, and the one I am standing in front of––'all in yellow'––is the most seductive and moving of them all. Forlorn, fading flowers set adrift forever in a sea of vibrant yellow.
Sometime before he started on this painting, Vincent had told his brother Theo "Instead of trying to render exactly what I have before my eyes, I use colour more arbitrarily in order to express myself forcefully.” This emotional, subjective and exuberant use of colour which had the power to speak directly to people is characteristic of Van Gogh. It shaped the wings on which Expressionism, with its various strains soared to great heights through Schiele and Kokoschka, De Kooning and Hodgkin, and others. In 1893, describing his iconic masterpiece Scream, Edvard Munch appeared to be paying tributes to Van Gogh: "I sensed a scream passing through nature; it seemed to me that I heard the scream. I painted this picture, painted the clouds as actual blood. The colour shrieked".
Van Gogh gave colour a voice. A resounding and evocative voice. It echoed in France through Fauvism with Vlaminck, who incidentally proclaimed that he loved Van Gogh more than his father; through Derain and Matisse; in New York through arguably the most influential American movement in the 20th century––Abstract Expressionism––with Pollock, Rothko, Motherwell and others stretching boldly the horizons of experimentation to its limits.
Out of the four Sunflowers he painted in Arles, the first––three yellow-orange blooms in a green glazed pot against a turquoise background––has been in private collections and strangely enough, has never been seen in public since 1948. The second, with three flowers in a pot and three more on a table in the foreground against a royal blue wall, was destroyed in an American bombardment of the Japanese town of Ashiya during World War II.
The last two he hung in Gauguin's bedroom when he finally turned up, after much dilly dallying, in October. (The one with the blue-green background is in the The Neue Pinakothek in Munich). Besides the masterly technique and vivacious colour, perhaps one of the reasons why these paintings are so astounding could be that its intended viewer was Gauguin, and anything less than magnificent would have been, in Vincent's mind, unworthy of his attention. Motivated by this strong desire to express his gratitude to his friend whom he looked up to, and employing a powerful Christian motif which he must have been familiar because of his background as a preacher, also leaning on its symbolic strength as objects of devotion and loyalty, it seems he had poured himself on to the canvas like "almost a cry of anguish while symbolising gratitude in the rustic sunflower”. "It is a kind of painting that rather changes in character, and takes on a richness the longer you look at it" He had written to Theo.
After standing hazy eyed and motionless for quite a while, those words were coming true. The Sunflowers had started revealing itself to me, layer by layer, beyond the technique, the symbolism, the analogy and the metaphor, the ulterior themes within the artist’s life. This is not just a painting of some still life which came about because his models failed to turn up, or the inclement wind forced him inside, this is the portrait of the man himself. In a distilled, pristine state.
And that's probably why I was moved beyond reason. This work represented him. Not Vincent the painter, but Vincent the man. "There are no ghosts in Van Gogh's painting", the eminent French poet and playwright Antonin Artaud had argued, "no visions, no hallucinations. It is the torrid truth of the sun at two o'clock in the afternoon". You don't have to look at this painting in person to realise the verity of that statement. A sense of searing honesty, a feeling of utmost moral uprightness envelops you, enfolds you like a kind embrace, stirring deep inside you something vulnerably fundamental, meaningful and true. In that embrace, you close your eyes and crumble, as the anguish and the pain and the suffering and the self sacrifice wash over you, not just of this man, but of men, universal men, and in that brief moment, and only for that brief moment, you find yourself, surprisingly enough, honest, upright and humane.
And that overwhelms you. Because deep beneath the vigorous brushstrokes, the twisted form and the compelling colour of the Sunflowers, you behold something that can be instinctively and universally recognised; something undefiled and austere, disarming and humane. Something you find on faces. Like Mother Teresa's, or Gandhi's; and in lives, like Dr. King's or Mandela's; something that you find in the eyes of children and in the gaze of animals. It is also something that you feel in the desolate penury of Karl Marx, and in the estimable self-sacrifice of Sydney Carton, and perhaps in the ungrudging and altruistic lives of grandmothers. Sunflowers shows you not only what it is to be Van Gogh, but also what it is to be human which, with his life and work as testimony, is hardly discrete but one and the same.
For Van Gogh, the meaning of Art was human solidarity, brotherhood and compassion. In a letter to Theo, Vincent states the purpose of painting: "To make of the art of painting what the music of Berlioz and Wagner already is––an art of consolation for broken hearts!"
Both physically and mentally, Van Gogh sided with the common man and the natural simplicity of their lives, holding to his bosom an affectionate regard for both man and nature. A worthy follower of Millet. With sagely discernment, he perceived the transcendental entity constituent of all living things, its enduring 'spirit', and set off to find it in the small, the poor and the simple. "If we study Japanese art, then we see a man, undoubtedly wise and a philosopher and intelligent, who spends his time––on what?––studying the distance from the earth to the moon?––no; studying Bismarck’s politics?––no, he studies a single blade of grass". He was certain that only by studying the small, however insignificant it might seem to us, would our eyes open to the infinite big. Wisdom, he believed, like Walt Whitman, is the consequence of our closeness with everyday things.
Therefore sunflowers, as everyday as the wheat fields and the cypresses and the blue sky of the Mediterranean landscape, symbolised everything that was precious to him, and through them, he expressed his profound and all-embracing belief. A thought not alien to Indian philosophy that all living things––humans, animals, plants––have a common bond, which formed the underpinning of life. "The sun itself cannot make the world bright without souls to feel its light," he told Theo, referring to this mystical alliance of sentient beings. The quest for this "essence of the landscape"––something that went beyond the mere appearances of natural objects––and the struggle to render it exactly and sensitively, defined his work and no less his life. The Sunflowers represents this pantheistic truth.
And for a fleeting but incisive moment, you see that truth. In that moment of inexplicable clarity and irrepressible delight, you are not a spectator or a participant, but a partner in the universe. In that moment, stripped of all pretensions, relieved of all burdens of vanity, you stand there naked. As naked as the painting itself. That exposes you to yourself. That moves you.
"I have moments when I’m twisted by enthusiasm or madness or prophecy like a Greek oracle" Vincent had told Theo months before Sunflowers––created perhaps in a rare moment of a cosmic confluence of all three in good measure. But then, works like these are not created wilfully, but born naturally, as a direct and inexorable consequence of our existence; as a validation of our reality. In that respect, the Sunflowers is not unlike the Veil of Veronica, and Van Gogh is not unlike Jesus Christ. Passed over by their own generation and embraced passionately by the next, both sensed the rousing and abiding spirit of nature in themselves, and would have, through their persistent and torturous enquiry, reached the realisation that "Aham Brahmāsmi" or "I'm divine"––the merging of the Self with the Infinite Reality.
Is the Sunflowers a product of that awareness? Maybe, maybe not. But it's no coincidence that Ingo Walther, author, editor and long time collaborator of Benedikt Taschen, wrote of Van Gogh's quest for oneness with nature thus: "And now, vehemently, with a hope that seems forced, with an intensity beyond that of his fellow artists, he set out to break down the distinctions between the I and the not-I, at least for one brief moment of happiness––in his work". In Vedanta, this merging of the I with the not-I is the ultimate liberation from the causes of suffering and sorrow––Moksha.
And liberation did come. In July 1890, noting the worsening weather in Auvers-sur-Oise he told his brother that he didn't feel the "need to go out of my way to try and express sadness and extreme loneliness"; painted the monumental Wheatfields with Crows––a work of extreme poignancy and emotional force, perhaps depicting the lonesome and melancholic state of mind he was in; then shot himself in the chest, and died a day later. His closest friend and artist Emile Bernard recalled the day and the sorrow––“You know how much I loved him and you can imagine how much I wept”––and the 'great many' flowers on the simple, plain coffin––sunflowers.
Paintings are often thought of as first-hand documentation of history, expressed in a cryptic language that needs to be deciphered to understand it in full. With Sunflowers there's nothing to understand but everything to feel. And what you feel is extraordinary and unforgettable. When I finally took leave, confused and with conflicting emotions, I remembered Khalil Gibran:
"When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight."
That is something you don't feel everyday. But then, that day was no everyday. That was the day I met Vincent Van Gogh for the very first time.
"To think that such is human life: to be born, to work, to love, to grow and to disappear.” Vincent had written to Theo. Disappear is one thing he didn't do. "In any given generation there are two or three people who are sacrificed for the others, discovering in great pain what benefits the rest…" this observation by Soren Kierkegaard seems scripted for a reluctant messiah like Van Gogh, who emulating Jesus, took the guilt of the whole world upon himself, and compelled comparison of his carefully considered end with the martyrdom of Christ.
His last words were "La tristesse durera toujours.". "The sadness will never end”. It’s been decades since my grandmother’s death. I truly hope so.
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Shankar Nair is a writer, brand strategist and entrepreneur born in Kochi, India, and living in Mumbai for the last three decades. He holds a degree in Applied Arts and has worked in advertising for many years. He writes on art, philosophy and politics and was a columnist for The Goan, an English daily newspaper published from Goa, India. Currently, he’s involved in helping marginalised and underprivileged women in Goan villages find social and financial independence by better leveraging their traditional skills. On the writing front, he’s nearing the end of a three year long research on the origins and evolution of Christianity in India which helps in nostalgic visits to his home state of Kerala.
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