Vincent Van Gogh, The Sower with Setting Sun 1888

Van Gogh made a great many works on this and related topics.  There are dozens of drawings and many notes in his letters that refer to the sower or the lonely worker in the field or on the road.

There are three aspects of this obsession that I want to bring out today. 

1. His commitment to representing the labourer as a modern hero and his identification of art with labour in the tradition of Courbet and Millet.  It is an image that inspired other artists such as Bacon in his series of paintings after Van Gogh on the road. 

The agricultural labourer is also an agent who binds nature with culture.  The labourer by his efforts brings forth God�s bounty.  It is a human collaboration with the divine or in the vision of D H Lawrence with the earth herself.  Vincent was deeply religious but his failure to gain a ministry led him to turn away from the church and to adopt a more Laurentian view.

2. The singular figure in Vincent�s paintings is often juxtaposed with the setting sun.  In this painting the sun provides a halo for the worker elevating labour and the labourer to a semi divine status. 

The sun is often a transcendent image in art, when it dips toward the horizon it dissolves the boundary of the material earth and the immaterial heavens in a burst of light. 

Vincent internalised this light in the form of the sunflower which he took as his personal totem.  �there is a bit of the sunflower in me as there is a bit of a bear in Berne and a she-wolf in Rome�. 

While the sun brings life to the earth it also burns and its secrets are not to be stolen.  Bataille identified Vincent with Prometheus who stole the secret of fire from the sun only to be hideously punished by the gods.  For Bataille Vincent was a sacrificial figure and indeed beyond the glorious fiery disc there may be ashes and the void.

3. This brings us to the Melancholic aspect to Vincent which is hinted at in another very close composition of the same year, The Sower at Arles.  The galaxy of light can become a sinister and threatening place.  The naked artificial light of the Night Caf� for example. 
******SLIDE 1 Left The Sower with setting sun 1888
SLIDE 2 Right The Sower , Arles 1888

Anselm Kiefer also fell in love with sunflowers after moving to Provence and for him the dark seeds of the flower become a kind of anti matter in dark galaxies.  This Germanic melancholy arises from the passionate desire  to possess the fire of total knowledge while knowing that it is not permitted. 

The artist, however, may be charged, like Prometheus, with stealing a glimpse of this divine knowledge to share with human kind on its journey towards final assumption into the cosmic whole. 

Or like Icarus maybe Vincent was carelessly attracted to its light and so doomed to die like a moth in the flame.

Vincent only began his vocation as an artist in 1880 after failing to gain acceptance as a lay preacher.  His sacrificial tendencies were not appreciated by the non conformist church.  His whole career as an artist lasted about nine years. 

From 1880 to 1886 his work took the form of a rather dour realism.  He wanted to establish his modern credentials by representing the modern, and sometimes rather drab aspects of everyday life. 

In 1886 he moved to Paris to stay with Theo  where met members of the Impressionist group and began to take an interest in their colour theory.  He also befriended Gauguin who introduced him to a symbolic view of colour.  These conflicting modes of Impressionist Naturalism and Synthetic Abstraction fought within his art for the next few years. 

In his own writing he does not seem to acknowledge this as a contradiction but he speaks to Theo about his desire to capture nature as he finds it while at other times talking about enhancing the colour to express his feelings about the subject.  It is almost as if he has naturalised himself as internal to the nature he experienced thus resolving the dichotomy.

His best known and loved works are those that celebrate the scorching sun and vivid colours of Arles painted after leaving Paris for the South of France in February 1888.  The starry nocturnes and nightlife scenes of this period reveal a darker strand that becomes more prevalent towards the end of his life in July 1890.

The early realist works
There was an established tradition of modern French realism that contrasted with Academic painting of the courtly life or of mythological subjects.  Courbet for example with his paintings of beefy country people and his celebration of the land and the river as the source of life.  Courbet also identified the painter�s work as a creative labour metaphorically identical with that of the farm labourer.

Vincent began painting in earnest in 1880.  His first studies were copied from compositions by Millet or themes that were closely related to Millet�s paintings of labourers.

SLIDE 2 Left Millet�s Man with a hoe 1863
SLIDE 2 Right Millet�s Man with a wheelbarrow 1855

SLIDE 3 Left Vincent�s The Diggers  1880  after Millet
SLIDE 3 Right The Sower 1881 after Millet
In April 1885 he writes �How typical that saying is about the figures of Millet: His peasant appears to be painted with the earth that he is sowing � How exact and how true.  And how important it is to know how to mix on the palette those colours that have no name and yet are the real foundation of everything.  Perhaps I daresay for sure, the question of colour and more exactly broken and neutral colours, will preoccupy you anew. � He is aware of the controversy about colour that surrounds the Impressionists in Paris, although he has not yet experienced it.

In his letter to Theo of March 1882 Vincent quoted Millet
� Art is a battle � it costs one the skin off ones back.  It is a matter of working like a bunch of Negroes: I would prefer to say nothing rather than express myself poorly.� 

Vincent claims to have felt the same thing before,

�that is why I sometimes like to scratch what I want to express, with a hard carpenter�s pencil or a pen, instead of with a soft brush.�

SLIDE 4 Left The Weaver with bobbin winder  1884
SLIDE 4 Right The weaver 1884
These paintings of the weaver framed by the loom also seem to identify the making of art with labour.  While the labourer is absorbed into his machine.

SLIDE 5 Left Vincent�s Head of a peasant woman  1885
SLIDE5 Right Millet�s Portrait of Louise Jumelin  1838

*****SLIDE 6 Left The potato eaters 1885
SLIDE 6 Right  Study for the potato eaters 1885

In the letter of July 1885 he defends the realism of modern art against criticism

�Apparently nothing is more simple than to paint peasants, rag pickers and labourers of all kinds, but no subject in painting are so difficult as these everyday figures.!

As far as I know there is not a single Academy where one learns to draw and paint a digger, a sower, a woman setting a fire, or a seamstress.   But in every city of some importance there is an academy with a choice of models for historical, Arabic, Louis XV, in one word  all really non-existent figures.�
>>>>> But I want to point out something which is perhaps worth while.  All academic figures are constructed in the same way and let us say incapable of being improved upon.  Irreproachably faultless.  You will guess what I am driving at, they do not reveal to us anything new.

he goes on to argue for the figure in action which he feels old masters failed to capture.:

�Rather than say there must be a character in a digger, I circumscribe it by saying: that a peasant must be a peasant, that a digger must dig, and there will be something essentially modern in them.�
He later goes on to say how difficult it is to get a suitable model and then how he can afford so little and eventually to his recurrent theme Theo can I have some more money.

*****SLIDE 7 Left Courbet�s The stone breakers  1850
SLIDE 7 Right Vincent�s Two peasant women digging in a snow covered field  1890

In July 1885 he wrote: One may laugh at Courbet�s saying
�Paint angels, who has ever seen them?�
but I would like to add for instance, courts of justice in a harem, who has ever seen them?  Bull fights and so many other Moorish, Spanish things, Cardinals, and then all those historical paintings which they keep on painting yard after yard.  what is the use of it and why do they do it?�

He goes on to talk about painting out of doors on the spot itself and not making things up in the studio.

Above all the connection with Courbet is the view that painting is a form of labour and the association of creativity with the work of the agricultural labourer.  Describe the metaphors in Courbet�s painting and refer to the Allegory in his art about art.

*****SLIDE 8 Left Bacon�s Study for portrait of Vincent II 1957
SLIDE 8 Right Bacon�s Study for portrait of Vincent III 1957

Francis Bacon identified with the solitary figure of Vincent.  In this version of Vincent�s painting that is now destroyed, The Road to Tarascon he captures some of the optimism and the fragility of the figure.  Vincent is made to be a part of the landscape as I suspect he wished himself to be.

SLIDE 9 to SLIDE 12 Left  Drawings of Sowers
SLIDE 9 to SLIDE 12 Right
Note that in the earlier works the figures dominate the composition but that later on the figures are diminished in the landscape

SLIDE 13 Left Vincent�s Pollarded willow
SLIDE 13 Right Jacob Ruisdael�s  A blasted Elm with a view of Egmont aan Zee  1648
While Vincent was keen to show nature as it is he was also prone to allegory, but this was nothing new, Courbet, the arch Realist made one of his greatest compositions as an allegory of the artist�s life, The Studio, or an allegory of seven years of my artistic life. Ruisdael was also prized by later artists as a realist but his anthropomorphising of trees was very plain to see.  It is a European tradition that goes back into deep prehistory as we know from the research of Robert Graves.

SLIDE 14. Left Caspar David Friedrich Monk by the sea 1809
SLIDE 14. Right Vincent�s Sower with setting sun 1888
The small lonely figure in the grandeur of nature is also a traditional and symbolic image just as the image of the figure that dominates the foreground and particularly when it is transmogrified by the sun.

SLIDE 15 Left Freidrich�s Woman in front of setting sun  1818
SLIDE 15 Right Freidrich�s Freidrich�s The cross in the mountains 1807

The sun on the horizon is a case of light being used to dissolve the boundaries of heaven and earth.  This can be seen in late paintings by Turner, Monet and Lloyd Rees.
SLIDE 16 Left Turner�s Venice with the salute 1840
SLIDE 16 Right Turner�s Margate from the sea 1835

In Vincent�s paintings however the romantic vision is transformed into a fiery cauldron that energises the earth itself equating energy and matter in a premature vision of atomic physics.  This is a vision or fin de siecle zeitgeist  that may well have been at work in Cubism without any need to invoke Einstein and relativity.

SLIDE 17 Left Vincent�s Enclosed field with reaper 1889
SLIDE 17 Right Vincent�s Sower with setting sun 1888

Vincent�s palette is now showing signs of his brush with the Impressionists and of a new trace of colour symbolism, planted perhaps by Gauguin.  In a letter to Theo August 1888 he says:

�I use colour more arbitrarily so as to express myself forcibly. ���� (he gives an example) I should like to paint the portrait of an artist friend, a man who dreams great dreams, who works as the nightingale sings, because it is in his nature. 

He�ll be a fair man.  I want t put into the picture my appreciation, the true love that I have for him.   So I paint him as he is, as faithfully as I can, to begin with.  But the picture is not finished yet.  To finish it I am now going to be the arbitrary colourist. 

I exaggerate the fairness of his hair, I get to orange tones, chromes and pale lemon yellow.  Beyond the head, instead of painting the ordinary wall of the mean room I paint infinity, a plain background of the richest intensest blue that I can contrive, and by this simple combination the bright head illuminated against a rich blue background acquires a mysterious effect, like a star in the depths of an azure sky.�

SLIDE 18 Left Pollard willows with setting sun 1888
SLIDE 18 Right Olive fields  St Remy 1889

SLIDE 19 Left Landscape at St Remy  1889
SLIDE 19 Right Wheat field with setting sun  1888

*****SLIDE 20 Left The red Vineyard  1888
SLIDE 20 Right Sower with setting sun  1888

Describing another painting in the letter of August 1888 he says : 
� I think of the man I have to paint, terrible in the furnace of the full ardours of harvest, at the heart of the south.  hence the orange shades like storm flashes, vivid as red hot iron, and hence the luminous tones of old gold in the shadows�.

In another letter later the same month:

�And all the same to feel the stars and the infinite high and clear above you. then life is after all, almost enchanted.  Oh! those who do not believe in this sun here are real infidels.  Unfortunately along with the good God Sun, three quarters of the time there is this devil of a mistral.�

The sunflower became not only a means of capturing the power of the sun itself but it was also something Vincent took as a part of himself.  If Klein liked to be thought of as Yves the Monochrome, here is Vincent the sunflower.
*****SLIDE 21 Left Bouquet of sunflowers  1888
*****SLIDE 21 Right Cut sunflowers 1887

There are many sun paintings in modernism.  Some directly influenced by Vincent.  It could be appropriated for the violent radicalism of the Futurists or dreams of renewal for the Suprematists.

SLIDE 22 Left Munch  Painting of the sun
SLIDE 22 Right Guiseppe Peliza da Volpedo  The rising sun  1903

SLIDE 23 Left Ivan Kliun  Red light spherical composition 1923
SLIDE 23 Right Howard Taylor Sun figure II 1989

SLIDE 24 Left Rothco  Yellow blue on orange 1955

In any case it ends up being about the limits of human understanding and the blindness that comes from the sight of God.
SLIDE 24 Right Raphael The vision of Ezekiel

SLIDE 25 Left Vincent�s Pieta after Delacroix  1889
SLIDE 25 Right Road with Cypresses 1890
Vincent often made copies or versions of historical works that he admired.  Delacroix was a particular favourite because of his colour theory, He was credited with discovering the effect of juxtaposing complementaries to heighten the optical sensation of each individual colour. 

Vincent tended to anthropomorphise these ideas.  For example in his letter of September 1888 he says about his study of colour

�I am always in hope of making a discovery there, to express the love of two lovers by a marriage of two complementary colours, their mingling and their opposition, the mysterious vibrations of kindred tones.----To express hope by some star, the eagerness of some soul by a sunset radiance.  Certainly there is nothing of that in trompe l�oeil realism, but it is not something that really exists?�

This image was particularly poignant for him since he made Theo buy the lithograph for him and while in the Asylum at St Remy he dropped it into his paints and ruined it.  As a response he made his own copy.

In his letter of September 1889 he confides in Theo that he is becoming prone to religious attacks which he does not want the doctor to know about, then  
�I am not indifferent, and even during the suffering, religious thoughts sometimes brings me great consolation.  Thus this last time during my illness a misfortune happened to me � that lithograph of Delacroix , the Pieta together with some other sheets fell into some oil and paint and was ruined.  I was distressed at this so in between times I have occupied myself with painting it���

These paintings came at a time of his life when he was prone to seeing himself as a rather tragic figure.  His earlier imitation of Christ might even have led him to identify with the pathos of the Pieta.

The cypress trees were not only symbolic of death but have the form of black fire rising from the void. 

SLIDE 26 Left Vincent�s Sunflowers 1887
SLIDE 26 Right Anselm Kiefer�s Sol Invictus 1996
Dead sunflowers could also be seen as a foreboding particularly since Vincent identified so closely with them. 

There is a black and nocturnal view which might be thought of as revelatory or melancholic.  Anselm Kiefer who now lives not far from where Vincent painted his last works also uses dead sunflowers to represent dark galaxies or antimatter.  It is the reverse side of the power of light. 

There is a great tradition of nocturnes and images of the void.  It represents a Gnostic thread in European thought.  Before the light was the void and to the void all must return.

SLIDE 27 Left Samuel Palmer  A shepherd and his flock under the moon and stars 1827
******SLIDE 27 Right Vincent�s Starry night  ( St Remy) 1889

******SLIDE 28 Left The night caf� 1888
SLIDE 28 Right Starry night over the Rhone 1888
Vincent described this painting of the caf� as being very ugly, he painted it as a commission to pay off his debts to the Landlord of the establishment.  In his letter of September 8 1888  
�I swore at the said landlord who after all isn�t such a bad fellow, and told him that to revenge myself for paying him so much money for nothing, I would paint the whole of his rotten shanty so as to repay myself.------ Now as for getting back the money I have paid to the landlord by my painting, I do not dwell on that, for the picture is one of the ugliest I have ever done.  It is the equivalent, though different, of The potato eaters.

I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green.  The room is blood red and dark yellow with a green billiard table in the middle.   There are four lemon yellow lamps with a glow of orange and green. everywhere there is a clash and contrast of the most alien reds and greens, ----�

Later on he tells Theo that this painting carries on from The Sower in that it attempts to convey ideas with colour.

This is the period of his work that lead Bataille to identify Vincent with Prometheus  

There is in fact no reason to separate Van Gogh�s ear from Prometheus�s liver.  If one accepts the interpretation that identifies the purveying eagle (the aetos Prometheus of the Greeks) with the god who stole fire from the wheel of the sun, then the tearing out of the liver presents a theme in conformity with the various legends of the sacrifice of the god.  The roles are normally shared between human form of a god and his animal atavar; sometimes the man sacrifices the animal, sometimes the animal sacrifices the man, but each time it is a case of automutilation because the animal and the man form but a single being.   The eagle-god who is confused with the sun by the ancients, the eagle who alone among all beings can contemplate while staring at �the sun in all its glory,� the Icarean being who goes to seek the fire of heavens is, however, nothing other than an automutilator, a Vincent Van Gogh.

On the other hand it is not necessary to see the night and the void as negative.  It may also bring great peace and presage the void as a spiritual return.
SLIDE 29 Left Matisse French window at Collioure 1914
SLIDE 29 Right Brian Blanchflower Nocturne III ( Whale Rock)

SLIDE 30 Left Malevich  Black square 1929
SLIDE 30 Right Rothco Earth and green  1955

SLIDE 31 Left Vincent�s Starry Night detail  1889
SLIDE 31 Right Vincent�s Wheat fields under threatening skies with crows 1890

On 27th July 1890 Vincent went out into the fields he loved and shot himself in the chest.  He did not die at once and his brother Theo had time to come to the bedside, Vincent died two days later.  Theo who was so closely tied to Vincent all his life  soon lost his wits and died the following year in January.