Van gogh’s pastoral days nytimes

20­3­2015

Van Gogh’s Pastoral Days ­ NYTimes.com

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INTERNATIONAL ARTS

Van Gogh’ Patoral Da  NINA SIGAL

MARCH 12, 2015

AMSTERDAM — Before he was an artist, Vincent van Gogh was an evangelist.

It is not the best­documented period of his well­examined life, but in many ways it was the turning point in his career.

At age 25, hoping to become a preacher like his father, van Gogh volunteered to become pastor to a poor mining village in southwestern Belgium, in an area known as the Borinage. When he left two years later, at the age of 27, he was no longer a pastor but an aspiring artist.

The transformation, and the enduring influence of this period during his life, is the subject of “Van Gogh in the Borinage: The Birth of an Artist (1879­ 1880)” at the Museum of Fine Arts, in Mons, Belgium, through May 17.

“His formation really was in the Borinage,” said Sjraar van Heugten, former head of collections at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, who curated the exhibition. “Those people that he wanted to preach to now became his subject, and that’s something that he perseveres with in the rest of his career.”

The exhibition is the first of 300 van Gogh­related cultural events planned for 2015, which has been named “Van Gogh Year” by a consortium of arts groups across the Netherlands, Belgium and France to commemorate the 125th anniversary of van Gogh’s death.

“It’s not his birthday,” points out Axel Ruger, director of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which is one of the collaborating institutions. “This is really clearly taking the death, which in and of itself is a critical aspect of van Gogh’s fame, as a starting point to look at these 125 years of inspiration. What has van Gogh caused in the world? He has clearly changed the course of art, and of all the historic artists he’s probably one of the most inspirational.”

It was a hard­won transition from priest to painter. Van Gogh, by all accounts, tried desperately to serve the miners and other residents of the Borinage, through word and deed. He gave away all his middle­class possessions and lived humbly, adopting the lifestyle of a near­beggar. But his http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/13/arts/international/van­goghs­pastoral­days.html?_r=1

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Van Gogh’s Pastoral Days ­ NYTimes.com

efforts came to naught. After just six months, the evangelical committee that had sponsored his time in the Borinage decided that he was unfit to be a pastor there.

“That was a huge blow for van Gogh, who to that point wasn’t successful at any other endeavor in his life,” Mr. van Heugten said. “He must have spent a lot of time thinking about what to do where to go next. He wants to be of use, he wants to mean something to people. He then takes the decision to become an artist.”

It was not an idea he thought of himself; it was his younger brother, Theo van Gogh, an art dealer, who suggested it. But it is clear from Vincent’s letters to Theo that even while working as a pastor, he was often thinking in visual terms.

“It’s a somber place, and at first sight everything around it has something dismal and deathly about it,” he wrote to Theo in April 1879, describing the nearby mine. “The workers there are usually people, emaciated and pale owing to fever, who look exhausted and haggard, weather­beaten and prematurely old, the women generally sallow and withered. All around the mine are poor miners’ dwellings with a couple of dead trees, completely black from the smoke, and thorn­hedges, dung­heaps and rubbish dumps, mountains of unusable coal.”

Matthijs Maris, a Hague School painter of realist landscapes and scenes from everyday life, “would make a beautiful painting of it,” Vincent concluded.

With more than 60 paintings and drawings plus seven letters, the exhibition tracks his early interests and many of the themes and subjects that stayed with him for most of his 10­year career.

“He was very quick to adopt certain motifs and certain ideas he’d develop throughout the rest of his life,” Mr. van Heugten said. “But it’s clear that from the very beginning his paintings and his work is meant to bring consolation to people, to give them moments of emotion and rest.”

Very few of the works in the Mons exhibition come from his time in the Borinage. It is thought that van Gogh made well over 400 copies of works by artists he admired during his time there, but almost none of those have survived. Van Gogh, distraught after being let go from the ministry, also dropped out of correspondence with his family for a while.

“The letters from that period are few, so our knowledge is not as deep as it is from other periods,” Mr. van Heugten said. “He also destroyed almost everything that he made during that period, in the Borinage and in Brussels. If http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/13/arts/international/van­goghs­pastoral­days.html?_r=1

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we had wanted to make an exhibition only of works from that period, it would have been tiny; there aren’t even a dozen works that could’ve been shown.”

Instead, the show presents drawings and paintings from the rest of his career that reflect “echoes” of that period. For example, van Gogh was deeply moved by weavers he saw working on looms during a long trip to the Pas de Calais in 1880. Although he wrote to Theo about them when he first saw them, it was not until later, 1883 to 1884, that he began to revisit the subject in oils.

His few extant sketches and letters from the Borinage give glimpses of his emerging interest in capturing the common man, a subject that would motivate his painting for the rest of his life. Five works in the show, including the early sketch “The Mower With Sickle (After Jean­François Millet)” of 1880 and two drawings of miners’ cottages, come from this period.

Other events are planned for this year to highlight van Gogh’s sojourn in the area. A labyrinth made of sunflowers, in homage to one of his favorite subjects, is planned for the Grand Place in Brussels this summer. Van Gogh’s house in Cuesmes, near Mons, has been renovated and restored for the occasion with funds from Van Gogh Year. But Maison Denis, a small worker’s house where van Gogh lived, sketched miners and wrote some key letters, is in a state of disrepair; only the facade has so far been restored.

“We need more support for the preservation of the heritage of van Gogh,” said Frank van den Eijnden, chairman of the Van Gogh Foundation, which oversees Van Gogh Year 2015. “There’s a lot of interest in his paintings worldwide, but overall, there is less money for restoration and preservation of all the van Gogh heritage sites.”

In addition to his former home, the Van Gogh Foundation would like to preserve some of the mines and other notable sites in the Borinage that influenced van Gogh’s early development. Although the ambition that brought him to the Borinage did not pan out, Mr. van Heugten said, van Gogh’s impact on the world has been far more significant than what he might have achieved as a preacher.

“I think he pretty much achieved what he wanted to do,” Mr. van Heugten said. “He gives people wonderful moments. Both the letters and the artworks do inspire people, and people do find consolation, or at least pleasure, in looking at his work. I don’t think he could foresee how much he would realize what he set out to do.”

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