Van Gogh's Letters

Letter 902 from Vincent to Theo van Gogh - the last letter he ever wrote his brother

Just in from seeing the current Van Gogh exhibition at the Royal Academy with my parents. Though I usually steer well clear of anything that smacks of Impressionism at the Royal Academy - since the crowds at those shows are legendary - my mother likes to get in touch with her Dutch roots when anything Netherlandish comes on, and I wanted to see the exhibition since reading a review of the latest edited volume of Van Gogh's letters in the LRB. (My father lasted about 20 minutes in the exhibition - which was, admittedly and expectedly, absolutely packed - and K went to see the Paul Sandby show of 18th-century watercolours, 'Picturing Britain', instead!)

Van Gogh was an inveterate letter-writer - after an exhausting day of painting, he would sit down and write screeds of correspondence, most often to his brother Theo, to whom he wrote nearly 1000 letters. These would describe in detail the paintings he was in the process of making, regularly including sketches or studies, with indications of how he intended to colour them... His philosophy of painting and the gradual deterioration of his mental state plays out in the pages of these letters, and the exhibition nicely brought together the finished oils themselves with pen and ink sketches or studies - which were often beautiful in their own right, occasionally more so than the paintings - with the letters, sympathetically mounted so you could see both sides, and with selected quotations from the letters on the labels, serving to elucidate the art.

It was nicely done, though huge. And as usual at the RA (I find) very little wider context. So no explanation, for example, of why Van Gogh suddenly switches from Dutch to French in his correspondence with his brother. And not arranged particularly chronologically - except for the last room, which contains the landscapes he painted when he was in the mental asylum in Auvers-sur-Oise, in the last months of his life. You're just expected to know the key events and moments of Van Gogh's career, which I don't - perhaps the result of not having come to any of the RA's previous Impressionist exhibitions.

My overriding impression was of the tragedy of Van Gogh's life. He had such a close relationship with his brother - they died within a year of each other. Theo was not only his main source of finance, but his main advocate and guide in the development of his artistic career - keeping him informed of developments in Paris, as Van Gogh taught himself to paint in the area round The Hague. Van Gogh was obviously hyper-sensitised to colour and his surroundings, I presume a consequence of his mental illness - something I had not really noticed before, perhaps from never having seen so many of his art works together in one place. Amazingly, in the last 70 days of his life, he painted more than 70 canvases. He was obviously working at such a frenzied peak of activity that ultimately it was too much for him to sustain, and he shot himself.

But it was the love and closeness that the two brothers had for each other that really came through for me - and perhaps mainly because I had read the LRB review, since there was not too much about this in the text panels. All the letters have been fully edited, translated and published - a small investment of £325, or you can view everything online in facsimile (for free!) here.

Resurfacing slowly

I'm sitting here with a cup of green tea and a Ben's Cookie (triple chocolate chip!) which I bought purely in honour of Yamin - she always raved about them when we were all living in Oxford and used to buy us boxes of the things, but I associate them with her and Oxford and because she is now in New Zealand and we in London I never eat the things. But I was passing their stall in High Street Kensington station earlier, and decided to pay memory lane a visit. Very tasty!

It is probably that Oxford is in my mind, since we were there at the weekend. We went down for a brilliant wedding - and if you know us, and how we usually feel about weddings, you'll be surprised to hear me say that. It was Polly and Steve's, and the theme was village fête - they had the service in a tiny, beautiful English country church, then the reception was in Polly's parents' garden, or rather in the field behind it, which had this amazing view down into the valley and the 'dreaming spires' of Oxford. The village fête theme manifested itself in the form of all the silly games you usually find at such things - welly wanging (!), coconut shy, skittles, treasure map... There were genuinely amusing speeches (including a singalong element to the best men double-act) and after dinner highly amusing barn dancing - you could hardly hold K back, and normally he's the last person to get up on the dance floor! It was all just joyous and great fun, and Polly and Steve seemed to be having a brilliant time, and that's the main thing.

Unfortunately, having finally got my hands on the camera to download the pictures of the day, it seems as if it had accidentally set itself to film rather than photo, and there are now lots of brief moments when I thought I was taking a snap, followed by lots of footage of the ground, as I held the camera in front of me ready for the next photo opportunity. It makes you rather sick watching it through actually! There is the occasional good capture - like this one, the first of the barn dances, based on a Central European wedding dance apparently...

I don't think I'd been to Oxford since February last year, when we went down for K's PhD viva. After 10 years of living there, it is so utterly familiar, that is never weird going back - it just feels like you've only been up to London for a day or so, though maybe some of the shops or cafes are different. There's a Costa cafe on Cowley Road for god's sake! Talk about gentrification. Still, I don't miss living there - I enjoy London too much now. But it was so so wonderful to catch up with old friends - Bob and Bev, who we stayed with, squeezing ourselves into their front room as Bev's brother was already staying; and Nigel and Ginny, who are back in Oxford now, living in an entire corner tower of Christ Church's Tom Quad! We had a wonderful lunch with them and an idyllic few hours sitting out in the Sunday afternoon sun in their garden, surrounded by medieval Oxford walls and the large fig trees which are the offspring of the seedlings which Edward Pococke - first chair of Arabic at the University of Oxford, in 1636, and who used to live in Nigel and Ginny's very corner tower - brought back with him from the Middle East!

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I am now on leave from work for two weeks, trying to shift gears in my brain and start thinking about our Scottish holiday... It's been an utterly crazy time at work since getting back from my Research leave - not just trying to get on with the remaining work on my book, but also getting sucked in to work on the Jameel Prize, which has been interesting but unexpected - it was never something on my work plan for this year. And the second round of comments and edits came back from the copy editor on Friday, leaving me no choice but to spend the first two mornings of my holiday working on those files, so they could be delivered to the designer today. The next time I see my text it will be starting to look like a book!

The weekend in Oxford felt like the start of the holiday, though K has the big academic conference on Henry VIII this week, so I have hardly seen anything of him! I have been enjoying being out and about - on Monday afternoon I went to visit Moya, and went with her to collect her kids from nursery, and played Lego with them while she prepared the supper. I even got to read Sam a bedtime story (actually 3!) - which was fun for being something I don't do every day! Yesterday I went to see the J.W.Waterhouse exhibition at the Royal Academy - as you may know, I have a soft spot for the Pre-Raphaelites, and though he was not really one of the Brotherhood, he worked in their mode, and created powerful visions of the classical world, especially of Homeric myths, or moments of tension from episodes in Ovid's Metamorphoses, just before a captivated all-too-human (usually) man falls prey to divine vengeance. His powerful, magical women fill the canvas and conjure long-forgotten stories from the Odyssey, or the Morte d'Arthur... I'd forgotten how these were the images that first inspired my interest in classical myths and legends. I love his painting St Eulalia (1885), and the striking contrast of the martyred virgin's unclothed body against the falling snow.


Today I have been pre-holiday shopping - how is it that that always entails spending about £50 in Boots?! On this occasion, I was investing in insect repellant, since everyone I have told that we are going to the Outer Hebrides has warned me about midges - and I am someone who usually receives a lot of attention from biting insects! I got 3 for 2 of a spray called Jungle Formula, the ‘Extra Strength’ variety for ‘Tropical Use’ - hopefully that will keep off the little devils!!!

It's time to think about cooking dinner - I'm doing Valentine Warner's 'spring chicken salad'. I really like his recipes - he does a series in the food magazine we get, Olive, about 'What to Eat Now', so it's always seasonal ingredients but I think he makes really imaginative and fresh combinations. It's also a specially nice meal, as tonight's our last night together until Sunday and holiday: tomorrow I'm going to my parents' and my sister and I then fly to Edinburgh on Friday morning, for a couple of days of girly together time, then we meet K at the airport on Sunday to fly to the edge of the world - Stornoway. I wanted to check in with the blog before disappearing again, so you knew I was still here! I am sure when we're back from our chilled-out week in our Hebridean cottage there will be lots of pictures to post and lots of seal- and dolphin- and whale- and puffin-watching to update you on... Speak to you then!

The Wonderful World of Byzantium

Last Sunday, I finally went to the Byzantium exhibition, the next ‘culture’ that the Royal Academy has decided to colonise. Wow. It is only on for a few more weeks (typical of me to leave it almost to the end), and I think everyone in London is trying to make sure they see it before it closes. It was packed! I got there as lunchtime was just starting, so during the two hours I was there, I experienced a comparative lull while everyone else went off to ingest some energy to get them through it. I walked straight through to the end of the show, and worked my way backwards – in my experience Royal Academy exhibitions are usually so huge that you are just too tired to take in the last few rooms, so I wanted to see what was there, and then focus on what I was really interested in – though unfortunately this meant that by the time I had got back to the beginning, lunchtime was over, and the first two galleries were jammed again. I felt so sorry for the several people I saw trying to go round in wheelchairs – one guy was particularly vocal about his frustration at not being able to see anything. I don’t think the height of the cases or position of the labels was very DDA compliant, so I really don’t know what he was able to see.

It managed to live up to all my usual gripes about Royal Academy exhibitions – terrible lighting, how can they get away with it? Objects are in darkness, or lit so that you can’t avoid throwing your shadow over them, or so over-lit that the surface of the object just reflects it back to you, and you can’t see any of the detail. Also, small objects with immensely delicate and detailed decoration, positioned so far back in the case that you can’t see a thing. I really must get into the habit of bringing a torch and a magnifier with me to RA exhibitions. They also seem to have developed a new habit of giving only (what we call in the trade) ‘tombstone’ information on the labels (which were in a new kind of reflective silver material which meant that there was no chance of seeing anything if you tried to read them at a sharp angle through the glass because of the long queue of people clustering round one object…), which gives you absolutely no understanding at all of the complex iconography of Byzantine art, where things were found or how they survived or even really why they were in the show at all. ‘Interpretation’ is never the RA’s strong suit, and they seem to have done away with it completely here. If you want to learn anything, you have to get the audio guide, which I am too much of a snob to do, since I hate the way it turns exhibition-goers into automata, looking only at what the machine tells you to. Or you buy the catalogue, which I had already decided to do before I even arrived. A nice traditional publication of the exhibition as it was, with the added bonus of essays by people who know what they’re talking about. And information about the objects – hurrah!

But what objects! It was amazing to see all the real celebrities of Byzantine ivory carving in one room – and such a treat to be able to see their backs! I have, however, seen more icons than I needed to, but I had no idea how large some of them were! Something I thought was really interesting was that the large collection of 6th-century icons in the Monastery of St Catherine on Mount Sinai, in Egypt, was actually saved from iconoclasm by having been absorbed into the Islamic Empire some hundred years before the decree of iconoclasm (730-845) – so now it has one of the best preserved sets of icons from the whole Byzantine world. Nowadays, The One Thing That Everyone Knows About Islamic Art is that there is no figural representation (which is true only in religious contexts, and even then it is not universally enforced), and it seems to be entirely forgotten that other religions, not least Christianity, had their aniconic phases too. I thought the way they covered to and fro of artistic influences with Islam was a bit tokenistic (and they certainly focused on the ‘to’, but there was most definitely ‘fro’ as well, as evidenced by some of the ivories, and the palmette scroll designs in the repoussé silver adornments on many of the icons), and much more could have been made of this important topic – but perhaps that’s actually a subject for a whole exhibition in itself.

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You will be pleased to hear that my book writing is progressing well – I am nearly at the end of the second week of my research leave, though I am not quite on the verge of achieving my target of having a complete finished draft of Chapter 1 by tomorrow. This is because I ended up spending most of the first week gradually moving my accumulated piles of papers and notes and useful books from home into my new office in the Research Department at work, then sorting and filing these. Well, “it’s an essential part of the process”, as I was pleased to hear one of my new colleagues say to me! (And my desk at home has not been so clear for years!)

I decided not to be too worried about trying to over-achieve in the first few days, and I was giving a lecture two days in – to the Friends of Dulwich Picture Gallery (close to home at least) – so I just let the creative juices start to flow in their own time. Towards the end, Nick, one of my Asian Department colleagues, told me something very important, which immediately turned into my mantra – “Don’t get it right, get it written” (with thanks to his cousin). Now, as you know I don’t have a problem with getting things written, as evidenced by the length of my blog postings – whether they actually say anything interesting is another matter (and one I won’t invite you to comment on!). So, I am very nearly there with a complete first draft of Chapter 1 (which covers the early medieval period in the art history of Islamic Spain, focusing mainly on the 10th to 13th centuries) – trouble is, it’s already twice as long as the chapter is supposed to be. Turns out there are quite a lot of interesting things to say about the rather neglected (in art historical terms) Berber dynasties, the Almoravids and Almohads. So, I’m going to be spending a fair bit of time doing some serious polishing and refining, which is going to take me at least into the middle of next week, by which point I will be behind my entirely unrealistic work schedule. Sigh.

Two things that were keeping me going last week:

1) Catching up on the last seven episodes of Season 4 of Battlestar Galactica (not the original!) – with sincere thanks to Az for his episode pirating skills. Only three more episodes to go – ever!

2) Scandinavian crime fiction, in the form of The Ice Princess, by Camilla Läckberg (with thanks to Lesley for the loan). As people who owned the Complete Works of Henning Mankell before anyone else in the UK had heard of him (and, by the way, weren’t the Kenneth Branagh TV adaptations good? Hope he does more!), and now that Scandinavian crime writing is The New Black, it was with mild disdain mingled with curiosity that I embarked on this new discovery – though helped along by Lesley’s recommendation. I enjoyed it – it certainly helped to take my mind off my own stresses, at the usual two pages a night before falling asleep… But I am not sure it lived up to the hyperbole of the back cover (“a masterclass in Scandinavian crime writing” – er, no), and I thought that most of the subsidiary characters were rather stereotyped. There’s an insightful write-up on it at this blog – I actually though the “obligatory big knicker homage to Bridget Jones” was pretty disappointing. The main protagonist is someone who makes her career writing literary biographies of important Swedish women – and her “favourite literary heroine” is Bridget Jones?? Come on!

Still, I would read more books by Camilla Läckberg (especially if I don’t have to buy them!). Since then I’ve been splashing about in that strange myre you sometimes find yourself in when you finish a book and don’t have anything immediately lined up. I temporarily returned to The Gormenghast Trilogy, since I still have the third book (Titus Alone) to go. But though I love it, it is just too heavy-going for me at the moment – plus now that Titus is out of Gormenghast, discovering the big wide Modernist world, with new weird characters verging on the science fiction, have turned it into a very different, less escapist, reading experience. I will return to it another time.

So, I stopped off at the wonderful Bookthrift on my way to the tube station this evening, and picked up Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – more Scandinavian crime fiction (it might just see me all the way through my own book project!), but I have read a number of plaudits for this guy, who died tragically young just after submitting the manuscripts of three crime novels to his publishers. I’ve enjoyed the few pages I managed to sneak-read on the tube on the way home, so I’ll let you know.

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Last thought for the day, then I’ll leave you in peace: have you noticed how the ad campaigns from our youth are gradually returning? And especially the characters that used to populate these ads? First it was Fido Dido returning to the 7Up campaign – now the bunny from Cadbury’s caramel has returned! (Remember – said in seductively hushed tones, with a slight hint of a West Country burr – “caaaaadbury’s caaaaaaramel”... Indulge in some nostalgia here). I have to admit, I didn’t think that chocolate bar was even around any more – guess that’s the point. But it makes me wonder – has the advertising world run out of ideas? Or is it just that the advertising world is now staffed by guys of our generation, nostalgic for the ad campaigns of our youth? Well, I am just glad the Wispa came back.