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Edvard Munch, Evening on Karl Johan Street, <\/cite>1892. Oil on canvas. 84.5 x 121 cm. KODE Kunstmuseer og komponisthjem, Bergen. CONTENTS<\/p>\r\n
Introduction<\/p>\r\n\r\n
FRANCISCO DE GOYA<\/h2>\r\n
8.1<\/p>\r\n
Goya's Demons<\/a><\/p>\r\n 8.2<\/p>\r\n The Disasters of War<\/em><\/a><\/p>\r\n\r\n 8.3<\/p>\r\n Psychic Malaise<\/a><\/p>\r\n 8.4<\/p>\r\n The Painter of Masks<\/a><\/p>\r\n 8.5<\/p>\r\n The Carnivalesque<\/em>:\r\nImages of Social Morbidity and Spiritual Crisis<\/a><\/p>\r\n 8.6<\/p>\r\n Madness, Mania, Melancholy:\r\nThe Artist as Observer<\/a><\/p>\r\n\r\n 8.7<\/p>\r\n Finding the Spiritual in Art<\/a><\/p>\r\n 8.8<\/p>\r\n Van Gogh's Empathic Eye<\/a><\/p>\r\n 8.9<\/p>\r\n Arles: Aesthetic Advances\r\nand Visions of Madness<\/a><\/p>\r\n 8.10<\/p>\r\n Asylum<\/a><\/p>\r\n 8.11<\/p>\r\n Portraits of Madness\r\nand Soulful Self-Images<\/a><\/p>\r\n\r\n 8.12<\/p>\r\n Death and Life<\/a><\/p>\r\n 8.13<\/p>\r\n The Frieze of Life<\/em><\/a><\/p>\r\n 8.14<\/p>\r\n Female Representations:\r\nHalos and Hysteria<\/a><\/p>\r\n 8.15<\/p>\r\n Alienation, Angst, and Collective Despair<\/a><\/p>\r\n\r\n 8.16<\/p>\r\n \"Always a Corpse in the House\":\r\nThe Search for Constancy<\/a><\/p>\r\n 8.17<\/p>\r\n Symbolic Expressionism<\/a><\/p>\r\n 8.18<\/p>\r\n Disillusion and Psychic Despair<<\/a><\/p>\r\n 8.19<\/p>\r\n Hodler's Parallelism<\/a><\/p>\r\n INTRODUCTION<\/p>\r\n Images of madness reflect shifts in social ideology and the changing cultural concerns of a given era. Until the Enlightenment, views of madness were attached to a fear of the supernatural and were visualized in terms of good and evil. With the Age of Reason came the recognition that insanity was a disease and that madness was a morbid condition. The mentally ill were sequestered and often subjected to experimental 'treatments'. In visual terms, the insane were pictured as the other<\/em>, diminished by their disease, and essentially lesser humans.<\/p>\r\nThe eighteenth and nineteenth centuries heralded modern psychiatry's beginnings and the dawn of the moral era. But it was only in the late eighteenth century that a more humane treatment of the mentally ill emerged.\r\n\r\nWith Romanticism, in the early nineteenth century, detached sympathy gave way to a fascination with the bizarre and the uncanny. Disillusioned with the Enlightenment's rational ideals, artists of the Romantic era turned to the imagination for their subject matter, emphasizing creative subjectivity and delving into the furthest reaches of the human mind to reveal narratives of human experience. For example, Francisco Goya used romantic imagery and realism to probe the world of inner demons and social madness.\r\n\r\nDuring the latter 19th century, the term madness encompassed several disorders that could be both mental and physical; ideas of alienation and angst surged within the cultural lexicon. Madness became an expression of passionate feeling, difference, and a response to the toxicity of modern life. In fin-de-sie\u0300cle <\/em>Europe, concepts of degeneracy were embraced by a rebellious avant-garde forging an identity outside the so-called norm.\r\n\r\nThis chapter will examine the practices of Francisco Jos\u00e9 de Goya, James Ensor, Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch and Ferdinand Hodler, each of whom addressed aspects of madness by laying bare the world of inner experience. Their subjective interrogations of psychological truth, ability to locate the universal in the personal, and belief in the freedom of artistic expression helped establish the trajectory of twentieth-century modern art.\r\n Francisco Jos\u00e9 de Goya was one of the first modern artists to address the world of the irrational in visual terms. The frontispiece of his Los<\/em> Caprichos <\/em>album of etchings, entitled The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, <\/em>depicts the slumbering artist assailed by nocturnal monsters of his imagination: the creatures associated in Spanish folk tradition with mystery, folly, ignorance and evil. Goya\u2019s caption for this print offers an interpretation: \"Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of the arts and source of their wonders.\" The implication is that without rational balance, the wondrous world of the imagination can quickly slip into the realm of insanity.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6016\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"500\"] Goya's Disasters of War<\/em> series signals an abandonment of his attempts at moralizing or rationalization. He created a series of etchings highlighting the horrors of the war between France and Spain, barbaric acts beyond rational understanding. As Achurch writes,<\/p>\r\n\r\n Predating photojournalism by centuries, in these personal works which went unpublished until thirty years after Goya\u2019s death, the artist portrays with equal attention the atrocities committed by the French troops and those of the Spanish guerrilla fighters. This is no attempt at patriotic propaganda, but a bitter record of the things of which humans are capable. Alongside the drawings that Goya produced throughout his life, these raw, monochrome prints are where we find Goya\u2019s most vivid, frightening and touching renditions of madness.<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6023\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"] James Ensor was born in 1860 at the seaside resort of Ostend in northwestern Belgium to James Frederic Ensor, a British engineer and the Belgian Maria Catherina Haegheman.His maternal family owned a novelty shop that sold exotic curios, taxidermic specimens and souvenir masks to tourists who flocked to the city during Carnival in summer. But it was a troubled family, frequently afflicted by ill health. Ensor\u2019s father was an outsider in Ostend, often unemployed, mentally unstable, and suffering from several addictions, mainly alcohol and heroin.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6025\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"] Working in his cramped, stock-filled studio, Ensor was drawn to the aesthetics and symbolism of the papier mach\u00e9<\/em> masks sold in the souvenir shop, causing the writer and poet \u00c9mile Verhaeren to later dub him \"the painter of masks.\" His early interest in masks and skeletons introduced the elements of the macabre imagery that would dominate his paintings of the grotesqueries of the world as he experienced it and the darkness of humanity as a whole.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6032\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"] Ensor co-founded Les XX, <\/em>an artist-run group initiated in 1883 by Octave Maus, a Belgian lawyer, art critic, and writer. They aimed to promote international modern art, holding regular exhibitions of works by the group's members and invited artists.<\/p>\r\nLes XX<\/em> was sympathetic to anarchist ideas, as was Ensor. They advocated for freedom of individual expression while actively promoting the social role of art. They utilized a variety of tactics, including hanging red flags outside their salon and printing the cover of their catalogue in red to represent their activities to the Belgian public as radical and revolutionary.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6039\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"] Diane Karp writes in \u201cMadness, Mania, Melancholy: The Artist as Observer\u201d (Philadelphia Museum of Art Bulletin<\/em> 80, no. 342 (1984): 1\u201324):<\/p>\r\n\r\n Vincent van Gogh's remarkable contribution to art history has often been viewed through the overarching lens of his mental illness. Yet the context of his artistic development, the social attitudes toward degeneracy and how his art shaped his life are essential to our understanding of his legacy. Perhaps most important is understanding his creative intentionality beyond his illness. Recent research has revealed the extent to which the artist assiduously honed his skills through a self-directed program and how his working methods were far more methodical than previously understood.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6057\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"] In 1881, Van Gogh moved back to his parent\u2019s home in Etten, falling in love with his widowed cousin Kee Vos, whose rejection devastated him. The subsequent family discord spurred his move to The Hague in December 1881, where he studied painting with his cousin-in-law Anton Mauve and became involved with a homeless pregnant prostitute named Clasina (Sien) Hoornik.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6061\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"400\"]JAMES ENSOR<\/strong><\/h2>\r\n
VINCENT VAN GOGH<\/strong><\/h2>\r\n
EDVARD MUNCH<\/strong><\/h2>\r\n
FERDINAND HODLER<\/strong><\/h2>\r\n
Francisco Jos\u00e9 de Goya<\/h1>\r\n
8.1\r\n| Goya's Demons<\/h1>\r\n
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<\/a> Francisco de Goya, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters <\/cite>(No. 43), from Los Caprichos, 1799. Etching with aquatint and other intaglio media. 188.98 x 149.10 cm. Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nGillian Achurch, writing about the exhibition Goya and Modernity<\/em> at the Pinacoth\u00e8que de Paris, (\u201cThe Madness of Goya: The Father of Modern Art\u201d (December 20, 2013) (https:\/\/www.meer.com\/en\/6556-the-madness-of-goya) explains,\r\n\u201cNo great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness,\u201d so Aristotle tells us. A quick glance over Goya\u2019s oeuvre is enough to recognize art both great and, by some definition, mad. Goya is famously often considered the first modern artist, for his concentration on depicting his own, inner thoughts and responses to the world he saw around him, rather than reflecting those of others or attempting to produce an \u2018objective\u2019 representation. What he saw, both in his private life and in the events occupying Spain, was often incomprehensible turmoil. It is unsurprising, therefore, that this is dramatically reflected in his astonishing works. The symbolism implies the dangers of withdrawing into oneself.<\/blockquote>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6018\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]
<\/a> Francisco de Goya, Courtyard with Lunatics or Yard with Madmen, <\/cite> 1794. Oil on tin-plated iron. 43.8 x 32.7 cm. Meadows Museum, Dallas. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nWithin Goya\u2019s prolific output of some 700 paintings, 900 drawings and 300 prints we find madness appearing again and again. Incarcerated lunatics roam an asylum yard,\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6019\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]<\/a> Francisco de Goya, The Madhouse,<\/cite> ca. 1808-12. Oil on panel. 45 x 72 cm. Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nand play fancy-dress in their cell,\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6020\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]<\/a> Francisco de Goya, Cannibals Chopping up Victims, <\/cite>ca. 1808-14. Oil on panel. 31 x 45 cm. Mus\u00e9e des Beaux-Arts et d'arch\u00e9ologie de Besan\u00e7on. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\ncannibals gnaw on their victims,\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6021\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]<\/a> Francisco de Goya, Saturn Devouring His Son, <\/cite>ca. 1819-23. Mixed media mural transferred to canvas. 143.5 x 81.4 cm. Museo del Prado, Madrid. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nand monsters loom over humans.\r\n\r\nGoya's fascination with the subject of insanity speaks to Romanticism's emphasis on passionate feeling and self-expression. His personal experience with depression and anxiety, of feeling, as quoted in Achurch, \u201cso bad that I don\u2019t know if my head is on my shoulders\u2026 I don\u2019t know what is happening,\u201d and the delusions of madness aggravated by a severe illness at forty-six which also left him deaf catalyzed his engagement with themes of reason and unreason and the dark side of the human psyche.\r\n\r\nThe socio-political turmoil of the era, and the horrific events of Spain's Peninsular War, which Goya witnessed first-hand, furthered his interest in exploring the fragility and ferociousness of human experience and what can occur when we are faced with the unfathomable.\r\n8.2\r\n| The Disasters of War<\/em><\/h1>\r\n
\r\n
<\/a> Francisco de Goya, The Same (The Disasters of War),<\/cite> ca. 1810-14. Etching, burnisher, burin, dry point on washed paper. 16.2 x 22.3 cm. Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6024\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]<\/a> Francisco de Goya, They do not want to (The Disasters of War), <\/cite>ca. 1810-14. Aquaforte, aquatint, dry point on warp paper. 15.6 x 20.9 cm. Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nIn an address he made at the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts, Goya emphasized the importance of allowing art students to follow their imaginations. This is certainly what he did throughout his life, finding the courage to do so knowing that though the imagination creates genius, so too is it the root of insanity. For Goya, giving free rein to his imagination was the only way to explore his persistent fascination with humankind and to express his sympathy for those he saw as dehumanized Perhaps they were mad, perhaps he was mad, and perhaps the world was mad, but the monsters roamed and Goya wanted only to open our eyes.\r\n\r\nGoya's subjective expos\u00e9s of the grotesqueness of the human condition made him a precursor of James Ensor, Vincent Van Gogh, Edvard Munch, and Ferdinand Hodler. All four artists, active on the verge of 20th-century modernism, engaged with an irrational and uncanny liminal world.\r\nJames Ensor<\/h1>\r\n
8.3\r\n| Psychic Malaise<\/h1>\r\n
<\/a> James, Ensor, Ensor and His Easel, <\/cite>ca. 1890. Oil on canvas. 40 x 58.5 cm. Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6026\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]<\/a> James Ensor, The Beach at Ostende,<\/cite> 1890. Gouache. 37.4 cm x 45.4 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nJames Ensor's early years were spent in relative isolation, making art in the small attic above the family's curio shop. The works he made then reflect his interest in a northern naturalism that was far removed from the psychological complexity of his later paintings. From 1877 to 1880, he attended the Acad\u00e9mie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. However Ensor was essentially self-educated, honing his skills through the practiced study of the master drawings of Rembrandt, Callot, Watteau, Goya, and Daumier.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6027\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"400\"]<\/a> Michel Foucault, Folie et d\u00e9raison: Histoire de la folie \u00e0 l\u2019\u00e2ge classique (Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason) <\/cite>(Paris: Plon, 1961). View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nIn Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason<\/em> the philosopher Michel Foucault addresses the concept of madness and its evolution in the early Renaissance, Classical and Modern eras, describing that it once \"was allowed free reign; it circulated throughout society, it formed part of the background and language of everyday experience (that one sought neither to exalt nor control...).\" The insane had a role in the community, and madness was seen as intrinsic to the human condition. Madness, like death, was not romanticized but was a constant reminder of the nearness and possibility of eternal damnation. During the nineteenth century, psychic maladies were often associated with the volatility and angst experienced as an effect of modernization.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6028\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]<\/a> James Ensor, Afternoon in Ostend,<\/cite> 1881. Oil on canvas. 132 x 108.5 cm. Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nEnsor's early images were often of interiors and family scenes. Executed in dark colours, they introduced his engagement with the intricacies of the human psyche. In his early career, the theme of psychic malaise was couched in the small dramas of domestic life. His impressionistic bourgeois interiors of the early 1880s were conveyed with the economy of a palette knife, yet still evoked interpersonal idiosyncratic behaviours. There is little doubt that the eccentricity of his domestic life marked him. The suggestion of neurosis and madness often undercut allusions to the home as the nucleus of safety and affection. Afternoon in Ostend,<\/em> which shows the artist's mother and sister at tea, suggests an uneasy encounter and foreshadows the psychological tensions of Ensor's later theatrical spaces.\r\n\r\nMarnin Young in \u201c1882 -The Revolutionary Foyer\u201d (Realism in the Age of Impressionism: Painting and the Politics of Time<\/em> (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 165-203) writes about these earlier works by Ensor:\r\nAfternoon in Ostend <\/em>on the whole seems especially attuned to the comforts of home. Like the other paintings of the artist\u2019s home and family, this canvas starts from an assumption of bourgeois composure within the space of the interior. Yet, there is also sense that these paintings cut against their own familiarity and the comfort with their subjects. The atmospheric effects of Ensor\u2019s loose paint handling across the surface only heightens the sense of disconnect between these women. The absence of men from these scenes speaks of the family dynamics that underpinned the social life of these interiors. Both Ensor and his unemployed father spent large stretches of the day indoors\u2026two Ensor men are missing from these interior spaces.\r\n\r\nIn the early 1880s, Ensor aggressively exhibited his various paintings of interiors\u2026 By 1886, these \u201cbourgeois interiors\u201d had made the painter\u2019s name, and he was widely noted for them... With some notable exceptions, critics reviewing his work focused almost exclusively on the paint handling, comparing it repeatedly with French Impressionism. As early as 1882, an anonymous review in L\u2019Art moderne <\/em>described the \u201cgreat quirkiness\u201d of Ensor\u2019s brushwork and proclaimed that he was \u201cstrongly inspired by the procedures dear to the Impressionists.\u201d At Les XX, one critic dismissively declared that \u201cFrench Impressionism dominates him,\u201d another that he sought to \u201centhrone Impressionism in Belgium.\u201d Beyond the predictable lamentations for a lost national school of painting\u2014Ensor was haunted \u201cby wan, second- hand memories of the French school\u201d\u2014 critics failed to explain exactly why this embrace of Impressionism so troubled them\u2026 Ensor vehemently denied the influence of Impressionism but nonetheless insisted that the \u201cdeformations\u201d that light subjects to line had been the key concern in his early works.\r\n\r\nThe critic Jules Destr\u00e9e, for example, waxed enthusiastic over Ensor\u2019s Afternoon in Ostend<\/em>: \u201cIt has a superb intimacy and intensity of life. How well one senses the closed up apartment! How one discerns the chit-chat of the two women, one smelling her coffee with a natural gesture, the other depicted with such truth, such observation, such a modern sense.\u201d In discussing the necessity of painting the modern world at the exhibition of Les XX in 1885, Albert Dutry used the same word to describe what advanced painting can achieve: \u201cWe must paint what is around us, as it is only from this that we can penetrate into intimacy.\u201d As Fried points out, French critics in the 1860s consistently used both \u201cintimacy\u201d and \u201cpenetrating\u201d to praise the absorption of the characters depicted in paintings. Dutry use of both terms confirms that the critical vocabulary had migrated to Belgium, and Ensor\u2019s productions only typified these wider preoccupations.<\/blockquote>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6029\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]
<\/a> James Ensor, Russian Music,<\/cite> 1881. Oil on canvas. 133 x 110 cm. Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6030\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]<\/a> James Ensor, Afternoon in Ostend,<\/cite> 1881. Oil on canvas. 132 x 108.5 cm. Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6031\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]<\/a> James Ensor, The Bourgeois Salon, <\/cite>1881. Oil on canvas. 133 x 109 cm. Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nYoung continues:\r\nIn the end, Ensor\u2019s interiors\u2014Chez Miss (Russian Music)<\/em>, Afternoon in Ostend, The Bourgeois Salon<\/em>, and others\u2014sought to hold in some kind of tension, the interior as stereotyped, sentimentalized representation and the interior as a space of lived experience. This seemed to demand the production of paintings that made visible the to-and-fro between the comforts of home and the recognition of its falling into mere image.<\/blockquote>\r\n
8.4\r\n| The Painter of Masks<\/h1>\r\n
<\/a> James Ensor, Scandalized Mask, <\/cite>1883. Oil on canvas. 135 x 112 cm. Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nScandalized Masks<\/em>, initially exhibited as Les Masques,<\/em> announced a new interest in the pictorial potential of the mask motif as a manifestation of covert things and contrivance of concealment. Here, a brightly lit interior shows a man seated at a table, a half-empty wine bottle and glass before him. A blue-spectacled shrew stands at the doorway, holding a stick like a weapon. Both figures wear long-nosed masks. The harsh lighting, the carnivalesque costuming of the woman, and the arrested action of the scene create an eclectic atmosphere of intimacy and menace.\r\nYoung discusses Scandalized Masks:<\/em>\r\nWithin the more naturalistic iconography of his earlier works, the scene might be viewed as a domestic narrative of alcoholism \u2026 even if it uncannily unfolds at the time of Carnival. Yet, the painting also seems to literalize the problematic of absorptive motifs giving way to frankly facing effects. The mask was Ensor\u2019s means of allegorizing this doubleness, and this motif, which typifies his later work, should be understood as an outwardly facing object, intended to be seen\u2014it literally faces us\u2014but also as a mechanism to conceal the subject from view.<\/blockquote>\r\nScandalized Masks <\/em>is one of several domestic scenes evocative of strangeness and alienation that the artist produced over the next several years.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6033\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]
<\/a> James Ensor, Skeleton Looking at Chinoiseries,<\/cite> 1885. Oil on canvas. 101 x 61 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nThe cryptic Skeleton Looking at Chinoiseries<\/em> painted two years later, lends itself to multiple interpretations. Is the skeleton the artist? Is the work a symbolic representation of a shopkeeper's tawdry secrets? Or does it conceptualize the living death of madness, a notion described by Foucault as \"...the head that will become a skull is already empty. Madness is the deja-la<\/em> of death.\"\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6034\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]<\/a> James Ensor, Skeletons Warming Themselves, <\/cite>1889. Oil on canvas. 74.8 x 60 cm. Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nEnsor's father died of the effects of alcoholism in 1887, followed by the death of his maternal grandmother. The shadow of mortality that had percolated beneath the surface of Ensor's oeuvre now assumed prominence.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6035\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]<\/a> James Ensor, Self-Portrait with Masks, <\/cite> 1899. Oil on canvas. 117 x 82 cm. Menard Art Museum, Komaki. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nIn Self-Portrait with Masks,<\/em> Ensor's self-image dominates in a carnival of masks, including skulls, glaring faces, exaggerated noses, piercing eyes and mixed looks of shock, menace, fear and amusement. Clad in a red fedora adorned with flowers and feathers, the artist's gaze directs the viewer on a tour of the claustrophobic masked crowd, always returning to his image.\r\n\r\nHere, the motif is repeated across the scene, a symbolic critique of a two-faced bourgeois society. For Ensor and others, masking was deployed as a multi-faceted metaphor, at once playful and dark.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6036\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"300\"]<\/a> Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, <\/cite> trans. H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965). View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nAs the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin explains in Rabelais<\/em> and His World <\/em>(Bloomington: Indian University Press, 1984 (1965):\r\nThe mask is connected with the joy of change and reincarnation, with gay relativity and with the merry negation of uniformity and similarity; it rejects conformity to oneself ... It contains the playful element of life; it is based on a peculiar interrelation of reality and image, characteristic of the most ancient rituals and spectacles. \u2026 It reveals the essence of the grotesque. The Romantic mask loses almost entirely its regenerating and renewing element and acquires a sombre hue. A terrible vacuum, a nothingness lurks behind it.<\/blockquote>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6037\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]
<\/a> James Ensor, Old Lady with Masks, <\/cite> 1889. Oil on canvas. 55 x 46.6 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nEnsor's portraits of family and friends were inclined toward naive renderings or misogynistic mockery. The woman is presumably Neel Doff, the Dutch writer and publicist.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6038\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]<\/a> James Ensor, Portrait of the Artist\u2019s Niece in Chinese Costume, <\/cite>1899. Watercolour over graphite, retouched in pen and ink, on light tan wove paper. 63.8 x 49.7 cm. Art Institute of Chicago. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nPortrait of the Artist's Niece<\/em> shows a girl who appears two-dimensional, empty, and lifeless. Leering masks surround her. Her painted face is mask-like, and behind her, a halo of light suggests an unreal space, perhaps an allusion to the theatre of life and death.\r\n8.5\r\n| The Carnivalesque:\r\nImages of Social Morbidity and Spiritual Crisis<\/h1>\r\n
<\/a> Louis Tinayre, \u201cRoux \u2013 Les chasseurs du 3e regiment, sous les orders du capitaine Bulot, dispersant par la force les \u00e9meutiers qui viennent d\u2019incendier la Verrerie du Hainaut,\u201d [Strikers burning the glass factory and ch\u00e2teau of M. Baudoux at Jumet], Le Monde Illustr\u00e9, <\/cite>April 10, 1886. Biblioth\u00e8que nationale de France, Paris. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]In 1886, four days after the closure of Les XX<\/em>'s March exhibition\u2014<\/em>which included works by members Ensor,Alfred William (Willy) Finch, Fernand Knopff, Th\u00e9o van Rysselberghe, Guillaume Vogels, as well as invitees Monet, Redon, and Renoir, among others\u2014 anarchists commemorating the anniversary of the Paris Commune rioted in the streets of Li\u00e8ge.\r\n\r\nSusan M. Canning writes in \u201cThe Ordure of Anarchy: Scatological Signs of Self and Society in the Art of James Ensor\u201d (Art Journal<\/em> 52, no. 3 (1993): 47\u201353):\r\nOn March 18, four days after the exhibition of Les XX closed \u2026 anarchists in the east of Belgium paraded through the streets of Li\u00e8ge to commemorate the fifteenth anniversary of the Paris Commune. The demonstration capped months of nationwide agitation for wage increases, work-time reforms, and the institution of universal suffrage. The vicious police response to the Li\u00e8ge event, resulting in numerous deaths, escalated national protests and crackdowns over the course of the year, ending with military control of industrial regions and the consolidation of the recently formed Parti Ouvrier Belge as a legitimate and enduring political force in the kingdom. Louis Bertrand would write at the end of the year, referring to the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, \u201c1886 is our ann\u00e9e terrible, just like the year 187 was in France.\u201d<\/blockquote>\r\nEnsor was in the thick of things politically that year, possibly even participating in demonstrations, and he responded to the events with works both small and large over the next half-decade.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6040\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]
<\/a> James Ensor, Christ\u2019s Entry into Brussels in 1889, <\/cite>1888. Oil on canvas. 252.6 x 431 cm. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nFrom the late 1880s onward, Ensor's imagery grew more exaggerated and twisted. He turned to caricature in his complex commentaries on social malaise and hypocrisy.\r\n\r\nChrist\u2019s Entry into Brussels in 1889 <\/em>is regarded as his most significant work. The monumental canvas introduces the artist's forte as a mordant observer of his time and declares his leftist leanings. Apart from its imposing ten by 15-foot scale, the frenzied work is jarring in form and content. Strident colour animates the agitated crowd. Among them is the figure Ensor, personified as Christ, riding an ass and barely discernible in the crowd of military bands, masked marchers, historical figures and politicians of all persuasions. The work exudes the madness of crowds, social deviancy and religious indecency. It conjures up the festivity of the Carnival of Ostend and turns it on its head.\r\n\r\nSuspended above the obscured Christ figure is a banner which reads \"Vive La Social\" (Long live Socialism) and a poster announcing \"Fanfares Doctrinaires Toujours R\u00e9ussi\" (doctrinal fanfares always succeed). The stacked configuration of the crowd on the viewing stand on the other side is surreal, a metaphor for mounting madness. The distorted faces and uniform stare are demonic, conveying twisted spirits.\u00a0But this was not a celebration of socialist and artistic politics. Ensor was striking out against the crushing of individual freedoms in a panoptic critique of institutional control.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6041\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]<\/a> Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Fight Between Carnival and Lent,<\/cite> 1559. Oil on panel. 118 x 164 cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nThere are comparisons to the Flemish Renaissance painter Brueghel worth noting. For one, the composition compels a reading that unfolds in time, as we decipher the pictorial pattern. In Brueghel's The Fight Between Carnival and Lent<\/em>, disparate characters animate the cacophonous scene, from Carnival's corpulent figuration to Lent's emaciated personification. Carnival embodies the three great excesses of carnival: food (and drink), sex and violence. He is Indulgence personified, and also Folly, a piper to the crowd of frenzied revellers.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6043\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]<\/a> Detail of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Fight Between Carnival and Lent,<\/cite> 1559. Oil on panel. 118 x 164 cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nThe Carnival is everyday material life; Lent is attired as a thin nun with severe countenance; she is the antidote to Indulgence. She is Abstinence, and she is losing. Elsewhere, people give alms and go to church, and the clergy are conspicuous among them (by the time of this painting, 1559 the clergy were at the forefront of campaigns against Carnival).\r\n\r\nBruegel does not seem to lean in favour of one side or another. Unlike Ensor's work, this is not a mortality painting. The folly of Carnival simply highlights life after the Fall, the reign before the Second Coming. It is life as inherently foolish.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6044\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]<\/a> James Ensor, Christ\u2019s Entry into Brussels in 1889, <\/cite>1888. Oil on canvas. 252.6 x 431 cm. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6045\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]<\/a> James Ensor, The Strike, <\/cite>1888. 67.5 x 34 cm. Drawing. Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nEnsor's works frequently featured people (clergy, kings, the bourgeoisie) vomiting, urinating, or defecating as an allusion to the crudity of their actions. Canning states, \u201cEnsor as Christ triumphantly enters Brussels in the midst of a Mardi Gras celebration, while on a balcony in the background revelers vomit and defecate on a banner bearing the Vingtist emblem \u201dart.\u201d\r\n\r\nCanning compares the \u201cmoral satire\u201d of this work to others painted during the same period:\r\nIn The Strike<\/em>, or Massacre of the Fishermen of Ostend<\/em> Ensor turns his attention to contemporary events. This large composite drawing refers to the August 1887 strike called by Ostend fishermen to protest the use of their fishing areas by the British. In the course of the strike, several fishermen were killed. In his drawing, Ensor merges reality with fantasy as he juxtaposes the bloody repression by the police with the imagined revenge of the townspeople, who defecate or vomit fish on the invaders. Whereas the men and women of Ostend are given heroic poses, the police are shown as brutal agents of state authority who surround and overwhelm the small group of protesters, slaughtering all who stand in their way.\r\n\r\nIn The Strike<\/em>, the scatological acts as an equalizing element, raising or lowering all to the same level. At the same time, Ensor associates the vulgar aspects of defecation, elimination, and vomit with an instinctual, unrefined state, a way of living, which in the artist's view appears more in tune with the natural order of things than the artificial leisure of the bourgeoisie or the violent actions of a repressive state. Like the anarchists whose beliefs he shared, Ensor sought in these works to replace the values of the old social order with representations of a new, more elemental society based on natural law and on harmony among classes.\r\n\r\nAfter 1888 Ensor employed exaggeration, distortion, and caricature as well as scatological references to comment upon a society which he saw as conformist, conservative, and hypocritical. As these images grew more political, Ensor's individualist ideology assumed a more anarchistic tone. Like many of his contemporaries, Ensor never publicly proclaimed his political views, but he associated with anarchists from the beginning of his career.\r\n\r\nEnsor first learned of the theories of Elisde Reclus, the geographer and anarcho-communist, in the late 1870s when he came to Brussels to study at the Academy. Later, in 1886, Ensor read excerpts of Prince Kropotkin's Words of a Revolutionary<\/em> in the Brussels avant-garde journal l\u2019Art moderne<\/em>. While these contacts educated Ensor on the fundamentals of anarcho-communist theory, at Les XX he learned the strategies of anarchist action. Les XX had declared themselves an anarchist group when they formed in 1884, and throughout their ten salons they utilized a variety of tactics, including hanging red flags outside their salon and printing the cover of their catalogue in red to represent their activities to the Belgian public as radical and revolutionary. Like the anarcho-communist theorists, Les XX did not outline a specific way for artists to visualize their political beliefs. Instead, the group proclaimed the freedom of individual expression while actively promoting the social role of art. Although in agreement with the socialist goals for class equality and the collective ownership of the means of production, anarcho-communist theory rejected the socialist model of collectivity. Instead, they called for small associations of individuals to form into harmonious federations. In anarchist theory, the free individual became an agent for social change. The anarchist sought an ideal order which would result in a natural world founded upon the harmony between the individual and society, a \"life without masters\" as Reclus termed it, where a social accord would arise \"from the free association of individuals and groups, conforming to the needs and interests of each and all.\" In the anarchist's view, until this ideal order was created, each individual must continue to struggle against all forms of political, economic, and personal authority by means of direct action or \"propaganda by the deed.\"<\/blockquote>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6046\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]
<\/a> James Ensor, Doctrinal Nourishment, second plate, <\/cite>1889. Etching. 18.2 x 25 cm. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nCanning notes that Alimentation doctrinaire (Doctrinal feeding)<\/em> is even more explicit in its assessment of social, political, and religious deceit than The Strike<\/em>, or Massacre of the Fishermen of Ostend<\/em>.\r\n\r\nAs indicated in this print, Ensor addresses the beholder in an aggressive, inflammatory way. He bares the buttocks of the political, military, and religious leaders of the Belgian state while titling the scene with a plaque and subtitling it with cards to underscore his point. He also inverts the scatological referent. Rather than a sign of the natural power is enfranchised lower class, excrement becomes a symbol of the foul-smelling, anal processes of the ruling order. Here, as the Flemish say, \"zij schijten in een pot\" (they all shit in the same pot).\r\n\r\nAlimentation doctrinaire<\/em> is Ensor's most overt political statement and his most direct use of scatological imagery. By the mid-1890s, when his art began to sell and he gained some critical and public acceptance, Ensor's use of scatological imagery declined. While he continued to make scatological references in later works, they are not as confrontational as the images discussed here. Just as the anarchists turned in the 1890s to a more constructive and less destructive model for social change, so too does Ensor's criticism of society grow more general and less abusive. Yet even with the artist\u2019s mellowing, the ordure of anarchy that acts as a sign for his sexually repressed, alienated, and foolish self and for his personal revolt against social and political repression remains fresh.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6047\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]<\/a> James Ensor, Christ\u2019s Entry into Brussels in 1889, <\/cite>1888. Oil on canvas. 252.6 x 431 cm. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6048\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"400\"]<\/a> James Ensor, Christ\u2019s Entry into Jerusalem<\/cite>, 1885. Graphite and conte crayon on off-white wove paper. 22.5 x 16.5 cm. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nMark Leonard and Louise Lippincott in \u201cJames Ensor\u2019s Christ\u2019s Entry into Brussels in 1889: Technical Analysis, Restoration, and Reinterpretation\u201d (Art Journal<\/em> 54, no. 2 (1995): 18\u201327) provide an informed formal and technical analysis of the painting when it was purchased by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.\r\n\r\nIt is essential to recall that Ensor was a consummate draftsman, and Christ's Entry into Brussels<\/em> must be seen in comparison with his own graphic works, particularly Christ\u2019s Entry into Jerusalem.<\/em> It is revealing to observe the way in which the calligraphic notations of the crowd from the drawing have been translated into similar shorthand notations in paint in Christ's Entry into Brussels<\/em>.\r\nIt is clear that Ensor considered himself the heir to a Northern tradition of draftsmanship that looked back to Rembrandt (the similarities between Ensor's prints and Rembrandt's etchings are notable), and the importance of underdrawing to the creation of a work of art has even deeper roots within the earliest traditions of Flemish painting and manuscript illumination.<\/blockquote>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6050\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]
<\/a> Detail of James Ensor, Christ\u2019s Entry into Brussels in 1889,<\/cite> 1888. Oil on canvas. 252.6 x 431 cm. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\nEnsor used his underdrawing as a strong guide for the painting. In a sense Christ's Entry into Brussels<\/em> could be considered to be an enormous colored drawing. Ensor carefully filled in the lines of his extensive drawing and was certainly not prone to bursts of spontaneity or change. In fact, aside from the changes within the inscriptions of the banners, there are virtually no major pentimenti to be found within Christ's Entry into Brussels<\/em>. In a detail from the lower right of the painting, it is possible to see that bordering colors of paint do not overlap, or as in the profile of the head, even touch. Ensor simply left the bare ground visible between the outlines of the underdrawing. The silhouetted effects of the forms are heightened by this careful and controlled handling of the paint.\r\n\r\nEnsor's palette in Christ's Entry into Brussels <\/em>was actually quite straightforward; he favored the use of pure colors and only rarely resorted to mixtures of any type. For example, a cross section taken from the red feather just below the signature showed that it was painted on top of the green background. Three simple layers were found: the lead white of the ground, the pure emerald green of the background, and the pure vermilion of the red feather. In the lower-right corner of the picture, underneath the podium, where the head of the figure identified as Ensor's aunt overlaps a blue stripe in her costume, the flesh tone is a simple mixture of vermilion, chrome yellow, and lead white. The blue is a pure Prussian blue. It is important to note that all of the pigments used were standard artist's pigments of the period. Media analysis suggested that these were straightforward oil colors.... Analysis of all of the cross-section samples taken from Christ's Entry into Brussels<\/em> supported the fact that development of complicated or overlapping layers of paint was not part of Ensor's working method. The paint is very thick in many areas of the picture, but the layer structure is actually quite simple; the colors were applied in single strokes, simply and directly.<\/blockquote>\r\n
While Ensor retained possession of Christ's Entry into Brussels<\/em> for over sixty years, he reworked a number of details within the picture. Some of the basic analytic techniques commonly used to sort out the later changes actually revealed very little as a result of the nature of the materials that Ensor used in the painting.<\/blockquote>\r\nEnsor's The Intrigue<\/em> which he painted several years later, is yet another portrayal of humanity gone mad. The faces are at once realistic and surreal, a comment on the depravity ordinarily hidden behind the facade of everyday appearances. Coarsely painted in clashing hues of red, green, yellow, blue, and white, the work describes a carnivalesque culture, discordant and dark. It is a veiled critique of the \"mercurial speculators\" who were bringing about the ruin of Ostend through modernization. His writings and art reveal that he sought a return to cultural unity, to a Belgium untainted by commercialism, tourism, and industrialization. \"Let us re-establish our pure and natural carnivals...those which included greatcoats of arms and red-lipped prostitutes, ostrich plumes and wooden shoes.\" The<\/em> Intrigue<\/em> speaks to the collapse of familial and communal bonds in a society increasingly centred on materiality.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6053\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"400\"]
<\/a> Hieronymus Bosch, The Ship of Fools, <\/cite>ca. 1490-1500. Oil on wood. 58 x 33 cm. Mus\u00e9e du Louvre, Paris. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nIn some respects, The Intrigue<\/em> also references Hieronymus Bosch in notions of satanic evil and the end of the world. There are thematic equivalences to be made between Ensor's carnivalesque madness and Bosch's Ship of Fools, <\/em>for example, sailing through a landscape of superficial pleasures while demonic forces anticipate the end at hand.\r\n8.6\r\n| Madness, Mania, Melancholy: The Artist as Observer<\/h1>\r\n
The enlightenment of the public to the complicated workings of the human psyche opened a whole new interior landscape to the scrutiny of the artist's eye, a landscape that had not escaped his vision in the past, but one that was becoming increasingly acceptable. Demons Ridicule Me<\/em>, a powerful etching by James Ensor, is a frightfully moving self-portrait of the artist surrounded by phantasmagorical demons that claw and pull at him.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6054\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]
<\/a> James Ensor, Demons Taunting Me,<\/cite> 1895. Etching. 11.8 x 15.8 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6055\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]<\/a> Martin Schongauer, Saint Anthony Tormented by Demons,<\/cite> ca. 1470-74. Engraving. 30 x 21.8 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6056\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]<\/a> Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Temptation of St. Anthony, <\/cite>1506. Woodcut; second state of two (Hollstein). 40.8 x 28 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\nIn comparison to the prints by Martin Schongauer or Lucas Cranach, the depiction is not of a saint... but of a mere mortal. The artist presents himself in a state of compromise, a human being tormented by his own demons, oppressed and pursued by the enemy within.\r\n\r\nEnsor's self-portrait exemplifies the self-doubt and emotional malaise that occurred at the end of the nineteenth century, marked by a proliferation of exotic religious movements and other manifestations of spiritual crisis. There was a fear that the golden glow on the horizon toward which nineteenth-century man had pointed with scientific-technological pride was perhaps not the bright glow of the rising sun but the waning light of the sun setting on the nineteenth century, leaving goals and hopes unfulfilled in the darkness.<\/blockquote>\r\n
Vincent Van Gogh<\/h2>\r\n
8.7\r\n| Finding the Spiritual in Art<\/h1>\r\n
<\/a> Vincent van Gogh, Coalmine in the Borinage, <\/cite>1879. Pencil, watercolour, paper. 26.4 x 37.5 cm. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nVincent van Gogh was born on March 30, 1853, in Groot-Zundert, the Netherlands, to Th\u00e9odorus van Gogh, a Calvinist pastor, and Anna Cornelia Carbentus. He was the first of six surviving children, second to a stillborn brother also called Vincent, whose name-inscribed tombstone haunted the artist's early childhood. His younger brother Th\u00e9o was born in 1857. The relationship between the two was close and life-spanning. Their correspondence maps out the narrative of the artist's life, beginning in 1872 when Vincent was nineteen and Th\u00e9o fifteen and comprises more than 650 letters.\r\n\r\nUntil the age of twenty-five, Van Gogh worked at several futile jobs\u2014as an art seller, unpaid teacher, minister's assistant, and book clerk. In 1878 he was awarded a preaching appointment in the Borinage coal mining region, arriving in December and staying ten months. It was a harrowing experience which influenced his spiritual beliefs and inspired his aesthetic interests.\r\n\r\nIn his first letters from Borinage to Th\u00e9o, Van Gogh described the booming area, its scenery and the local people as \u201cfull of character \u2026 and reminiscent of Bruegel\u2019s medieval paintings ...The people are completely black, like chimney sweeps. Their houses could be better called huts, scattered along the sunken roads and against the slope of the hills. At first sight everything around it has something dismal and deathly about it. The workers are emaciated and pale due to fever, and they look exhausted and haggard, weather-beaten and prematurely old, the women generally sallow and withered.\"\r\n\r\nNellie Hermann, the author of The Seasons of Migration<\/em>, a novel about Van Gogh\u2019s ten months stay (1878-1879) in the coal-mining village of Petit Wasmes in the Borinage region of Belgium, writes in Paris Review<\/em> (Idle Bird, June 10, 2015, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/06\/10\/idle-bird\/)\r\nIn October of 1879, Theo van Gogh went to visit his brother, Vincent, in the Borinage coal-mining district of Belgium. Theo was en route to Paris, where he had business to conduct as an art dealer; Vincent was doing self-appointed missionary work... Theo, upset by Vincent\u2019s appearance\u2014he had given away nearly all of his clothes to the miners, and had ceased bathing\u2014told him, \u201cYou are not the same any longer.\u201d He felt that Vincent was wasting his time in this squalid place, and suggested that he leave to take up a different trade.\r\n\r\nAngry at his brother\u2019s inability to understand him, Vincent wrote a letter to Theo on October 15 that would be the last for ten months. The brothers had been writing letters to each other almost unceasingly since 1872, when Vincent was nineteen and Theo fifteen. This would be the first and deepest rupture between them, a silence that would never repeat itself. Referring to Theo\u2019s accusation of \u201cidleness,\u201d Vincent wrote with bitterness: \u00a0\u201cI am not sure it would be right to combat such an accusation by becoming a baker, for instance. It would indeed be a decisive answer (always supposing that it were possible to assume, quick as lightning, the form of a baker, a barber or a librarian); but at the same time it would be a foolish answer, more or less like the action of a man who, when reproached with cruelty for riding a donkey, immediately dismounted and continued his way with the donkey on his shoulders.\u201d\r\n\r\nTheo\u2019s visit came at a particularly vulnerable point for Vincent. After almost a year in the dark and poverty-stricken landscape of the Borinage, he was losing any clarity he had about what his life was for. He had brought himself to the furthest limits of his Christian understanding trying to help the destitute community he found there, giving them all of his money and clothes, moving out of the comfortable home he was living in and into a run-down abandoned miner\u2019s hut, trying to live like them and care for them as Jesus would have, and yet it had come to nothing\u2014no one was saved. The break from his brother was only the last deepening of an isolation that had been growing for years. Vincent was wrestling, at base, with who he was; he was struggling to understand the dissonant elements of himself, the religious man and the artist, and the ways they might combine. He was frightened of the spiritual void he might confront if he gave up his religious life, yet he had known no other life. The deep silence of those ten months over the winter of 1879\u2014more than any outside accounts of him or what he would later write of the time\u2014speaks to the profound struggle of this, the most significant period of transition in his life.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6058\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]
<\/a> Vincent van Gogh, Miners\u2019 Wives Carrying Sacks of Coal,<\/cite> 1882. Watercolour on paper. 32 x 50 cm. Kr\u00f6ller-M\u00fcller Museum, Otterlo. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nIn mining country, van Gogh followed Christian teaching literally to the letter\u2014to the dismay of his father and other pastors on the missionary committee\u2014behaving, truly, as if he were Jesus Christ, sacrificing all he had. But in the end, after he had given away everything and was sleeping on the floor of his abandoned hut, feverish and delirious, barely preaching anymore, the townspeople began, as people would for the rest of his life, to think him mad. Enormous explosions rocked the mines and he had nothing to give the people to help, but still he ran from hut to hut, tearing up his remaining clothes to use for bandages. Then Theo came to visit and berated him, completing his isolation and despair.<\/blockquote>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6059\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]<\/a> Jules Breton, The Weeders,<\/cite> 1860. Oil on canvas. 94 cm x 169 cm. Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\nAt some point during the winter after Theo\u2019s visit Vincent walked some seventy kilometers from the Borinage to Courrieres, a town just across the French border; his aim was to see the painter Jules Breton, whom he admired, and whom he had heard had recently moved there. As he wrote months later, \u201cI had undertaken the trip to find some kind of work \u2026 I would have accepted anything. But after all, perhaps I went involuntarily, I can\u2019t exactly say why.\u201d The trip seems to have been an artistic pilgrimage, a way of breaking free from the darkness of the mines and the religious life that held him there. He was reaching, however unconsciously, for something concrete to hold onto\u2014confirmation, perhaps, of the dawning of his call to art. Prior to this time, Vincent had never thought of himself as an artist \u2013 he was always involved with art and artists, but always as an admirer rather than a creator. In the Borinage, he began to draw more earnestly, and it was after his time there that he began his study to become the artist we know.\r\n\r\nIt took him a week to get to Courrieres, where Breton lived. Vincent walked through freezing rain and slept in haystacks and woodpiles, waking up each morning in frost. But when he finally got to Breton\u2019s house, he could not get himself to enter. \u201cThe outside of the studio was rather disappointing,\u201d he wrote later: \u201cit [had] \u2026 an inhospitable, chilly and irritating aspect \u2026 But what shall I say of the interior? I was not able to catch a glimpse, for I lacked the courage to enter and introduce myself.\u201d He walked around the town, searching for some trace of Breton or his work, but found nothing concrete. He had no more money and nothing else to do, so he turned around and walked back.\r\n\r\nDespite the seeming failure of his pilgrimage, the journey served the purpose Vincent originally hoped that it would. As he wrote to Theo,\r\n\u201cThough this trip was almost too much for me and I came back overcome with fatigue, with sore feet, and quite melancholy, I do not regret it, for \u2026 one learns to take a different but correct view of the hardships of real misery \u2026 Well, even in that deep misery I felt my energy revive, and I said to myself, in spite of everything I shall rise again: I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken in my great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing. From that moment everything has seemed transformed for me; and now I have started and my pencil has become somewhat docile, becoming more so every day.\u201d<\/blockquote>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6060\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]
<\/a> Letter from Vincent Van Gogh to his brother Th\u00e9o, 1881. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nIn taking up that pencil, Van Gogh did not turn away from the labourers he\u2019d worked among. \u201cI should be happy if someday I could draw them,\u201d he wrote, \u201cso that these unknown types would be brought before the eyes of the people.\u201d Realizing that art could be the conduit to express his passion for religion, the underdog, and beauty cemented his commitment to creative expression.By the fall of 1880, Van Gogh had broken the silence with Th\u00e9o, seeking his brother's understanding of the paralyzing effects of his mood disorders. The analogy he employs is revelatory:\r\nA caged bird in spring knows quite well that he might serve some end; he is well aware that there is something for him to do\u2026What is it? He does not quite remember. Then some vague ideas occur to him, and he says to himself, \u201cThe others build their nests and lay their eggs and bring up their little ones\u201d; and he knocks his head against the bars of the cage. But the cage remains, and the bird is maddened by anguish.\r\n\u201cLook at that lazy animal,\u201d says another bird in passing, \u201che seems to be living at ease.\u201d Yes, the prisoner lives, he does not die; there are no outward signs of what passes within him\u2014his health is good, he is more or less gay when the sun shines. But then the season of migration comes, and attacks of melancholia\u2014\"But he has everything he wants,\u201d say the children that tend him in his cage. He looks through the bars at the overcast sky when a thunderstorm is gathering, and inwardly he rebels against his fate. \u201cI am caged, I am caged, and you tell me that I do not want anything, fools! You think I have everything I need! Oh! I beseech you liberty, that I may be a bird like other birds!\u201d A certain idle man resembles this idle bird.<\/blockquote>\r\n
8.8\r\n| Van Gogh's Empathic Eye<\/h1>\r\n
<\/a> Vincent van Gogh, Sorrow, <\/cite>ca. 1882. Black chalk on paper. 44.5 x 27 cm. New Art Gallery, Walsall. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6062\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]<\/a> Anton Mauve, A Dutch Road,<\/cite> ca. 1880. Oil on canvas. 50.5 cm x 36.8 cm. Toledo Museum of Art. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nVan Gogh would only end up spending three weeks with Mauve who could not tolerate his erratic behaviour. But he gave Van Gogh money to rent and furnish his own studio. Van Gogh was appreciative of Mauve\u2019s short tutelage and mentioned him in 152 letters. Vincent\u2019s determination to marry Sien and support her daughter and unborn child scandalized his family. Out of concern for his mental health, his father sought to commit him to an asylum.\r\n\r\nVan Gogh's evocative, empathic depictions of Sien are portraits of a woman driven to the brink. He described his relationship with her in a letter to Th\u00e9o in 1882: \"I never had such a good assistant as this ugly, faded woman. In my eyes she is beautiful, and I find in her exactly what I want; her life has been rough, and sorrow and adversity have put their marks upon her-now I can do something with her.\" When he left her the following year, at Th\u00e9o's urging, Van Gogh abandoned the only domestic relationship of his lifetime.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6063\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]<\/a> Vincent van Gogh, Weaver, <\/cite>1884. Oil on canvas. 62.5 x 84.4 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nFrom late 1883 to 1886, Van Gogh lived in Nuenen, a village in the rural Dutch province of North Brabant, where his father had a parsonage and then Antwerp. Carol Zemel has described that despite his unhappiness, he was idealistic about country life. \"I for my part,\" he wrote, \"often prefer to be with people who do not even know the world, for instance, the peasants, the weavers, etc., rather than being with those of the more civilized world. It's lucky for me.\" (\"The 'Spook' in the Machine: Van Gogh's Pictures of Weavers in Brabant\" (Art Bulletin<\/em> 67 no. 1 (March 1985): 123-137).\r\n\r\nHe was fascinated by the weavers who worked from their homes and produced numerous paintings and drawings of them between January and July 1884.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6064\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]<\/a> Vincent van Gogh, Weaver at the Loom, <\/cite> 1884. Oil on canvas. 70 x 85 cm. Kr\u00f6ller-M\u00fcller Museum, Otterlo. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nVan Gogh's empathic nature and his compassion are evident in these works which capture the weavers' grim, mind-dulling work. But his approach to his subject is also unexpected. Rather than focusing on the weavers portrayed, his scenes are stripped of extraneous and personal detail, fusing worker and work instrument into one.\r\n\r\nZemel writes:\r\nIn December, 1883, after two difficult years in The Hague and three lonely months in provincial Drenthe, Vincent van Gogh returned to his father's parsonage in Nuenen, a village in the rural Dutch province of North Brabant. Despite his own unhappiness, he was idealistic about country life. \"I for my part,\" he wrote his brother Theo a month after he arrived, \"often prefer to be with people who do not even know the world, for instance, the peasants, the weavers, etc., rather than being with those of the more civilized world. It's lucky for me.\" Almost immediately, Van Gogh began to depict the local weavers at their looms, producing approximately thirty drawings, watercolors, and oil paintings of them between January and July, 1884.\u201d<\/blockquote>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6065\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]
<\/a> Vincent van Gogh, Weaver at the Loom, <\/cite>1884. Oil on canvas. 70 x 85 cm. Kr\u00f6ller-M\u00fcller Museum, Otterlo. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\nIn The Weaver: The Whole Loom, Facing Front<\/em>, a painting dated May, 1884, the loom and weaver are the single important form. Firmly focused on work or the instruments of labor, and lacking anecdote or extraneous detail, pictures like these and others in the series are virtually emblems of an archetypal, artisanal trade. So Van Gogh initiated his homage to Brabant workers and artisans. But for the modern viewer, at least, these images can also invite less celebratory and even disquieting readings. For rather than the weaver and his skills, it is the loom and its structure that dominate these images, and the weaver is reduced, it seems, to a mere accessory of the monumental machine.\r\n\r\nWhen they were first exhibited in Rotterdam in 1903 and 1904, critic Albert Plasschaert admired the sense of \"communication between the object and the encaged man working in it\"; and N. H. Wolf was moved by the representation of \"unremitting activity\" and \"the tragedy of labor which man has in common the beast.\"\u2026 Half a century later in 1953, Carl Nordenfalk wrote: \"Van Gogh presents the weaver as a victim held fast in the spiked jaws of the loom, or a captive in a medieval instrument of torture. The social significance is quite unmistakable. Still, this is one possible explanation: the paintings also possess a tender, intimate atmosphere.\" Nordenfalk notes the pictures' \"unmistakable social significance,\" but he scarcely explains this interpretation and leaves it unrelated to the specific conditions of Van Gogh's time, place, or experience\u2026 [T]hey nevertheless set historical factors aside, and they do not explore the pictures' unusual and ungainly features - the remote, impassive figures, the starkness of the designs, and their unexpected emphases.<\/blockquote>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6066\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]