Van Gogh and Japan review – the painter as tortured apprentice

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
There is no doubting Van Gogh’s reverence for the Japanese masters such as Hiroshige, but his attempts to re-create their calm artistry surely added to his personal torment

Art history has gone global. Gone are the days when the likes of EH Gombrich and Kenneth Clark could tell the story of art as if it was exclusively European. The BBC’s new series Civilisations is merely following today’s museums and academics in insisting instead that western art is just one part of a world history in which the most dynamic forces are exchanges, influences and sometimes acts of daylight robbery linking one part of the world with another.

The artistic relationship between the European avant garde and Japan in the 19th century is one such cross-cultural flow. There’s plenty of evidence that the (mostly French) artists who laid the foundations of modernism were obsessed with the images of Hokusai, Hiroshige, Utagawa Kuniyoshi and other masters who took popular, brightly coloured woodblock printmaking to a zenith of sophistication in 18th and early 19th-century Japan. In Édouard Manet’s 1868 portrait of the radical novelist Émile Zola, a picture of a wrestler by Utagawa Kuniaki II is pinned up on his study. Manet’s associate Whistler brought the cult to Britain in paintings like Nocturne: Blue and Gold – Old Battersea Bridge that are manifestly inspired by Japanese prints.

Perhaps the most spectacular evidence of all can be seen at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Its unique collection of Vincent van Gogh’s art includes two direct copies of Hiroshige prints that he painted in 1887. One depicts the white flowers of plum trees against a scintillating pink sky, the other a curvy wooden bridge seen through driving rain that’s represented as sharp black lines against varying shades of atmospheric blue.

The intense passion and fervour with which Van Gogh copied Hiroshige leaves no doubt of his reverence for Japanese art. At the beginning of the Van Gogh Museum’s typically thorough, scholarly survey of how that enthusiasm helped shape his vision, these two paintings are hung beside Hiroshige’s originals, The Residence with Plum Trees and Sudden Evening Shower on the Great Bridge near Atake.

And this is where my doubts began.

Even when he is slavishly copying Japanese art, Van Gogh looks nothing like a Japanese artist. You’d have to stand very, very far back and squint to think his versions of Hiroshige resemble the originals – even though they duplicate their imagery. Every impulse of Van Gogh’s brush adds something of his own. A smooth, dark silhouette of trees by Hiroshige becomes, when repainted by Van Gogh, a raw, rough, blobby blue cloud whose every touch looks hard won and difficult. The black lines of rain that form a cool curtain across Hiroshige’s picture become, in Van Gogh’s vision of it, violent, sinister, oppressive slashes.

Van Gogh’s identification with Japanese artists was utterly sincere – what about the poor bastard wasn’t? – yet as doomed as an uptight western hippy reading eastern religious texts outside an Amsterdam cafe. One of the most tragic exhibits here is an 1888 self-portrait in which he tries to make himself look like a Japanese priest with shaven head. What comes through is not the spiritual calm he was aiming for but his desperate, troubled forehead and piercing eyes. They communicate the depth of his loneliness and agitation and desire to find a worthwhile place in the world.

His angst is exhibited in a formidable row of self-portraits that also includes Self-Portrait with a Bandaged Ear, painted in 1889 after he mutilated himself. Here the contrast between the graceful ideals Van Gogh saw in Japanese art and his own tortured reality is even more painful. On the wall behind him hangs a print of Mount Fuji by Sato Torakiyo. Yet the man staring at us from behind blue eyes is as far from the calm that landscape projects as can be. He is a harrowed modern saint, a Dostoyevskyan character on the edge of society and fighting to stay sane.

In a very curious way this exhibition reveals the essence of Van Gogh. It makes clear that his interest in Japanese art went beyond cold issues of aesthetics. Sure, he learnt from the way the woodblock artists framed their scenes in daring, proto-cinematic sweeps free from western convention. Beyond that, however, Van Gogh saw them as monk-like eastern visionaries whose art espoused a philosophy of Buddhist calm.

Compared with his paintings, the many woodblock prints here do indeed appear at one with nature, reconciled with life. There’s a fundamental contrast between their laid back composure and Van Gogh’s turbulence. This is most pitiable in the show’s last juxtaposition of west and east. The curators suggest that one of Van Gogh’s very last works, Rain at Auvers, painted shortly before his suicide in 1890 and lent by the National Museum of Wales, is actually his final interpretaion of the graphic way rain is shown in prints like Hiroshige’s Night Rain at Karasaki.

Well, perhaps – in the same way a drunken rendition of Mozart on a broken bar piano by a man at the end of his tether is still, technically, Mozart. Van Gogh’s last rain has nothing in common with Hiroshige’s or anyone else’s. Rain at Auvers is a terrifying postcard from the abyss. It is a landscape slashed, a world seen through bitter tears. This painting is practically a suicide note.

Yet I have to confess that by the time I got to this point I had long since stopped giving the Japanese prints much attention. The claim that Van Gogh was deeply influenced by Japanese art simply does not hold up. Did he need to see Hokusai to paint his lovelym all-embracing 1888 vista The Harvest, as the exhibition suggests? To me it looks much more like the epic panoramas painted by his Netherlandish predecessor Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Similarly, it seems odd that the curators trace his close-up drawings of insects and flowers to Japan’s influence when still life has been a Dutch specialism since the 17th century and plenty of homegrown models for his art can be found next door in the Rijksmuseum.

Worse, I stopped caring. Even if the fine works by Hiroshige and his peers that are shown here really were a key influence for Van Gogh, his art simply blasts them out of the gallery. Their precise, ironic panoramas just look flat and repetitive compared with the visionary splendour of his art. Vincent’s Bedroom glows and sways, rocks and rolls with intimacy and passion. No one had ever painted anything like this before, anywhere. Van Gogh’s art is self-expressive in a way inconceivable to Hokusai or, for that matter, Raphael.

An honest multicultural history of art has to acknowledge that the raw individualism of Van Gogh is as European as his unhappiness. That’s why so many people from everywhere on earth make the trek to this Amsterdam museum, to revere a modern soul without equal.

Contributor

Jonathan Jones

The GuardianTramp

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