A certain souvenir made in gratitude

Tuesday, March 30, 2021

A portrait of the postman Joseph Roulin by Vincent van Gogh (1888)

Today is Vincent van Gogh’s birthday.

On August 7, 1883, he wrote to his brother Theo that he felt an obligation, being given life, “to leave a certain souvenir in the form of drawings or paintings in gratitude.”

I love that. Art as a souvenir of our time here, made in gratitude.

Here is the whole passage:

It’s a matter of relative indifference to me whether I live a long or a short time. Moreover, I’m not competent to manage myself in physical matters the way a doctor can in this respect. So I carry on as one unknowing but who knows this one thing — ‘I must finish a particular work within a few years’ — I needn’t rush myself, for that does no good — but I must carry on working in calm and serenity, as regularly and concentratedly as possible, as succinctly as possible. I’m concerned with the world only in that I have a certain obligation and duty, as it were — because I’ve walked the earth for 30 years — to leave a certain souvenir in the form of drawings or paintings in gratitude. Not done to please some movement or other, but in which an honest human feeling is expressed. Thus this work is the goal…

(In Van Gogh: The Life, the authors mention that the artist was fond of that word, “souvenir,” and used it for many of his works. It’s worth remembering that the word comes from the Old French word meaning memory, or “to recall,” and the Latin word, subvenire, meaning “to come to mind.” )

And, because you know I’m newly obsessed with owls, here are two barn owl drawings he made in 1887: “Barn Owl Viewed from the Front” and “Barn Owl Viewed from the Side.”

The porridge eaters

Tuesday, December 17, 2019

I asked Jules (age 4) what we were doing in this drawing, and he said, “Eating porridge.” (Like The Three Bears, duh.) It was later pointed out to me that the drawing bore some resemblance to Vincent Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters.

(“The world keeps showing me these pictures.”)

Van Gogh’s collages of consolation

Tuesday, October 8, 2019

The wonderful online print collection of the Van Gogh Museum

Knowing next to nothing about Van Gogh before reading his biography, I am struck by what a great reader and collector of images he was, how pictures and words were married together for him. (He would’ve been a great cartoonist, I think.)

This passage From Naifeh & Smith’s Van Gogh: The Life describes the process of collecting and collage at work, how images and words are combined and transformed in the artist’s mind:

The consoling images that Vincent took from literature and art underwent a similar transformation as he reimagined them—simplified and intensified them—in pursuit of his heart’s elusive comfort. He changed the names of poems and paintings. He disregarded dissonant characters and authorial views. Like the illustrated books of his childhood, he grafted words to images and images to words, insistently reshaping both to his narrative of reassurance. He paired pictures with poetry, sometimes transcribing lines from literature and scripture directly onto his prints to create collages of consolation. This process of layering words and images so gratified his manic imagination and his search for comfort that it would become his principal way of seeing and coping with the world.

Collage is something he learned as a child:

Under their mother’s tutelage, all the Van Gogh children mastered the parlor arts of collage, sketching, and painting, in order to decorate and personalize the gifts and notes they relentlessly exchanged. A simple box might come adorned with a bouquet of painted flowers; a transcribed poem, with a cutout wreath. They illustrated favorite stories, marrying words to images in the manner of the emblem books widely used to teach children moral lessons.

Related: glue one thing to another

The way we talk about influence is backwards

Friday, February 2, 2018

“You’ve got to realize that influence is not influence. It’s simply someone’s idea going through my new mind.”
—Jean-Michel Basquiat

I have always liked this quote because it insists that much of what we call “influence” is active, not passive. The way we talk about artistic influence is backwards. When we say, “Basquiat was influenced by Van Gogh,” that isn’t really correct, because it implies that Van Gogh is doing something to Basquiat, when actually the opposite is true.

Here is an explanation in literary terms from K.K. Ruthven’s Critical Assumptions:

Our understanding of literary ‘influence’ is obstructed by the grammar of our language, which puts things back to front in obliging us to speak in passive terms of the one who is the active partner in the relationship: to say that Keats influenced Wilde is not only to credit Keats with an activity of which he was innocent, but also to misrepresent Wilde by suggesting he merely submitted to something he obviously went out of his way to acquire. In matters of influence, it is the receptor who takes the initiative, not the emitter. When we say that Keats had a strong influence on Wilde, what we really mean is that Wilde was an assiduous reader of Keats, an inquisitive reader in the service of an acquisitive writer.

And here’s art historian Michael Baxandall, in Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures, lamenting that “influence” is a kind of catch-all that leads to an impoverished way of talking about art:

‘Influence’ is a curse of art criticism primarily because of its wrong-headed grammatical prejudice about who is the agent and who the patient: it seems to reverse the active/passive relation relation which the historical actor experiences and the inferential beholder will wish to take into account. If one says that X influenced Y it does seem that one is saying that X did something to Y rather than that Y did something to X. But in the consideration of good pictures and painters the second is always the more lively reality…. If we think of Y rather than X as the agent, the vocabulary is much richer and more attractively diversified: draw on, resort to, avail oneself of, appropriate from, have recourse to, adapt, misunderstand, refer to, pick up, take on, engage with, react to, quote, differentiate oneself from, assimilate oneself to, assimilate, align oneself with, copy, address, paraphrase, absorb, make a variation on, revive, continue, remodel, ape, emulate, travesty, parody, extract from, distort, attend to, resist, simplify, reconstitute, elaborate on, develop, face up to, master, subvert, perpetuate, reduce, promote, respond to, transform tackle… — everyone will be able to think of others. Most of these relations just cannot be stated the other way round — in terms of X acting on Y rather than Y acting on X. To think in terms of influence blunts thought by impoverishing the means of differentiation.

Again, Van Gogh isn’t working on Basquiat, Basquiat is working on Van Gogh. This is a crucial distinction, and you won’t do any good thinking about artistic thievery without it.

PS. Basquiat above is quoted by art historian Robert Farris Thompson, author of Flash of the Spirit, in the documentary Jean-Michel Basquiat: Radiant Child. (The screenshots are from the doc, too.)

PPS. Special thanks to Edward Tufte for the Baxandall passage.