Thinking about the Yellow House

Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art. Deborah Silverman. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000. Pp. ix + 494. $60.00.

Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South. Douglas W. Druick, Peter Kort Zegers, and Britt Salvesen. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2001. Pp. viii + 418. $65.00.

For nine weeks in the fall and winter of 1888, Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh lived and worked side by side in the French Provençal town of Arles. The culmination of this episode has become a central event in the mythic history of the modern artist: van Gogh's violent confrontation with Gauguin, and his subsequent self-mutilation and voluntary internment in a local asylum. Of all the world's events in the winter of 1888, perhaps none is better known. What is less well known is how this heady and mutually exhausting artistic cohabitation affected the output of both painters during and after their time together. Two recent and substantial studies address just this question: Debora Silverman's Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art, and Douglas Druick, Peter Kort Zegers, and Britt Salvesen's Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South, published in conjunction with an exhibit of the same name at the Art Institute of Chicago. Both texts presume the importance of the collaboration, but understand it in quite different ways. The former sets out to question modernism as a secular movement in the arts, while the latter makes a more conventional case for mutual influence, assuming the participation of the artists in a general movement of late nineteenth-century European painting towards greater subjective expression.

The collaboration, as presented in Studio of the South, is as significant as the works of either artist taken individually, and is therefore made the occasion for a comprehensive overview of the evolution of both artists' styles. The authors are committed to the idea that van Gogh and Gauguin influenced each other, though less in terms of iconographic borrowing or technical imitation than as a result of their mutual enactment of a presumably common commitment to subjective liberation in painting. In this view, the intensity, skill, and passion of each spurred the other to pursue his self-development more completely. Ultimately, however, the encyclopedic survey of biographic detail, for which the collaboration provides the occasion, overwhelms its conceptual anchor in the brief nine-week period in Arles. So much is considered, it is difficult to discern just why Arles should be positioned as a watershed event in the development of each artist.

Though museums such as the Art Institute hardly need justification for producing blockbuster shows, Studio of the South is exceptional in its scholarly ambition. Capitalizing on curatorial labor, it has supplemented the physical exhibition with what is clearly intended to be a landmark scholarly synthesis. Rather than pursuing the demythologization of van Gogh and Gauguin as artist-heroes, as does Silverman, the Art Institute has taken up an exhaustive forensic positivism that favorably highlights the capabilities of a well-financed and fully staffed museum. Studio of the South is a massive text, the synthesis of a collaboration that includes laboratory testing of canvas treatment, the creation of a lexical database for the van Gogh correspondence, and an exhaustive tracking of the various experiences and impressions that might have served as raw materials for the paintings. Like the text accompanying the Art Institute's previous French show, Beyond the Easel, it is much more of an academic monograph than a museum catalogue. ¹ In all of this, it is hard not to read the enterprise as an attempted refounding of the art museum as an academic, art-historical laboratory, in lieu of its former role as the bellwether of taste and high culture during the heyday of the avant-garde.

Given the adoption of a more academic format, it is surprising that the Art Institute's project reiterates the popular narrative used to interpret van Gogh...