Van Gogh’s Ghost Paintings: Art and Spirit in Gethsemane

VAN GOGH’S Ghost Paintings

Art and Spirit in Gethsemane

CLIFF EDWARDS

VAN GOGH’S GHOST PAINTINGS

Art and Spirit in Gethsemane

Copyright © 2015 Cliff Edwards. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Cascade Books

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

isbn 13: 978-1-4982-0307-4

eisbn 13: 978-1-4982-0308-1

Cataloging-in-Publication data:

Edwards, Cliff, 1932–

Van Gogh’s ghost paintings : art and spirit in Gethsemane / Cliff Edwards.

xii + 122 p. ; 23 cm. —Includes bibliographical references and index(es).

isbn 13: 978-1-4982-0307-4

1. Gogh, Vincent van, 1853–1890—Religion. 2. Gogh, Vincent van, 1853–1890—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.

ND653 G7 E337 2015

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

Scripture quotations are from The Old and the New Testaments of the Holy Bible: Revised Standard Version. Nashville, Thomas Nelson, 1971.

Quotations from Vincent van Gogh’s letters appear by permission from Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters: The Complete Illustrated and Annotated Edition. Edited by Leon Jansen, Hans Luitjen and Nienke Bakker. Six Volumes. London: Thames and Hudson, in association with the Van Gogh Museum and the Huygens Institute, 2009.

Permission to reproduce photographs of letters and art works was procured from Vincent van Gogh Foundation/National Museum Vincent van Gogh, Amsterdam, and The Anderson Gallery, School of the Arts, Virginia Commonwealth University. Henry Hibbs Collection, 74.14.5

Dedication

I am delighted to dedicate this book to my father-in-law, Professor Fernand Lucien Marty, Professor Emeritus of French at the University of Illinois, whose passion for French literature and linguistics at several colleges and universities has inspired friends, family, and students for many decades. His early work on language learning labs in the 1940s and 50s, computer-assisted language learning in the 1960s and 70s and automatic text-to- speech systems in the 1980s and 90s broke boundaries and established new benchmarks for excellence across numerous disciplines. In all this work, Professor Marty created a long list of books, monographs, and articles that continue to guide and enrich others. More recently, Professor Marty returned his attention to French literature, with a particular focus on the writings of Emile Zola, including an expert critique of Vincent van Gogh’s reading and comments on several of Zola’s works. Our conversations on French culture and the arts go back many years. Almost thirty years ago Professor Marty helped me get access to French periodical sources important to my earliest book on Van Gogh, and he has since then kept me up on his research that bears on the life and work of Vincent Van Gogh in their cultural context. To Professor Marty’s long list of books, monographs, and articles on the teaching of French and pioneer work with computers, he has now added a Van Gogh connection that has enriched many, and certainly stimulated me. Few scholars have continued active research and publishing into their tenth decade of life, and fewer still whose work continues to inform new understandings of the world around us. Professor Marty is one of those rare individuals. It is my personal honor to know him as his friend, colleague, and son-in-law. His continuing intellectual curiosity, his work ethic, and his practical wisdom all continue to inspire me, as they have so many others.

Foreword

To write a book on two paintings we have never seen is an accomplishment. For Cliff Edwards, the absence of the paintings is a kind of presence—revelatory at that. With Van Gogh’s Ghost Paintings, which can be read as mystery narrative and detective adventure, Edwards adds a fourth work to his previous three on the artist: a Vincent van Gogh quartet. Here again we meet Vincent van Gogh as an artist in paint who is also a painter in words: Let us work with our heart and love what we love. Vincent did. So does Cliff Edwards. Edwards suggests that Vincent is doing in paint what Christ himself was doing in words. Vincent was painting parables. Consider this: we shouldn’t judge the Good Lord by this world, because it’s one of his studies that turned out badly. On a simple journey by train, which he compares to the journey of life, Vincent writes, you go fast, but you can’t distinguish any object very close up, and above all, you can’t see the locomotive (Letter 656). If we cannot see the locomotive pulling the artist’s train, we can certainly feel that it is there and that this is a train worth riding. The text is punctuated and animated by questions, questions inviting us to climb aboard this train and join Edwards in his adventure and engagement with the life and death of Vincent van Gogh. Personal and geographical passages are welcoming as Edwards takes us with him to a monastery in Kyoto, Japan, where the quest begins. The Japanese and Zen connections are important: a concern of the text is the recognition that there are symbols that reach across all cultural divides. We travel to Amsterdam, Otterlo, Paris, Arles, Montmajour, Auver-sur-Oise. Edwards’s love and dedication show. He writes of the antitheses that pulled Vincent’s religious consciousness and artistic adventure taut. So we may be pulled taut in an appreciation of the emptiness and of the beauty of Vincent’s Gethsemane, of how the erasure of Gethsemane is the actualization of Gethsemane. We arrive at insight into the relation of religion and art—of how religious art is a way of seeing rather than a what is seen . . .

David Cain

Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Religion

University of Mary Washington

Acknowledgments

This book makes full use of the six volumes of Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters edited by Leon Jansen, Hans Luitjen, and Nienke Bakker, and published by Thames and Hudson in association with the Van Gogh Museum and the Huygens Institute in 2009. I have purposely used the new numbering system for Van Gogh’s correspondence introduced by this new resource. I have also taken all quotations from Van Gogh’s correspondence from this same source. Periods and spaces, capitalization and bold type in the English text are the translators’ attempts to indicate features of Van Gogh’s own handwriting in the original letters. Only ellipses composed of three periods with one space before and after each are my own addition to the quotations, indicating omissions I have made for purposes of focus and space.

I have used this new six volume resource and its electronic version on purpose so that every reader can explore the letters and related art. The source is also available on the internet by simply typing vangoghletters.org in a web browser. One can then click on any piece of Van Gogh correspondence available and see it in English, the original Dutch, or French, or view a facsimile of the handwritten letter itself. If one clicks on art work, one can view every art work available that is mentioned in each letter, in color when available. Clicking on notes gives one observations by the experts. I am deeply grateful for this new work, and believe it will add an important dimension to my book and will open doors to your own exploration of Van Gogh’s life and art. An index at the end of my book will allow you to find and view many key works of art mentioned by Van Gogh and in my own discussions.

My personal gratitude to those who have provided the space and help for my research is so extensive that I must be satisfied with just a few brief references. Family and friends have provided the rich community in which I live and do my work, and deserve my deepest thanks. Colleagues at Virginia Commonwealth University in the religious studies program, the School of World Studies, The College of Humanities and Sciences, and the Anderson Gallery have given major inspiration and support. The staff of the Cabell Library has been a great help, and its staff in the Special Collections and Archives unit has given me a wonderful space for working with the Van Gogh volumes, as well as creative support and advice. Albertien Lykles-Livius in the Rights and Reproductions department of the Van Gogh Museum has been a wonderful help in arranging for the use of most of the images in this book. My current Commonwealth Society Class sponsored by the VCU School of the Arts has been a great inspiration. A special thanks is due, as in all my Van Gogh books, to Marcia Powell. Over thirty years ago Mrs. Powell, a teacher of French language and culture residing in Richmond, Virginia, translated every line of every letter of Van Gogh as a resource for our discussions of Van Gogh’s paintings. That translation and those discussions have played a key role in my understanding of Van Gogh. Marcia Powell later gathered support to establish the Powell-Edwards Fund in Religion and the Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University, bringing major lecturers on the arts and conferences on religion and the arts to our campus. I am deeply grateful for her interest and labor. Chelsea Wilkinson, in the midst of preparing for graduate work in art therapy, has taken time to coach me in computer skills needed to get this text in order, and of course my editor, Dr. Chris Spinks, and the entire enterprise at Cascade Books have worked with me thoughtfully and with great expertise. I hope that it is clear to the reader that my gratitude to a great cloud of witnesses has shaped this book from beginning to end. What is best in it is to their credit, but I claim any and all its faults.

1

Locating the Ghost Paintings

Imagine that one of the most significant and revealing paintings by the world-famous artist Vincent van Gogh was never seen by anyone but the artist himself. Imagine that it was so important to the artist that he painted it twice, but he was so conflicted about it that he destroyed it twice. Those imaginings are reality. I call those paintings Van Gogh’s ghost paintings.

Vincent, as the artist preferred to be called, composed those two paintings during his most creative year as an artist. It was 1888, the same year he painted his Sunflowers, The Yellow House, The Bedroom, numerous blossoming orchards and fields of wheat, flower gardens and harvest scenes, fishing boats on the Mediterranean, and portraits of peasants, housewives, a postal worker, and children.

What is especially puzzling about Vincent creating and destroying his ghost paintings is that never before had he ever composed such a painting, and never again would he attempt such a painting. Those two destroyed paintings were unique among all his works. The closest he would come to those paintings was a copy of a work by Delacroix, but that was a copy, and that was not the subject he would choose for his own work.

I believe the two unique paintings Vincent created and destroyed are at least as important to understanding the artist and his work as are the two thousand or more paintings and drawings that do exist. I believe devoting attention to the ghost paintings will reveal an illuminating new dimension of Vincent’s struggle to discover the spiritual dimension of art for the culture of his day and ours. I believe that hidden in those paintings and their story is Vincent’s final word on the art of life.

For me, the ghost paintings are much like Edgar Allan Poe’s Purloined Letter, hidden in such plain sight that their very existence, brief though it might have been, has remained largely invisible to us. My guess is that you have never heard of them, and I know you have never seen them. Yet I am convinced those two works did much to determine the course of Vincent’s art for the last two years of his brief life as artist. In those two paintings he struggled with the meaning and direction of his intended contribution as an artist. The struggle and provisional solution arrived at by Vincent as revealed in those two works and their destruction played a critical role in the future direction of art, and contributed to the future relationship of religion and spirituality to the arts.

Let us go to the hiding place of those paintings and allow the artist himself to tell us their secret. On Sunday, July 8 or Monday, July 9 of 1888, worn out by a day of painting outside the city of Arles in Provence, just thirty miles from the Mediterranean, Vincent likely sat at a table in the Café de la Gare, on the ground floor of the Ginoux