Van Gogh Self-Portraits: Cortauld Gallery

Handful of artists have painted on their own as many moments as Van Gogh did. Was he a narcissist who cherished his personal graphic? Did his state of brain compel him? Or was he only his possess greatest model?

By bringing 16 of these portraits together for the 1st time, Van Gogh Self-Portraits at The Courtauld offers some solutions. “Van Gogh’s self-portraits are the lens by way of which we view him and challenge tips onto him—ideas about genius, passion, wrestle, psychological health, sacrifice, resilience and motivation,” suggests Karen Serres, the exhibition’s curator and Curator of Paintings at The Courtauld. “More so than those of any other artist, Vincent van Gogh’s paintings, and primarily his self-portraits, are browse by way of the filter of his one of a kind and powerful biography.”

Says Franck Petitgas, Morgan Stanley’s Head of Worldwide, “This exhibition showcases some of Van Gogh’s most breathtaking paintings designed in the course of a time when he was experimenting with new variations as perfectly as means of setting up his very own id and presenting himself to the outdoors entire world. The array of portraits, several of which are introduced alongside one another for the 1st time from major collections all over the world, make it possible for us to consider his remarkable lifetime, as well as his get the job done, and how the two are inextricably bound.” 

Van Gogh Self-Portraits, element of The Morgan Stanley Sequence, is the initially-at any time exhibition devoted to Van Gogh’s self-portraits. Alongside one another, the is effective permit us to trace the development of the artist’s signature fashion, which progressed in a comparatively small total of time. The exhibition consists of his earliest self-portrait, made in Paris in 1886, to 1 of the very last, painted at the asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in September 1889.

These functions authorized Van Gogh to test on numerous personas and attempt to depict an inside point out of head they also authorized him to take a look at new procedures devoid of relying on (or paying out for) models. When the subject of these paintings—with its eco-friendly eyes, crimson beard and ginger hair—is effortlessly determined by the general public, so is the arresting and exclusive type Van Gogh designed by way of these self-portraits.

When Van Gogh moved to Paris to reside with his brother Theo in 1886, he had been a painter for 6 decades but had not designed any self-portraits. All through his keep in the European capital of the avant-garde, he observed a lot of Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist paintings. Intrigued by the artists’ use of pure colour used to canvas in compact daubs, Van Gogh commenced dabbling with this design, applying himself as the model. Jettisoning the loaded, dim tones involved with Rembrandt and other seventeenth-century Dutch portraitists, Van Gogh also started incorporating brighter shades into his individual work. He produced sufficient use of reds and greens—conveniently his individual coloring—as nicely as blues and oranges, implementing these complementary colors next to just about every other to develop dynamic backgrounds. In a really small time, Van Gogh experienced lengthened his brushstrokes to produce a larger sense of electricity and vibrancy.

Two yrs and twenty-seven self-portraits later, Van Gogh moved from Paris to the sunny South of France, where he identified his creative voice: the distinctive shade palette and brushstrokes blended with the flattened place of his beloved Japanese woodblock prints. In January 1889, he painted the well known self-portrait in his studio in Arles just after the moment that outlined his life in the public’s imagination.

This self-portrait, states curator Karen Serres, “shows his boldness as a painter as properly as his resilience as a human staying.” Upon returning from a two-week keep in the hospital just after mutilating his ear and suffering a mental disaster, Van Gogh offered himself foremost as artist who had returned to function: a canvas on an easel is obvious in the track record. Alternatively than disregard the repercussion of his steps, he confronted it head on, displaying the massive bandage that protected his wound, which is held in place by a hefty, fur-lined cap. 

Through his two yrs in the South of France, Van Gogh painted a lot of landscapes but only eight self-portraits, 3 in the remaining yr of his existence. Van Gogh admitted himself to an asylum in a former monastery outside the house of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence and experienced quite a few mental well being crises. It was during a two-week period in the slide of 1898 that he manufactured these a few self-portraits the exhibition reunites two of these closing works, which had been previous witnessed jointly at the asylum in 1890.

Even though he had lately experienced a psychotic split, the next of the two paintings is carefully manufactured, relying on a darker, muddier palette. Van Gogh employed 5 various shades of blue in his painter’s smock, flesh tones and track record. His brushstrokes and shade decisions were being bold and assertive. As in before is effective, he presented himself as a robust and bodily wholesome artist, clasping a palette in a person hand and confidently holding the viewer’s gaze

Van Gogh would die by suicide a lot less than a year later on, at only thirty-seven many years of age. Despite the fact that he is normally remembered for his tortured existence, Van Gogh Self-Portraits reminds us that he was an ambitious and revolutionary artist who applied self-portraiture to hone his creative eyesight.