I-Spy van Gogh (and a Rodin)

When I was young, I collected train numbers, bus numbers, and also filled in I-Spy books. Each I-Spy book covered a particular topic such as vehicles, aeroplanes, birds, insects and so on. Each would include information about a particular car, animal etc, and space to record where you first saw it. The book awarded marks for each first sighting, graded according to rarity. I Spy books still exist, glossier than they were in the past, but still small enough to fit into a boy’s pocket.

I-Spy books are for collectors, but collectors of memories rather than objects. The dominant drive is the same in both cases: the desire to accumulate for its own sake. However, the I-Spy motive is the most innocent form of accumulation. The accumulation of memories does not usually destroy what is being accumulated, or deny others its pleasures. Collectors of memories do not steal or hoard great works of art, but view them in galleries and tick them off the their mental list.

I suspect that the I-Spy motive drives a substantial proportion of those that visit art galleries and museums. There are of course other reasons for seeing great works of art - to be inspired, to look with awe at a work completed with great skill, or to understand the mind of the artist. However, these more aesthetic objectives are hard to achieve when visiting the major art galleries. This is because crowds gather round the most familiar paintings because they are famous, because they wish to tick them off in their mental I-Spy book of great paintings.

I found this to be true last month in the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The museum was packed, with people gathering around the most well-known pictures. Van Gogh was a particularly obliging artist for collectors because he often painted multiple pictures of the same subject - nine different pictures of sunflowers in a vase, now all spaced round the world in different collections. How many people would appreciate these paintings if they were not in all the art books, and sold for vast sums to museums? Some of the early paintings by van Gogh certainly struck me as dismal efforts.

The potato eaters is a grotesque cartoon of peasant life. The peasants were painted as ugly semi-animal figures with outsize hands and noses. This was supposedly a work in honour of manual labour, but it is degrading. I suspect that the peasants who were models for the picture would have preferred to be seen in their Sunday best, to have their dreams and hopes respected.

A pair of pictures elsewhere in the museum also the limitations of van Gogh’s early works. His view of Paris seemed to me to be an uninspired technical exercise, flat and conveying nothing of the city and its life.

Next to it in the gallery was Bonnard’s view of Montmartre which, like van Gogh’s picture, was painted from the window of a flat. Bonnard’s picture sparkles with city lights in the rain, evoking the excitement of a great city at night. But Bonnard is not as famous as van Gogh, so the I-Spy crowds did not gather around this wonderful picture.

Van Gogh’s later work is of course far more attractive and commercially successful (although sadly only after the artist’s early death). His series of paintings of iris flowers are utterly beautiful and, like many people,  I have a reproductions of one of these on my living room wall. But I was affected much more by the sole sculpture in the Museum by Rodin, of one of the Six Burghers of Calais. This showed the anguish of the senior men of the City, who had agreed to surrender their lives to the besieging English army in exchange for it agreeing not to massacre the inhabitants when the City surrendered. The English king ordered that they walk out of the City gates dressed in rags, wearing nooses around their necks, and carrying the keys to the city and its castle. Rodin’s sculpture portrays the anguish of the starving magistrate, his teeth grit in determination and sacrifice, as he stumbles to surrender and death. These emotions burn our hearts when we think of the lives of our forefathers in Europe who lived through the first half of the 20th Century - the century of genocide and mass murder, the century from hell.

Much more comforting to turn aside and look at sunflowers.