Welcome! My name is Christopher Riopelle. I am the Curator of Post-1800 paintings
here at the National Gallery in London and it is my pleasure to inaugurate
an extraordinary Facebook Live experiment which, over the next hour or so,
will take us, literally, around the world to look at five of the most famous paintings
in the world. They are all by the same artist, Vincent van Gogh, and they are
all of the same subject: his great 'Sunflowers' paintings.
You see the London painting behind me.
These paintings have an extraordinary appeal to the public: people come
to our museum and to the five museums around the world where you can see
versions of the 'Sunflowers', in their tens of thousands to look at these works.
After I tell you a bit about the London painting, we will then travel to those
other five cities, five museums, in five countries.
They are the home of Van Gogh's studies; the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, Holland;
then the Neue Pinakothek in Munich, Germany; on to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in
the United States; and we will end at the Seiji Togo Memorial Sompo
Japan Nipponkoa Museum of Art in Tokyo.
Each one of these museums has a 'Sunflowers'; they are all subtly different, one from the other
and together they tell a remarkable story.
Three years ago, in 2014, we, here in London, had the opportunity to bring
together two versions of the 'Sunflowers': our own with the painting in the Van Gogh
Museum in Amsterdam. We saw then how popular they were with the general public,
how hungry people were to learn about the paintings and the extraordinary
story surrounding them. We thought "wouldn't it be remarkable
to bring all five pictures together?" But very quickly realised
that that would be impossible. Some are very fragile, all of them
indeed are, fragile, the distances are great, and museums would be loathe
to give up these pictures, even briefly, so popular are they with their public.
So, we thought that this might be a good alternative to us travel around the
world to see them and that is what we will do.
We're looking, here, at the London version which was painted in
the summer of 1888, probably in August of that year.
Vincent van Gogh, the Dutch artist, had, a few months earlier, come down
to Arles in the south of France in Provence. There, he wanted to
set up what he called 'The Studio of the South', to paint
in the brilliant light of the south of France and he wanted to
attract other artists to come and join him there and together
to paint in a new way in the brilliant sunshine.
Most important, he wanted to bring his friend, Paul Gauguin, down
to attract him to come and paint with him and this seems to have been
the origin of the five pictures we will be looking at today.
He began by painting two versions, probably our version and the painting
now in Munich, to decorate the bedroom of Paul Gauguin, that Gauguin would use
when he arrived in Arles. The paintings would be waiting there as a kind of
welcome for him. They would also be a symbol of Vincent's own relationship
to Gauguin. He told him that he would follow Gauguin's direction in inventing
a new style of painting and what better symbol of that, following the leader,
than the sunflower which follows the path of the sun across the sky?
And so, he began to paint these works as he waited for Gauguin to arrive.
A bit later, my colleague at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam,
Axel Rüger, will tell us something about the differences among these paintings.
But when Gauguin finally arrived, and finally saw, these pictures including
the London picture, he realised right away, it seems to us, that
here Vincent, the sometimes difficult Dutchman, the endlessly enthusiastic Dutchman
had found his great topic: huge vases spilling over with these flowers of
the south, and he had also found a new way to paint them;
in the case of the London picture, with all kinds of yellows dancing
across the canvas with only very few touches of other colour.
For example, he signs the vase, in which the sunflowers stand,
with 'Vincent' in bright blue, standing in very strong contrast to the
yellow of the flowers. You will see that, in the two versions in
Munich and in Philadelphia, he has painted the background pale blue as well.
So he is always making changes as he goes through but as Gauguin recognised,
and as others would come to recognise, this symbol of life, of sunshine,
of brilliant colour, would come to represent the zenith of Van Gogh's
creativity at this moment in his life of huge creativity.
Now the experiment with Gauguin did not end well. They worked
together for several months in the autumn of 1888.
It was not entirely successful because they found that their
approach to art was not the same; Gauguin veering more towards abstraction,
the simplification of form, Van Gogh always wanting to stick with the motif
in front of him and to capture life exactly as it was.
At Christmas of 1888, they broke. They had a feud. Gauguin stomped
off. Van Gogh had, what we would call, a nervous breakdown, cut off
part of his ear, was admitted to hospital. Early in 1889, however,
having recovered, he began to paint this motif again,
not least because Gauguin, now back in Paris, realised
that this was his friend's great theme and asked him to paint a version
to send to him that he would keep as a memorial of his work and the painting
we will be looking at in Amsterdam, almost certainly, was one of those replicas
now done early in 1889.
The five paintings done in these two sessions of high creativity are,
as I say, all closely related, one to the other, but in each case
Vincent is slightly rethinking what he is doing; changing the number of
blooms in the vase, in some cases; showing the flowers in different states
of preservation - some are more faded than others, some are in their full richness
of their bloom – but Gauguin's realisation that this was Van Gogh's great subject
began to spread after the death of Van Gogh. At his death he was virtually unknown
but remarkably quickly his fame began to spread across Europe and then in America
and then around the world and it is, of course, very interesting how the London picture
came to the National Gallery. It came in the early 1920s when the Gallery received
money from the great industrialist, Samuel Courtauld, to buy modern pictures
for the nation. Right away, there was a decision made that Van Gogh had to be
included in any collection of modern paintings. So, literally, in
less than 30 years that he was central to modern art, was already an established
truism. At first, the Courtauld Fund and the Trustees of the National Gallery
acquired one of Vincent's great portraits: that of the postmaster, Roulin. Done at
the same time as the 'Sunflowers', an incredibly vivid picture which is now
in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. But after a few months, the Trustees
of the National Gallery returned to the family of Vincent van Gogh, from whom
they had bought the picture to say "No, no we're the National Gallery.
For us, we have to have one of his most important works. We have to have
a 'Sunflowers'" and so the great portrait of the postmaster, Roulin,
was returned and this 'Sunflowers' came instead. If only we had kept
both of them, it would have been wonderful! But this is very important
in telling us that already by the early 1920s, the fame of the 'Sunflowers'
had spread around the world and even in London, which was always rather
resistant to modern art - it was a struggle to get modern paintings into this
collection in some cases - already the Trustees were convinced that the highest
statement of Van Gogh's art lay in these pictures of sunflowers in their vase
and that if we were to have a Van Gogh, this was what we must have.
It came; then, over the years, happily, we have been able to assemble a larger
collection of that, with some marvellous pictures from every
stage of his relatively brief career but it is, and remains always, the
'Sunflowers' at the head of that display of Van Gogh's works.
Now, one of the things we learned when we were able to bring together
the Amsterdam and London pictures three years ago, was to look very
carefully at the different ways in which the flowers were painted,
the very different ways in which paint could be applied, the gamut
of yellows that Van Gogh was exploring, how he made distinctions
between them, how he worked in greens and blues to make those distinctions
work and to work chromatically, even from a very great distance and one of the
powers of the pictures you will be seeing today is how strongly they address us,
even from far across a room. This chance to look at two of them together
has, as I said, suggested to us that we can learn a great deal more even by
looking at all five of them together, thinking about what this artist was doing
by taking up the motif of the sunflowers and then by repeating it five times.
Each time amending, altering, making subtle distinctions between the pictures.
At this point, having looked at the London picture, its glowing form, I want to
pass over to our colleague, the Director of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam:
Axel Rüger, a former colleague of ours here,
indeed, at the National Gallery before he went to Amsterdam and ask Axel
to tell us something about the distinctions between the pictures and what it is we can
be looking for as we compare these five versions of the 'Sunflowers'
as we make our way around the world.