On Friday I returned, for the first time since 1980, to the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Rembrandt, Vermeer, Van Gogh - have all been commodified to the extent that it can be difficult to see past the countless lousy reproductions and brash commercialism. But, despite the crowds and the queues and the kitschy museum shops, I cried when I got to the Rembrandts in the Rijksmuseum and I walked round the Van Gogh Museum with tears falling freely.
By posting reproductions which in no way do justice to the originals, I am complicit in the commodification - but I can't help it. I need to try and explain, in words and images, why I feel the way I do. I have only posted two paintings from the Rijksmuseum - so many others I could have chosen.
Quite apart from his technical brilliance and his ground-breaking use of light and shade, it is the depth of humanity in Rembrandt's portraits that is so moving. Here is a man who understands people - the painterly equivalent of Shakespeare. Especially he understands old age...
Rembrandt also understands emotion. The Jewish Bride is one of the most tender and glorious paintings I know. It goes well beyond the mere technical requirements of a commission to represent love and care and (perhaps?) apprehension - the human condition. I kept circling back to the Rembrandts and had trouble leaving the gallery because of this.
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The queue outside the Van Gogh museum was a mile long (this being the high tourist season) and I am not a queue person, but I hung in there. And this time I saw more clearly than ever before the literal and symbolic passage from dark Holland to sunny France to the angst that is so clear in the sinuous lines of the final paintings just prior to his suicide. Here is a man who risked everything, including his sanity, for what he believed in. Who so wanted to sell a painting - and never did. Who saw beauty in the simplest things and who conveyed utter joy through his use of colour. Reproductions of Van Gogh's paintings always disappoint. They fail to capture either the intensity of colour or the texture.
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| Gaugin's chair |
I remember a Post-Impressionist exhibition in London in 1980 which I went to with Shirley Tetley. I couldn't leave. I went back and back to the Van Goghs. They were magnetic.
