'Immersive Van Gogh,' Part 1

 

[It’s been a long time since I posted a report on anything live and in person.  Over the New Year’s weekend, my frequent theater companion, Diana, and I went down to the Lower East Side to see one of the two immersive van Gogh art exhibitions that were visiting New York City at the time, and I wrote a report on the experience, a new one for me.

[I felt I had to include at least a summary of the artist’s biography, and because his life was so crowded with incident, I was unable to keep it really brief.  As a result, I’ve split the “Immersive Van Gogh” report into two parts.  Below is the first installment; Part 2 will be posted on Thursday, 13 January.]

Frequent readers of Rick On Theater will have noticed that I’ve posted few performance reports since the pandemic shutdown started.  I managed to write up some online performances and one television presentation of a stage play on PBS, but the only live, in-person productions on which I reported since the theaters shut down were ones I saw before 12 March 2020.

The corollary to this situation is that I hadn’t seen my theater partner, Diana, for all that time, either.  We’d been in touch some by text and e-mail, but we hadn’t met for anything.  Then, in late November this year, Diana wrote and suggested we get together for coffee or something. 

It took us a while to follow up, but Diana had a good excuse to press the issue: she invited me to dinner on my recent birthday last December.  We talked about returning to the theater, but I told Diana that I wasn’t really comfortable going back to the theater yet because so many shows are cancelling performances even at the last moment. 

Some plays are even closing permanently, like the Rockettes, which had just opened its holiday spectacular to great fanfare, only to cancel the rest of the season.  The Met’s Nutcracker has just done the same thing.

That’s making me less and less comfortable with booking a show only to have it cancelled out from under us.  And even if it’s not, though both Diana and I are vaccinated, sitting for two hours in a theater wearing a mask is not part of a theater experience I’d enjoy. 

But I added that if there were some good art shows on, I’d be very happy to go.  Diana had mentioned a van Gogh show on a pier which she thought was closing on 2 January.  I said I’d look it up and see where it was exactly and what the remaining dates had to offer.

The show Diana was talking about turned out to be Immersive Van Gogh, one of several “immersive” van Gogh “experiences” making the rounds around the globe just now; there’s even a competing show on Manhattan’s Lower West Side called Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience.

The surprise was that these aren’t really art shows—there are no actual paintings on view.  It’s all CGI reproductions of van Gogh paintings, manipulated and animated digitally and projected onto the walls and floors of room-like galleries and you “enter” the paintings.  After reading some online articles about these shows, I remembered having seen something about the phenomenon some time back. 

One problem arose immediately: there were three reviews in the New York Times, all by art critics, and their responses ranged from merely dismissive to derisive.  One of the three quipped: “Like Vincent, I too suffer for my art, and so I attended both of them.”  Doesn’t bode well, does it?

Immersive Van Gogh, which opened in New York City on 10 July 2021 and closed on 2 January 2022, was conceived and produced by Lighthouse Immersive, founded in Toronto in 2019 as an “experiential entertainment multiplex,” in its own words.  It has locations in Toronto, Chicago, San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, and Dallas and has produced other immersive shows such as Illusionarium, which is on magic, and Immersive Klimt, a treatment of the art of Austrian Symbolist painter Gustav Klimt (1862-1918).

Lighthouse Immersive finds local partners to coproduce IVG in each city.  In New York, it’s Maestro Immersive Art, a subsidiary of Maestro Artist Management.

The Artistic Director of IVG is Massimiliano Siccardi, an internationally-known digital artist who created the videos, aided by Broadway set designer David Korins (2009 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Set Design Of A Play for Why Torture is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them and the 2019 Drama Desk Hudson Scenic Award For Set Design For A Musical for Beetlejuice; Tony nominations in 2016 for Hamilton, 2017 for War Paint, and 2019 for Beetlejuice). 

The Van Gogh immersive experiences are for-profit, virtual reality exhibits of the artist’s paintings.  Usually presented in large exhibition spaces (like the Pier 36 sports and entertainment facility used for IVG), images or videos of van Gogh’s works are projected onto walls, ceilings, and floors, often accompanied by animations, narrations, music, or fragrances.  Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience (but not IVG) provided virtual-reality headsets.

Depending on the perspective and expectations of the visitor, criticism varies greatly; art devotees, especially if they anticipated seeing actual art, are often disappointed—especially when the cost of the tickets is added in.  Entry prices range from $25 to $75 for adults (adult IVG tickets went from $40 to $110, depending on when you went and what perks you wanted; on-site parking was a flat $42 fee for two hours).

Entertainment-seekers, especially families with children (there were lots of very wee ones at IVG) find the experience fun, even exhilarating, and very diverting.  For them, the video experience was more engaging than staring at an inanimate painting on a museum wall. 

Again, this was especially so of parents with little children, who were more entertained here than in an art museum; some were mesmerized by the moving and changing images—the older kids largely—and others found the big, open room with the odd lighting effects just a great playroom, which wouldn’t have been tolerated, I don’t imagine, in a museum setting.  (I’ll tell you how Diana responded in a bit—it was a surprise to me.)  

Another source of complaint was the similarity of the exhibits’ names.  I saw Immersive Van Gogh; the other New York City show is called Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience.  In other cities around the world, there have been shows entitled Imagine Van Gogh: The Immersive Exhibition, Van Gogh Alive, and Beyond Van Gogh.  There are reports of would-be visitors buying tickets to the wrong show or arriving at the venue of the wrong exhibit.

The immersive art experiences first became known more than a decade ago in Europe.  Van Gogh is by far the grandaddy of the genre, but there have also been virtual shows of work by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), the Spanish abstract painter, sculptor, printmaker and ceramicist; French Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), Russian Abstract painter and art theorist Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944); and Claude Monet (1840-1926), the French Impressionist painter. 

(Many writers have attributed the mass popularity of IVG and, by extension, the other immersive van Gogh experiences, to the Netflix streaming series Emily in Paris.  In episode 5 of the first season, “Faux Amis,” which was released on 2 October 2020, the title character, played by Lily Collins, went to an immersive van Gogh exhibit called Van Gogh, Starry Night and the notion went viral.  I can’t attest to this personally because I bever watched the show.)

Vincent van Gogh (1853-90) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who lived and worked most of his short life in France.  Though he produced about 2,100 works of art, which included around 860 oil paintings, he sold only one in his lifetime—and that was to his art-dealer brother Theo (1857-91).  Of his total output, van Gogh created some 300 paintings and drawings while he was in Arles from 1888 to 1889.  (He produced another 222 from May 1889, when he was hospitalized, to his death in July 1890.)

Despite his lack of success as an artist while he was alive, after death, he became one of the world’s best-known, most-beloved, and biggest-selling (and at some of the highest prices on record) painters ever.  Many of his works, such as 1889’s The Starry Night, many of his self-portraits (1885-89), his sunflowers (mostly 1887-89), and several of his portraits (e.g.: Portrait of Père Tanguy [1887-88], Portrait of the Postman Joseph Roulin [1888], La Berceuse (Augustine Roulin) [1889]), among others, have become iconic, recognizable almost instantly even by people with little interest in art.

The Starry Night, in fact, is one of the few pieces of art that inspired a pop song, Don McLean’s “Vincent” (popularly known as “Starry, Starry Night”), written and released in 1971.  A tribute to the artist inspired by a biography of van Gogh the composer read, it went to number 1 on the U.K. pop charts and number 12 in the U.S.

Van Gogh led a troubled life, beginning in childhood when he was intensely introverted and shy.  In one of his letters, originally published in English in 1958, the artist described his childhood as “austere and cold, and sterile.”

Vincent was the oldest of six children of Theodorus van Gogh (1822-85), a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, but he was close to only his younger brother Theo and his youngest sister Wilhelmina (1862-1941), known as Wil.  

The name Vincent was a common in the van Gogh family, but the last possessor of the name was an older child who’d died at birth about a year before the future painter was born.  Vincent’s parents let him know that he was a replacement for the dead son.

Vincent was obsessively religious as a youngster and after failing to find success as an art dealer, he endeavored to become a pastor.  He failed in three attempts and his religious zeal became excessive.  His father thought he should be committed to an asylum.

During a stint in London as an art dealer when he was 20, he fell in love with his landlady’s daughter, but she rejected him.  Later, when he was 28, he fell in love again, with a niece of his mother, Cornelia “Kee” Vos-Stricker (1846-1918).  He declared his love for her and proposed marriage, but Kee rejected him vehemently.

Later that year, van Gogh wrote a strongly-worded letter to Kee’s father.  Van Gogh quickly went to Amsterdam, where the Vos-Strickers lived, but Kee wouldn’t see him.  The young man stuck his hand in the flame of a lamp and demanded that the parents let him see Kee for as long as he could keep it there.  Vos-Stricker apparently blew out the lamp and was adamant that the rejection would stand and that van Gogh and his daughter would never marry.

He’d always had an interest in art, and his mother had encouraged him to draw.  His early drawings were expressive and full of feeling, but nowhere near the force and color of his later work.  In 1880, van Gogh had returned to live in a Belgian coal village where he’d done some missionary work earlier and lodged with a miner.  He found himself interested in people and the daily scenes of his neighbors going about their lives.

At Theo’s suggestion that Vincent follow his artistic instincts seriously, he went to Brussels to study at the royal Belgian art academy.  The nascent artist came home for a visit in 1881 and he continued to draw, using his neighbors as subjects. 

In 1881, van Gogh went to The Haque to meet his second cousin, Anton Mauve (1838-88), a successful artist.  Mauve asked van Gogh to come back in a few months; in the meantime, he recommended that his cousin try working in charcoal and pastels.  When the would-be artist returned home, he took his cousin’s advice.

Van Gogh went back to The Hague and Mauve took him as a student.  He introduced his cousin to watercolor and a few months later, taught him to paint in oils and lent him money to start a studio.  But van Gogh and his cousin fell out and by 1882, Mauve stopped answering his cousin’s letters.

Van Gogh, however, found he liked working in oils and began to practice the impasto technique, applying the paint thickly onto the canvas, that would become one of his trademarks.  He had little money, and Theo and their sister Wil, supported him, giving him money to buy paints and supplies.

Impecunious as he was, van Gogh could only afford to use street people as his models, and one of these was a prostitute named Sien Hoornik (1850–1904) with whom he also had an affair.  In June 1882, he contracted gonorrhea and was hospitalized.  When he had met the woman, she was pregnant and in July, she gave birth to a son.

Van Gogh’s father learned of the relationship and pressed his son to leave Sien.  He first resisted his father’s urgings, but in early 1883, he left the woman, who ultimately drowned herself in 1904 at the age of 54.  Sien is the subject of a series of drawings and paintings van Gogh made between 1881 and 1883.

When loneliness impelled him to move back in with his parents in December 1883, van Gogh concentrated again on his art work, completing several canvases and sketches of local peasants and artisans at their work and in their homes. 

His companion on his painting and drawing forays in the summer was the daughter of a neighbor who was 10 years older than he.  She fell in love with the tyro painter, and he felt the same, but neither family supported a marriage.  The woman took strychnine, but survived because van Gogh rushed her to a nearby hospital. 

In March 1885, Minister Theodorus van Gogh, the young painter’s father, suffered a heart attack and died.

In the two years he stayed with his parents, van Gogh completed nearly 200 painting.  His palette was dark and somber, quite the opposite of the colors he used after he arrived in southern France.  Theo in Paris asked if his brother had any paintings ready to be shown, and in May 1885, van Gogh sent him The Potato Eaters and several of the character sketches of the local peasantry on which he’d been working.

When the works didn’t sell, Theo explained that his paintings were too dark and not in the fashion of the brightly colored Impressionism that was then in style.  In August, one of van Gogh’s works was exhibited to the public for the first time, displayed in the window of an art dealership in The Hague.

In September 1885, a young peasant girl who’d sat for the artist became pregnant and van Gogh was accused of having forced himself on her.  The local pastor prohibited the villagers from modeling for him.

In November, the young painter moved to Antwerp where he lived the life of a penniless artist, eating little and smoking and drinking excessively.  He spent most of the money Theo sent him on art supplies, and by early 1886, he was in poor health, but he was conscientiously studying color theory and expanding his palette to include some of the bright blues, reds, and greens that would become his signatures in later work.

(It may surprise no one that van Gogh’s habitual drink was absinthe, popular especially among 19th-century artists and bohemians.  This highly alcoholic [90-148 proof], liquorish-flavored drink was believed to cause hallucinations and altered perception; it was banned in most countries by the early 1900s.

(The psychoactive effects were found to be a myth and the liquor was revived worldwide in the 1990s.  The dangers attributed to absinthe were found mostly to be caused by its high alcohol content and the facts that many absinthe drinkers were alcoholics or users of other drugs and psychoactive substances. 

(Van Gogh, for instance was not only a heavy drinker, but also smoked heavily and drank coffee immoderately while at the same time eating little and infrequently.)

At the same time, van Gogh discovered Japanese woodblock prints and became intrigued with them.  He began applying some of their style in his paintings. 

He was drinking more heavily now and was hospitalized in February and March 1886.  He was possibly also treated for syphilis at this time.

Van Gogh had never cared for academic art training, but in January 1886, he’d entered the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp.  He quickly came into conflict with a series of the teachers under whom he was studying resulting from his quick temper, his intolerance for regimentation, and his idiosyncratic painting style.  He abruptly left the academy in February and went to Paris in March to live with his brother, Theo.

Van Gogh’s sister-in-law Johanna (1862-1925), the wife of his brother Theo, reported: “[T]he greatest objection against him was, ‘He is not submissive’ . . . .”  Van Gogh himself put his rationale this way:

. . . I don’t care a damn whether my language is in conformity with that of the grammarians.

. . . .

Suppose a man has something to say, and that he speaks a language which his audience knows instinctively—then every now and then there will be the phenomenon that the speaker of truth has little oratorical elegance, and that what he says is not to the liking of the majority of his audience—nay, that he will be called a man ‘of slow speech and of a slow tongue,’ and be despised as such.

He may consider himself fortunate if there is one, or at the most a very few, who are edified by his words, because what these listeners were looking for was—not oratorical tirades—but most decidedly the true, the useful, the necessary content of his words, which enlightened them and broadened their minds, made them freer and more intelligent.

And now as regards painters—is it the purpose, the non plus ultra, of art to produce those peculiar spots of color—that capriciousness of drawing—that are called the distinction of technique?  Most certainly not.  Take a [Camille] Corot [1796-1875], a [Charles-François] Daubigny [1817-78], a [Jules] Dupré [1812-89], a [Jean-François] Millet [1814-75] or an [Jozef] Israëls [1824-1911]—fellows who are undoubtedly the great leaders—well, their work is outside the paint; it is as different from that of the elegant fellows as an oratorical tirade . . . is different from a prayer—or a good poem.

He found himself in the midst of one of the most exciting periods in art history, the emergence of Impressionism and several “radical” techniques allied with the movement, like Pointillism.  Though Theo’s dealership carried Impressionist art, Vincent was slow to take up the style.

Nonetheless, van Gogh frequented the places where the great modernists gathered, painted, and displayed their work; he painted with them in the same ateliers.  Now-famous artists like Australian John Peter Russell (1858-1930) and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901), a French count, painted the redheaded Dutchman’s portrait.  Under the influence of the Paris art scene, van Gogh further broadened—and brightened—his color palette.

By the end of 1886, Theo van Gogh found living with his brother intolerable and their relationship became contentious.  (We’ve seen this happen with Vincent’s cousin Anton Mauve and it will occur again in Arles with fellow artist Paul Gauguin.)  “It is a pity that he is his own enemy,” Theo van Gogh wrote, “for he makes life hard not only for others but also for himself.”

Vincent left his brother’s home and moved out to a Paris suburb, even though the two had reconciled.  By November 1887, van Gogh adopted more of the techniques of Impressionism.  He exhibited with Toulouse-Lautrec and Émile Bernard (1868-1941), a French Post-Impressionist.  He and Theo also became friendly with Gauguin (1848-1903), newly returned to Paris from Copenhagen.

During his two years in Paris, van Gogh painted some 200 canvases, but his poor health and diet, his drinking and smoking, and his habit of working constantly left him exhausted.  In February 1888, van Gogh made his famous trip to Arles in the southern French region of Provence. 

It would be the artist’s most creative and productive period.  In the 15 months he lived in Arles, van Gogh created 200 paintings and over 100 drawings and watercolors.  Of these, many were his most famous and recognizable works.  But Arles would also prove to be van Gogh’s most devastating experience as well.

He took rooms in the now-famous Yellow House (demolished during World War II) which he also used as a studio.  Van Gogh sent many works back to Paris to exhibit (and hopefully sell) and to exchange with other artists such as Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Bernard, Charles Laval (1862-94), and others.  He painted anything and everything he saw around him—street scenes, landscapes, seascapes and boats, flowers, trees, fields, people working, people in the cafés, his bedroom, still lifes, portraits, self-portraits, night scenes—all in the bright, vibrant colors of sun-bathed Provence. 

Van Gogh had always been fascinated with depicting light—not the effects of light, like Rembrandt (1606-69), the Dutch baroque master, and American Realist Edward Hopper (1882-1967), but the light itself.  One of the aspects of Arles and Provence that had attracted him was the bright sun, which contrasted so drastically with the dark and somber tones of his native Holland. 

He painted scenes that drew the viewer’s attention to glowing candles and lamps (especially in otherwise darkened rooms), twinkling stars in a night sky, lighted windows in a nighttime street scene, lamp-lit interiors of restaurants and cafés, and the sun-drenched Provençal landscape.  He was especially challenged to paint the sun itself.

In an 1892 entry in her diary, Theo’s widow, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, wrote that esteemed Dutch painter Jozef Israëls remarked of her late brother-in-law’s works on exhibit in The Hague:  “Some of them he thought very fine, but he said there were impassible bounds between things that can be painted and things that cannot, and Vincent had often wanted to paint things that were impossible, for instance the sun.”

At his brother urging, van Gogh, after many invitations, succeeded in prompting Gauguin to join him in Arles in October 1888.  To prepare for the stay of the artist he thought of as his mentor, van Gogh fixed up the room in the Yellow House with a newly-acquired second bed and painted a series of sunflower canvases to decorate the house.

For van Gogh, the anticipated arrival was, however, more than just a visit from a fellow artist, even one he admired greatly.

Since his earliest drawings, one of van Gogh’s most repeated themes was working people at their labor or in their homes—“le paysan chez soi, peasants in their surroundings [literally, the peasant at home].”  One reason, I suspect, is that he saw artists as laborers, too.

Van Gogh proposed a community of artists who would support one another and take control of their art, in terms of both content and sales, away from the dealers and the managers, like a workers’ cooperative.  He spoke of a “collaboration” among artists so that they would support each other both emotionally and financially and also share their professional knowledge and discoveries.  In van Gogh’s mind, the older and more established Gauguin was destined to be the leader of the artists’ commune.

It didn’t work out that way.

First, Theo van Gogh was Gauguin’s art dealer, and while he had urged his brother to invite Gauguin to Arles, to Gauguin, Theo had promised a 150-franc monthly stipend if he went.  For Gauguin, the visit to van Gogh was just a way to acquire a stake to get him back to the French colonial island of Martinique in the Caribbean where he’d spent six inspiring months in 1887.

Second, Gauguin took an instant dislike to Arles—and he let van Gogh know his feelings and his plan to go back to the Caribbean.  This destroyed van Gogh’s vision of establishing an artists’ collective in Arles with Gauguin at its head.

Third, the two men’s personalities were diametrically opposed.  Gauguin was slow and methodical in his work, he was neat and orderly in both his habits and the maintenance of his painting materials.  Van Gogh was sloppy, disorganized, and crazed in his painting, slapping paint almost haphazardly any way his eye and his feelings prompted him.  His paint box was a mess.

Van Gogh’s behavior became increasingly erratic and Gauguin began to fear for his own safety.  In late December, he told van Gogh that he was returning to Paris and van Gogh snapped.  He chased Gauguin through the streets of Arles waving a straight razor as the Frenchman raced to a hotel to take refuge from his housemate. 

Gauguin was afraid to leave the hotel that night, for fear that van Gogh was outside waiting for him.  He couldn’t have known that the Dutchman had gone back to the Yellow House where he cut off part of his left ear, wrapped it in paper, brought it to a local brothel, and presented it to one of the prostitutes.

Though Gauguin and van Gogh continued to correspond until the latter’s suicide, the two artists never saw each other again.

The day after he severed his ear, Christmas Eve, the police came to the Yellow House, alerted by the maison de tolérance (a French euphemism for a licensed brothel), and found the artist unconscious from loss of blood.  They rushed him to the hospital where he was treated by Dr. Félix Rey (1867-1932), a young trainee doctor whose portrait van Gogh painted in January 1889. 

Theo van Gogh was contacted that night and raced to Arles immediately, arriving on Christmas Day.  The day before, Theo had proposed marriage to Johanna Bonger, who would have an outsized responsibility for the posthumous fame of her brother-in-law.

Theo van Gogh comforted his brother, who was fairly lucid, and then returned to Paris.  The painter recovered despite a pessimistic prognosis, and returned to the Yellow House in early January 1889.  He began to suffer from hallucinations and paranoia—he may have had auditory hallucinations the night he cut off his ear—and returned frequently to the hospital.  It was at this time, apparently, that he acquired the pejorative nickname of “le fou roux,” the crazy redhead.

In May, he checked himself into the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, 17 miles northeast of Arles.  He was hospitalized from May 1889 to May 1890, during which time he continued to paint.  He created about 150 works including scenes in and around the asylum from the garden to the corridor outside his room, portraits of people at Saint-Paul, irises, still lifes, and the iconic Starry Night.

In early 1890, van Gogh began to experience epilepsy-like seizures.  The attacks got worse and he didn’t feel that staying at Saint-Paul was doing him any good.  In May 1890, he made arrangements to move to Auvers-sur-Oise, 20 miles northwest of Paris (and 485 miles north of Arles), near Theo and his bride, Johanna. 

(Theo and Johanna van Gogh married on 17 April 1889, around a month before Vincent committed himself to the asylum in Saint-Rémy.  They had a son on 31 January 1890 and named him Vincent Willem [d. 1978] after his uncle.  Theo and his family visited his brother in Auvers on 8 June, a little more than a month before Vincent died. Vincent Willem van Gogh founded Amsterdam’s Vincent van Gogh Museum, which opened on 3 June 1973.)

In Auvers-sur-Oise, van Gogh was under the care of homeopath Paul Gachet (1828-1909), who was an amateur painter himself.  The Dutch artist lived in Auvers for just two months, but he completed some 80 paintings in that time. 

Among his subjects were some wheat fields near the auberge (inn) in which he lived.  He said they expressed his sense of being sad and lonely.  Wheatfield with Crows was painted in July 1890; van Gogh shot himself in the chest on 27 July and died of the wound early in the morning of 29 July.  He was 37.

Theo van Gogh, who’d been ill, died on 25 January 1891, just shy of six months after his brother; he was 33.  He was buried in Utrecht, Holland, and Vincent had been buried in Auvers-sur-Oise, but in 1914, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, Theo’s widow, had her late husband’s remains reburied next to his brother.  Both graves are covered with a bed of ivy from an original cutting from Dr. Gachet’s garden.

[Part 2 of “Immersive Van Gogh” will cover the exhibition, including a description, my evaluation, and a survey of published reviews.  Please come back to Rick On Theater on Thursday for the conclusion of the report.]