[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.]
