The Red Vineyard - Vincent Van Gogh

Kuadros pays homage to this fantastic painting that was left to us as a legacy of the great master Vicent Van Gogh.

The artist once wrote: Art expresses humanity's deep relationship with the world.

It was the same genius who suffered from mental illness, including depressive and psychotic episodes, with possible bipolar disorder.

That today he is considered one of the most wonderful and beloved artists of all time is only a partial anecdote from his universe.

His talent was so impressive as a painter that he managed to significantly change the course of modern art. He never received recognition in his life and committed suicide at the age of 37 thinking he was a failure, due to his poor mental health, but despite that, his art transcended for a lifetime.

In his later years and while living in Arles, in the south of France (1888), he managed to produce wonderful art, and while it reflected his ongoing mental conflicts, it certainly also offered a very different way of representing the world.

He not only painted, but also wrote titles such as: “To act well in this world, men must abandon all selfish goals... Man is not on this earth only to be happy; he's there to be honest, he's there to achieve great things for humanity", all this at just 22 years old. Art historian Herbert Read considered this commitment to be honest as an unbreakable rule in his life.

His genius managed to achieve, or discover, a mode of self-expression. His impulse was always oriented to search for the strength of the form, the purity of the color, a new contact with reality. It is a set of traits and sentiments that make up the rare vitality of his art.

It is not the language of painters, but the language of nature that one must listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for the paintings.

His bold use of color and expressive brushwork were defining components of his communication with the world. But it was this strange feeling that drew him to everyday life, to ordinary people, that may explain why his art is so captivating.

Undoubtedly, wine was very important to Vincent in his life, since it was like his energizer in his hard work rhythm. According to an excerpt from a letter suggesting that he drank too much: “Every day I take the remedy that the incomparable Dickens prescribes against suicide. It consists of a glass of wine, a piece of bread with cheese and a tobacco pipe”.

This passion for wine may also have influenced this, one of his best works, The Red Vineyard .

A special legend of Vincent Van Gogh, makes this painting a legendary painting. This painting forms the story of the only sale that Van Gogh made in his entire life.

The story as such is true, what is not real is the statement that it was only one. The truth is that Van Gogh sold at least two paintings, as well as some drawings.

That doesn't change anything about his life: "What matters is that he sold very little," says curator Richard Kendall, who wrote the main catalog essay for the hit "Van Gogh's Van Goghs" exhibition shown a few years ago at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

The origin of this magnificent work begins with a simple comment that the artist makes in a letter to his friend the painter Eugene Boch, about his plans to paint The Red Vineyard :

"Ah, well, I have to go to work in the vineyard, near Montmajour." Everything is purple-yellow-green under the blue sky, a beautiful pattern of colors. "

Arles, the French city that served as Van Gogh's inspiration, was where he worked intensely, painted most of his most beautiful works and wrote his clearest and most profound pages.

But there was a place that captivated Van Gogh's soul, this place was a vineyard whose colors changed to autumnal reds and yellows depending on the hour. Van Gogh chose to capture this place, and in the painting he manages to capture these vibrant colors and also reproduces the distinctive light of the Provencal afternoon sun, shining on the river and irradiating the resplendent landscape, with a majestic technique.

Brilliant rays illuminate the workers who bend over to pick the ripe grapes, which seem to blend into the vineyard. They all seem to actively participate in the harvest in a direct relationship with the land that reflects the rhythms of agricultural work.

On October 23, 1888, the painter Gauguin , after many invitations made long before, agrees to go to Arles to the Yellow House to live with Van Gogh and spend some time there.

In November of that same year they dedicated themselves to drinking and working together. When the weather was not favorable and they joked that Gauguin had brought the rain, they painted from memory, or from tête. After a walk one Sunday night, when they had been living together for 13 days, Vincent began to paint The Red Vineyard .

Van Gogh is known as a painter who always used the technique of painting what was in front of him, Vincent stated: "I always do my work in one place." A curious fact, since this painting The Red Vineyard was painted entirely from memory.

In a paragraph of a letter that the painter Gauguin wrote to Van Gogh's brother, Theo, he says: "I have made a souvenir picture of a really haunted poor wretch in the middle of a red vineyard, and your brother, who is very generous, think it's good."

In November Van Gogh decides to also write to his brother Theo and tells him about a painting by Gauguin, which he had painted from memory, and it was about women in a vineyard, and also that he was painting his own vineyard: "A red vineyard, all red like red wine. In the distance it turned yellow, and then a green sky with the sun, the earth after the violet rain, shining here and there where it caught the reflection of the setting sun."

It is very evident that this pair of painters during this time worked closely together, even sharing the same rough silicon canvas that Gauguin had brought from home. The measurements of the red vineyard are 75 by 93 centimeters, standard model, used many times before by the artist in his other paintings.

In the painting Van Gogh shows us: very rustic viticultural practices: a flat, north-facing vineyard planted with vast gobelet-shaped vines on posts; horse drawn carriages; wooden baskets; hand picked; and women harvesters.

The days seemed short and Van Gogh had less time to capture this moment. This image must represent, a day in the life of the painter, one of those days when Van Gogh worked outdoors in the early afternoon, while the sunlight reflected off the river and ran down the side of the river. vineyard.

The yellow sky is a novelty in Van Gogh's landscapes of Arles, as he almost always painted them a bright blue. In The Red Vineyard the dominant colors are red and yellow, in this painting we can see how Vincent is capable of ignoring the established laws of contrasting color theory. Furthermore, the influence of Impressionism cannot be denied when it uses the pure color or individual brushstrokes of Pointillism.

We can also appreciate Van Gogh's well-known technique of impasto, in huge stained drops of still wet paint. The unsigned canvas indicates the state of uncertainty that was occurring at the time.

At Van Gogh's request, Theo van Gogh his brother, dispatched six paintings to Brussels, with the aim of exhibiting them, in an exhibition of a group of painters called XX or Vingtistes, in whose group Cezanne was also included.

Anna Boch bought " The Red Vineyard " for 400 Francs. She herself was a painter and the sister of the poet Eugene Boch, a friend of Van Gogh. Eugene visited Van Gogh in Arles in 1888 and Van Gogh painted his portrait. Later, the painting was acquired by Sergei Shchukin, a Russian collector, nationalized by the Bolsheviks and later transferred to the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow.

Van Gogh found it difficult to relate to society, and we spoke from his own family to friends, he was a very tormented being, and he struggled to keep his place in the world. His talent was not recognized at the time and was unknown throughout his life.

That is why The Red Vineyard represents so much for us, the only painting that he sold, one of his most expressive, most powerful paintings, which gives us a pleasant aesthetic experience for our eyes and mind. This work is so impressive, that it is capable of making people find life and reconnect with the natural world.

"I want to get to the point where people say about my work, that man feels deeply and that man feels subtly."

The famous art critic and writer John Berger wrote these lines about Van Gogh: "For him, the act of drawing or painting was a way of discovering and demonstrating why he loved what he was looking at so intensely."

KUADROS © , a famous painting on your wall.