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When Van Gogh Looks Into The Mirror, What Does He See?

Denise Guerra |
February 3, 2013 | 9:49 p.m. PST

Staff Reporter

Van Gogh's 1889 self-portrait is on display until March 3, 2013 (Photo By Denise Guerra)
Van Gogh's 1889 self-portrait is on display until March 3, 2013 (Photo By Denise Guerra)
I’m sure we’ve all seen the laughable meme of the bathroom mirror self-portrait - girls in seductive poses puckering their lips and the shirtless boys with their abs holding the phone to the mirror.
 
Now our smartphones are sophisticated enough to put the camera in the front of the screen as to eliminate the need for a mirror, and we have Instagram to tint ourselves in glowing sunlight and faded dreamy colors.
 
The question of how we portray ourselves online will one day be the study of future curators, and they will ruminate over whether the Instagram filters we chose were mere vanities or reflections of insecurity.
 
The image of Vincent Van Gogh, staring off into the distance, with a white bandage hiding a sliced left ear would be taboo on a Facebook wall. Instead, Van Gogh aspired to what he said was “Truer than the literal truth.”
 
For Van Gogh, the idea of painting himself was not out of vanity, but for a deeper process of tumultuous discovery and self-exploration. With several of Van Gogh’s self-portraits on display at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena until March, the museum has dedicated a series of lectures focused on the Dutch painter.
 
A lecture by Judy Sund, Professor of Art History at City University of New York, titled “From Mirror to Canvas: Van Gogh's Processes of Self-Portrayal,” illuminated the work of the iconic painter through Sund’s own research and quotations lifted from Van Gogh’s letters to his friends and family.
 
Van Gogh had a “desire to paint human figures,” Sund said. When he couldn’t find models, he turned the focus on himself instead.
 
Four years before his death, Van Gogh painted more than three dozen self-portraits. But Van Gogh did not merely hold a mirror up to himself, he painted what he saw, exaggerating and illuminating features to make him unrecognizable in real life.
 
According to Sund, Van Gogh’s self-portraits offered a blueprint of his development as an artist, from his inspiration of Rembrandt’s dark black and brown oil paintings that defined his early stay with Dutch potato farmers to the light yellow and blue circular strokes that would define his most famous painting, “Starry Night.”
 
In his self-portraits, we begin to see Van Gogh as a shapeshifter of his environment.
 
While living with his brother Theo in Paris, Van Gogh experimented with disjointed brush strokes in the style of Claude Monet and Georges Seurat . According to Sund, this represented Van Gogh’s struggle to fit in with the more popular French impressionists of his time.
 
In Paris, between 1867 and 1868, Van Gogh painted himself clean-shaven and dressed in a sharp suit and top hat. His pupilless eyes were large, empty and black.
 
Sund described this faraway look as Van Gogh’s “desire to be somewhere else” and "a disillusionment with city life.”
 
For this reason, Van Gogh would move to the countryside and live a life like the Japanese monks he admired. In one self-portrait, his head is shaved and his eyes are clearly slanted with an obscure image of a Japanese Geisha in the background.
 
Judy Sund, Professor of Art History at City University lectured at Pasadena's Norton Simon on Van Gogh's self-portraits (Photo By Denise Guerra)
Judy Sund, Professor of Art History at City University lectured at Pasadena's Norton Simon on Van Gogh's self-portraits (Photo By Denise Guerra)
Months later in 1869, Van Gogh committed himself to a mental hospital. Art historians would deem him later to suffer from a bipolar disorder. Again, Van Gogh wanted to paint human subjects but felt deterred because he found his “fellow patients scary.”
 
In one of his more famous self-portraits, Van Gogh depicts himself as thin and pale, a physical condition resulting from several mental breakdowns before his death in 1890.
 
For an artist who painted more than 1,100 pictures in five years and with just one painting sold when he was alive, the history of Van Gogh’s self-portraits shows a man willing to look beyond his own self-image.
 
Today, the Facebook era self-portrait rarely reveals such deep truths.

Reach Staff Reporter Denise Guerra here or on Twitter



 

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