Fresh looks at van Gogh.(exhibitions of Vincent van Gogh's works)(Critical Essay)

In "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Walter Benjamin argued that creating, by mechanical means, multiple copies of something once prized for its singularity and its specific presence in time and space diminished the "authority" and the "authenticity" of the original, whether it was a painting, a sculpture, or the performance of a musical composition. The proliferation of anonymous replicas permitted by twentieth-century technology compromised what Benjamin called the "aura" of the work of art--which he described as "the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced." Aura "withers" when the work of art is mechanically duplicated, Benjamin warned:

 
   the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the 
   domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a 
   plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the 
   reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular 
   situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. 

Benjamin's essay was published in 1936. Postmodern appropriation has borne out the unfortunate accuracy of the first of his assertions; the others are simply facts of modern life, although just what he meant by "reactivate" remains unclear. As it turns out, while Benjamin should have worried about how the qualifies of mechanically reproduced music would affect expectations and standards for live performance, he needn't have been concerned about loss of "aura" in the visual arts. Quite the contrary. Being introduced to a work of art through some "mechanical" medium can even enhance aura. Seeing, in the flesh, a painting or sculpture known only from reproductions remains thrilling. Slides and illustrations may provide useful preparation, but nothing can replace the intensity of real surface, real scale, real color, real context; nothing short of direct confrontation conveys a sense of the work of art as a physical object with particular material properties, made by another human being--"authenticity" and "authority" remain intact. Aura is diminished when scholars downgrade attributions, but that's another matter, as is the more interesting question of whether aura is, in fact, what we seek from works of art, rather than formal excellence or emotional resonance or anything else.

It could be argued, moreover, that the mass media's wide dissemination of mechanically reproduced images of works of art has had precisely the opposite effect than Benjamin predicted. Far from causing aura to wither, it has transformed some works of art from physical things with particular aesthetic qualifies into another category of objects that are all aura. These paintings and sculptures have become instantly recognizable icons, all accumulated lame and history, "signifiers" of artistic value whose presence is eagerly sought by hordes of beholders simply because they have been reproduced so often. Standing in front of these well-known works takes on a significance that has nothing to do with aesthetic experience, but lies somewhere between celebrity spotting and the veneration of relics. Even if we pride ourselves on out immunity to the effects of popular reputation, it's difficult to come to terms with such sanctified works. They are hard to see, not only because of the physical barriers imposed, these days, by layers of bulletproof glass and massed tourists armed with video recorders, but also because their accumulated lame and familiarity makes it difficult to look at them the way we would at any other work of art--for their aesthetic qualities; aura prevails.

The oeuvre of that most mythologized of modernist painters, Vincent van Gogh, has been particularly vulnerable to this disagreeable transformation; people who can't recognize The Potato Eaters and would walk right by a picture of the corridors at Saint-Remy can spot a Sunflowers from the far end of a gallery and know all about how the mad genius cut off his ear and never sold a painting. It can be argued that responsibility lies as much with novelists and movie makers as it does with mechanical reproducers, while some blame also has to be assigned to the painter himself. Van Gogh's pictures can teeter on the edge of manner; his rhythmic strokes, loaded surfaces, stylized drawing, and supercharged color make his work so readily identifiable that ifs sometimes hard to get involved with what is really going on in his pictures. (His vigorous pen and ink drawings are easier to "see," despite their stylizations, not only because they have been less frequently reproduced, but also because they are so direct and intimate.) It takes special effort to approach van Gogh's paintings as paintings, and so this spring we must be grateful to the organizers of a pair of enlightening exhibitions devoted to the work of the troubled Dutch painter: "Van Gogh's `Postman': the Portraits of Joseph Roulin," a sharply focused little gem of a show at the Museum of Modern Art from February 1 to May 15; and "Vincent van Gogh and the Painters of the Petit Boulevard,"(1) a broad, contextualizing overview at the Saint Louis Art Museum. Together and separately, they allow us to see this problematic painter freshly and oblige us to take his measure hot as the popularly conceived tortured outsider, but as an informed participant in the modernist enterprise.

MOMA's small but spectacular show is, admittedly, a surefire crowd pleaser, but it is also an inspired footnote to the survey of van Gogh's portraits seen at the Philadelphia Museum last year and an illuminating examination of an important work in the Modern's collection, a confrontational 1889 image of Joseph Roulin against an elaborately patterned background. The postman, who lived with his family on the same street as van Gogh, was one of first people in Arles to agree to pose for the odd, intense, easily offended Dutchman, and one of the few to befriend him. Van Gogh began to paint his neighbor in the winter of 1888, fascinated equally, it seems, by Roulin's pug-nosed, bony face with its wide-set eyes, his luxuriant beard, his ruddy drinker's complexion, his natty uniform, and his passionately populist politics. The two men became close. (Roulin tended the painter during the notorious ear-cutting crisis.) Eventually, van Gogh painted the entire family, producing multiple versions of Madame Augustine Roulin as a paradigm of maternity--often with the couple's youngest child, bore about the time Roulin pere began to sit for his portrait--plus pictures of the two older sons, aged eleven and sixteen. The curator of the exhibition, Kirk Varnedoe, suggests that, as the father of three children, the postman symbolized virility and manly responsibility to the famously alienated painter. Varnedoe sees the series of portraits of the postman as documenting a transformation from the specific to the universal, supporting the view that no matter how interested he was in a sitter's distinctive features and personality, van Gogh wished his portraits to embody enduring types rather than individuals. His comments on works in progress, in letters to his brother, Theo, make this explicit. Witness the famous description of the portrait of the solid, ample Mme. Roulin, La Berceuse, (1889, Boston Museum of Fine Arts), showing her against a flower-strewn background like that in MOMA's portrait of her husband, clasping the cord of a cradle; van Gogh called it an attempt

 
   to paint a picture in such a way that sailors, who are at once children and 
   martyrs, seeing it in the cabin of their Icelandic fishing boat, would feel 
   the old sense of being rocked come over them and remember their own 
   lullabies.