Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Vincent van Gogh
Dutch; 19th-century
Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Van Gogh Museum
86%
The Sower. 1888. Oil on canvas
The colors and the slanted arrangement are pretty out-there and so bring this painting up to the brink of extremity for its own sake, but it's all justified by the graphic intensity of the tree-and-sower system slammed up against the picture plane, and by the delicate integration into these two figures of certain elements of their ground. Namely, the breath of sunset greens inside the crook of the tree at top center, and the strokes of lime in the coat of the farmer, pull the background up to the very front of the image, but also temper it by subordinating its high tones to these backlit blacks and browns. Also, the graphic nature of this painting goes a long way towards resolving one of the big problems in Van Gogh's style: his tendency towards mark-making at the expense of spatial order. Here, his famous daubs are there in the fields and, to a lesser extent, in the sun and the sky, but they're corralled by the hard lines around them and suppressed by the two stamped figures up front. The marks therefore impart a wild surface energy, without disrupting or distracting from the more crucial build-up of depth and volume. (It's telling, though, that it takes so extreme a figure-ground contrast as this for Vincent to bring his handling under control.) (TFS, 2026)
Otterlo, The Netherlands: Kröller-Müller Museum
75%
Enclosed Wheat Field with Rising Sun. 1889. Oil on canvas
This painting prefigures Klimt's divine landscapes in an interesting way, but it is a smaller artistic achievement. Klimt manages to aesthetically justify his paintings' pure decorative cores by destabilizing them with the barest, most vanishing hints of spatial hierarchy. (It reminds you of Altdorfer's great St. George.) But Van Gogh is forced, by his compulsion for tossing around paint, to close in the pretty part of this painting with a wall (literally!), so as to firm it up in space and legitimate its relation to the rest of the image. This is just an extreme version of the way he tends to bind his forms with thick black lines. It's a solution, but an evasive one. Not that I'd deny the unique effect of that tilty enclosure barely containing a universe of sweeping greens; it's just worth pointing out that Vincent causes more problems than he solves. (TFS, 2026)
Otterlo, The Netherlands: Kröller-Müller Museum
73%
Wheat Field with Reaper and Sun. 1889. Oil on canvas
Van Gogh only ever moved partially and passively (at his best) towards the sort of orderliness and control of the painting's worked-over surface that characterizes the art of, say, Cézanne, the consummate post-impressionist. Vincent's mark-making is never not overbearing; it is the primary feature of his paintings that they are amalgams of daubs and strokes — errant, erratic — before they are figures, forms, even patterns. This primacy of the mark makes the space of Vincent's paintings feel subordinate to their physical presence, which is a limitation. In this piece, however, there's enough variability to the appearances and effects of all the different applications of paint, and enough build-out to the composition in the background, to make the maelstrom in the foreground seem contained and deliberate (if not quite necessary). The obvious achievement in this regard is the haystack near the front of the image, which defies the artist's compulsive facture to body itself into plasticity. But the way the curves of the mountains find an echo in the windsweep of the hay is productive, as is the cordon sanitaire of dragged paint in the midground. The yellow sky and thick-rimmed sun is a travesty. (TFS, 2026)
Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Van Gogh Museum
72%
Shoes. 1887. Oil on canvas
Vincent's manic brushwork is never as controlled as Cézanne's at even his sloppiest. But it's usually pretty exciting, and at its best (as here) it achieves worthwhile effects. This painting's moderate success lies in its bottom left corner, where space bends around the heel of the shoe before congealing in that darker patch of paint and then dissipating upwards into the breezy upper quarter of the canvas. But by the top right corner it's all a bit too dissipated, energetic but open and unfocused. When Vincent manages to sustain the spatial results of his markmaking, he can be great. Otherwise he's not much more than a masterful decorator, slinging experiments but failing to follow through on them. (The patches of brownish-pink on the shoes' soles and tabs are cool, but they don't go far enough towards commingling figure and ground.) (TFS, 2026)
Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Rijksmuseum
59%
Wheatfield. 1888. Oil on canvas
The fat horizontal strokes in the sky set against the dense quick verticals that comprise the wheatfield — and they're separated by that skinny line of horizon — work well towards putting some purpose behind Vincent's crazy technique. But it only goes so far, and ultimately the picture succumbs to the same issues as ever: van Gogh all but refused to draw, and when he did it was only ever as a last-ditch effort to salvage a picture after his devotion to handling had backed him into a primary-colored corner. In this painting, that "corner" is the patch of duller and less textured yellow in the upper right, which is the only limned thing in the picture and so fails to transfer any of the energy from the bottom two-thirds of the canvas either upwards or outwards. Here the many joyful marks in the wheatfield come to a boring rest. (TFS, 2026)
Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Van Gogh Museum
53%
Garden with Courting Couples: Square Saint-Pierre. 1887. Oil on canvas
This painting epitomizes what's wrong, aesthetically, with Van Gogh's frenetic facture. The obvious comparison is to Seurat, and slightly less so to Cézanne: Vincent's skein of fast marks is related to the all-over effects of both of these painters, more so to the atomically pulled-apart figures of the former. With Seurat, however, there is always a close (if somewhat inarticulable) relationship between the lovely surface patterns and, not only the objects these patterns give weight to, but moreover this weight itself and the dimensional space it's set within. In contrast, Vincent here focuses on surface at the expense of plasticity and a coherent spatial order. It's as if this scene takes place behind the array of brushstrokes, instead of being brought about by or in conjunction with it. Daubs of nonlocal color appear perfunctory and merely expressive, failing to bring disconnected zones of the canvas into any sort of unlikely concert (as do Seurat's colors); the sky presses down too heavily on the canopy of trees, but this heaviness doesn't disperse through the picture's lower half. (TFS, 2026)