Empty Chairs

The image of the empty chair has a potent symbolic value for artists and photographers. It denotes both absence and an imagined presence. When Van Gogh was immersed in his personal identity crisis in the Yellow House in Arles he employed the subject of the empty chair to stand in for himself and his reluctant companion, Gauguin, in a pair of symbolic portraits. These postcards have no explicit symbolic content but that doesn’t stand in the way of what the viewer can read into them. Some seem to anticipate the imminent arrival of an animated crowd while others suggest abandonment, a sense that they may never again be occupied. A few are enveloped in a deep melancholy suggesting they won’t be adding to the sum of human happiness any time soon. The ultimate in empty chairs is the Electric Chair, built with a single purpose, temporary occupation and no reason for consideration of human comfort.

Van Gogh – a life in six pictures

If there’s an artist whose existence has penetrated almost every consciousness, it must be Van Gogh. And the one fact most widely known is that he cut off all or part of his ear in a nocturnal frenzy brought on by chronic depressive illness, packaged it up and presented it to a sex worker of his acquaintance. The details of his short career and dramatic life have been minutely investigated and recorded by legions of scholars. It was a life endlessly romanticised in popular culture and subject to intense psychoanalytic scrutiny, to the point that a distinct effort is required to see past all the accumulated mythology when considering the paintings he left behind. Every one of his major works has been submerged in an ocean of critical over-interpretation which the viewer has to set aside in order to respond on a personal level. So it’s quite refreshing to see all this turbulence condensed into just six images.

This set of Liebig collector cards was issued in 1959 a few years after Vincente Minelli directed the film Lust for Life in 1956, itself based on Irving Stone’s biography of the same name that kick-started the mythologising of Van Gogh in 1934. The first card shows the young Vincent driven by a life long religiosity, addressing a not especially attentive audience of miners and their families on the path to salvation. In the second we see our hero taking a drink and smoking a pipe in a working class Antwerp bar. The Parisian premises of Goupil & Cie are the scene of the third card – the manager, Theo Van Gogh is greeting his troublesome brother, Vincent. Card number four shows the Gendarmerie of Arles visiting Van Gogh in the Yellow House in the aftermath of the ear severing episode in December 1888. By May of 1889 Van Gogh was a patient in an asylum at Saint-Rémy where the fifth card shows him painting at his easel while a nun brings him some refreshment. Van Gogh’s funeral at Auvers is the final card – the inconsolable mourner collapsed at the table is presumably Theo. For another view of the artist, see Van Gogh the Salesman, posted in 2012.

Van Gogh the Salesman

Separating the work of Van Gogh from the acres of verbiage devoted to the tragic legend of unappreciated genius is no easy task. Critics, journalists and film-makers have created a romanticised and mostly invented picture of a solitary artist mentally wrestling with demons through which all Van Gogh’s drawings and paintings are filtered. This crude characterisation leaves little room for consideration of Van Gogh’s many artistic subtleties and exposes the work to popular exploitation. Advertisers have noted that Van Gogh has just about the highest level of public recognition of any artist with two key facts, the saga of the missing ear and the suicide in the fields. This trio of examples is not especially tasteless despite an attempt to comment on the artist’s self-inflicted lack of stereo hearing. Gentle parody is as far as it goes but equally, none are especially inventive in their use of the artist’s image. There’s a school of thought that any use of Fine Art imagery in advertising is a desecration but that seems excessively narrow minded given the free use that artists have made of advertising imagery over the past half-century.