Vincent van Gogh painted 35 self-portraits in his lifetime. Fifteen of them are now together at the Courtauld Gallery, in the first exhibition dedicated to his portraits here since 1960 and the first ever featuring his paintings of himself from across his career. They’ve come from the huge collection in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, of course, but also from Washington DC, Chicago, and Paris among other places. Will this many Van Gogh self-portraits be gathered in London again? Not in my lifetime, I imagine. Maybe never. So you have to beg, borrow or steal a ticket, of course; and you have until May 8.
It would be easy to phone-in a Van Gogh self-portraits show, but the Courtauld’s is rigorous and thoughtful, with smart pairings and groupings. And it has a compelling argument: that we inevitably see the artist’s paintings of himself through the prism of his mental health and suicide, but they should instead be seen as him pursuing a unique artistic language despite rather than because of his illness. Yes, they were vehicles for expression, but it was a more rational pursuit rather than one governed only by torment.
Among much else, he wanted to reflect his conviction that painting could do something photography, still relatively new, couldn’t. In paint, Van Gogh felt, an artist could seek a “deeper likeness”, as he put it, than a photographer with his machine could achieve, something that could emerge from a feeling “deep in the soul of the painter”.
Amazingly, all his self-portraits were made between 1886 and 1889; 27 of them in the two years he lived with his brother Theo in Paris and 22 of them in 1887 alone. There are many reasons he made so many at that time, including that he struggled to find models for portraits and turned to himself. But the self-portraits were also a test: if he could paint the complex colouration of his own head, he said, “I’ll surely be able to paint the heads of the other fellows and women as well.”
The bonus of having so many self-portraits condensed into so short a period is that you can see the huge shift in his art in his last three years. In a painting made between December 1886 and January 1887, Van Gogh’s smoothly painted red beard barely emerges from the gloom, but within months, it’s blazing crimson and orange, realised in thick, broken lines. It’s an astonishing development.
He used the self-portraits to experiment, to push his painting to new territory. He would adopt different personas – the gentleman in middle-class cravat, waistcoat and jacket; the working painter in smock and straw hat – and jump about stylistically, flirting with the broken marks of pointillism in some, working in more pared-down, looser style in others. People were complex, he argued: “the same person supplies material for very diverse portraits”. And how diverse the pictures here are. Common to them all, though, are exhilarating passages of painting, vibrant bursts of colour and bold gestures.
Van Gogh made many fewer self-portraits in his later years when he moved south to Arles and to the asylum at Saint Remy in Provence, but those that are here are some of the best. The Courtauld’s own Self-Portrait with a Bandaged Ear may be his greatest, but another pairing of late pictures provides the show’s most moving moment. The astonishing self-portrait with a palette from the National Gallery in Washington was one of the first he made as he recovered from a terrible bout of ill health in the summer of 1889, when he was “thin, pale as the devil”. Dominated by the deepest blue, it reflects yet another leap – a fluidity and directness, even a confidence, missing in some of the earlier experiments.
Next to it is a more difficult work, a painting that looks unfinished, made a couple of weeks earlier than the Washington picture, and paired with it for the first time in the 130 years since they were made. Van Gogh gave this murky painting to friends in Arles, so he must have regarded it as finished, but it is sketchier, with much of the paint on the face scraped off. He described it as “an attempt from when I was ill”, and it’s difficult not to see the gloom as reflecting the dark crisis he was emerging from, if briefly. But he also wrote that if he was to recover, it was because “I’ve cured myself through working”.
Of course, you can’t divide Van Gogh’s biography from his work, but neither can you ignore the fact that, even as he unflinchingly portrayed himself, and effects of his illness, he hoped painting would be his salvation, his escape. That commitment, that search “deep in the soul” for an original form of expression, is abundant in this extraordinary show.
