OSK/Van Gogh Museum Visiting Fellow in the History of 19th Century Art
Van Gogh Fellow 2023: Belinda Thomson, Honorary Professor Edinburgh College of Art
Dates: 11-16 June 2023 (Tutorial data: 27 February, 11 April and 5 June – 13.00-16.00hrs)
Venue: Van Gogh Museum & University of Amsterdam
Open to: RMa students
Credits: 6 EC
Coordination: Dr Rachel Esner (UvA)
To register: Please contact Dr. Rachel Esner: r.esner@uva.nl (putting “VGM Visiting Fellow” in the subject line). Please supply a short statement of motivation.
In the week of 11-16 June 2023 (Research) MA students in Art History and related fields will have the opportunity to participate in the annual Van Gogh Museum Visiting Fellow in the History of Nineteenth-Century Art seminar, sponsored by the Van Gogh Museum, the Research School for Art History (OSK), and the University of Amsterdam.
The aim of the Van Gogh Museum Visiting Fellow in the History of Nineteenth-Century Art seminar is to provide MA students with the opportunity to study a single yet wide-ranging subject in nineteenth-century art through an intensive one-week workshop taught by a leading scholar in the field and supported by the Van Gogh Museum. The seminar will introduce students to important issues in the study of nineteenth-century art and provide an impulse for further research. Its aim is to encourage interest in various aspects of the discipline, and to provide students not only with factual information, but more importantly with new methodological and theoretical perspectives on this important period in the history of art.
This year’s Visiting Fellow is Prof. Dr. Belinda Thomson, Honorary Professor in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh. As a specialist of late nineteenth-century French art, Thomson has written books and articles on impressionism and post-impressionism and on Gauguin, Vuillard, Bonnard, Van Gogh, and Pissarro, including Gauguin by Himself (2001) and Van Gogh’s Paintings: The Masterpieces (2007). She is a co-author of the exhibition catalogue Gauguin: Maker of Myth (2010). In addition, she was an advisory consultant and contributing author to the exhibition Gauguin, Paris, 1889 (2009–2010) at the Cleveland Museum of Art and at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. In 2015 she was made Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in recognition of her work on French art and contributions to the art-historical field.
Curating Their Legacies
The Packaging and Presentation of Van Gogh and Gauguin
To succeed you have to have ambition, and ambition seems absurd to me.’
Vincent to Theo, 23-25 July 1887.
‘But I believe that Gauguin will never give up the battle of Paris; he has that too much at heart, and believes in a lasting success more than I do.’
Vincent to Theo, 13 August 1888.
The theme of this year’s seminar will be the enduringly fascinating relationship between Van Gogh and Gauguin, particularly as it played out in their artistic legacies. While Van Gogh was sceptical of ambition and felt Gauguin to be far more motivated by dreams of success, both artists were destined to achieve posthumous recognition beyond their wildest dreams. For different reasons, their reputations loom immensely large today and speak to contemporary critical issues; their ‘brands’ are subject to manipulation from many directions. Van Gogh has, arguably, never been more popular, thanks to the immersive exhibition currently on tour which invites viewers to enter into his world through his words combined with his images, technically enhanced. Whether this is an example of commercialised hagiography or a legitimate inclusive outreach to new audiences, it certainly goes well beyond anything Van Gogh could have envisaged. Gauguin’s paintings fetch record sums on the art market yet his personal reputation veers from high to low depending on the point of view of the beholder. International scholars discover nuance and complexity in his art’s diversity and surprisingly advanced and wide-ranging thinking in his writings, yet contemporary artists from the Pacific roundly critique what they see as his imagery’s reductive legacy in their islands and so-called ‘cancel culture’ would dismiss him based on assumptions of immorality or paedophilia.
Over the course of the week’s study, we will look at how all this began. Although around 1900 there were no recognized career paths in public relations or reputational management; rather, different actors promoted Van Gogh’s and Gauguin’s achievements and influenced how audiences came to terms with them. During the seminar we will return to the first words and images available at the start of the process of forging these two intertwined reputations, asking who these agents were, how the artists’ stories were framed and whose interests were served. Concentrating on the period 1889-1906 and looking at specific comparisons of individual works and their fluctuating fortunes and market values, we will seek to chart the artists’ changes in reputation.
Bearing in mind the interval of thirteen years between Van Gogh’s death in 1890 and Gauguin’s in 1903 and Gauguin’s absence from Europe for much of that time, we will examine, through a variety of texts, the trickle-down appearance of knowledge about Van Gogh, from the first exhibitions 9notably those in which the two artists’ works were seen together) and the publication by Emile Bernard of an edited selection of Vincent’s letters in the Mercure de France in 1893. To what extent did these events shape Gauguin’s strategic management of his own presentation via exhibitions and the printed media? What other agents need to be considered – fellow artists, critics, journalists, editors or family members – names such as Camille Pissarro, Albert Aurier, Jo van Gogh-Bonger, Octave Mirbeau, Charles Morice, Daniel de Monfreid, André Fontainas, Julius Meier-Graefe, Mette Gauguin, Pola Gauguin? Did the respective courting of sympathetic critics and journalists by what increasingly came to be seen as the two artists’ separate camps fatally embed an impression of competition and contest between Van Gogh and Gauguin? Who was responsible for that and has it skewed our understanding of their relationship?
The seminar will kick off on Sunday, 11 June, with a public lecture entitled Curating their Legacies: The Packaging and Presentation of Van Gogh and Gauguin, and is intended to launch some of these strands of enquiry.
The three seminars will be developed sequentially around specific readings from such online sources as: Vincent van Gogh The Letters; the new translation of Gauguin’s Avant et après (Courtauld Institute of Art); and books: Gauguin, Correspondance; Lettres à Daniel de Monfreid and Letters to his Wife and Family; the biography of Jo van Gogh-Bonger by Hans Luijten; Emile Bernard, Les Lettres d’un Artiste; essays on each artist (Isaacson, Aurier, Morice, Mirbeau) and downloaded extracts from contemporary journals such as the Mercure de France, translated where necessary. Further details will be provided in January.
We will also take the opportunity to visit the exhibition Van Gogh in Auvers and to examine examples of prints and works on paper by both artists and their immediate contemporaries in the Van Gogh Museum print room.
Practical Information
The seminar will consist of three sessions of three hours each, plus an afternoon excursion. A public introductory lecture will take place at the Van Gogh Museum on Sunday, 11 June. The exact location and days of the seminar and the excursion will be announced well in advance.
Students will be supplied with the themes of the sessions and a list of readings in advance (mid-January). These will introduce the material and issues of the seminar and are required, whether you are taking the seminar for credit or not (see below).
N.B. A reading knowledge of French will be a distinct advantage but most of the selections will be available in English.
As part of any art-history or related Research Masters program, the Van Gogh Museum Visiting Fellow seminar can be followed as a 6 EC tutorial (limited to 5 students). On the basis of the readings supplied, tutorial students will be expected to develop a research question and proposal, plus a bibliography on their chosen topic for a paper of 3,000-3,500 words, on which their grade will be based. During the spring semester (March-May) these students will meet three times together with the supervising lecturer (Dr. Rachel Esner) to discuss their proposed project. Before the start and after the end of the seminar students will then be expected to work on their projects independently. The final paper will be due at the end of June (date to be announced). Exact instructions will follow in January.
Students from the UvA can register as they would for a regular class (from 2 December). Students from other universities should send an email to the coordinator. As the number of places is strictly limited, preference will be given to Research Masters students; students from other programs will be admitted on a first come, first serve basis.
Auditors (MA students and professionals) are, however, also welcome.
Interested in either the tutorial or attending as an auditor? Contact Dr. Rachel Esner: r.esner@uva.nl for more information (please put “VGM Visiting Fellow” in the subject line).