Curator Karen Serres reflects on the role that portraiture plays in defining the post-Impressionist painter.
There is something uncanny in the hands of a painter. Something that flows through their fingers and reaches the end of the brush, leaving a trace on the canvas. A connection that unveils what is in fact behind a hasty stroke, and conveys the signs of an artist’s time and space. Now, imagine you slightly move back, open your eyes wide and realise that their fingers, their hands, along with the rest of their body, can be viewed. This is the magic of self-portraits.
In the case of post-Impressionist master Vincent van Gogh, 16 of such works are displayed in an unmissable exhibition at The Courtauld Gallery until 8 May.
The time spans from 1886 to 1889. In four years, his technique, his colours and his clothes would change. But, most interestingly, he himself would change. As if, underlying one of the prominent names in Western art history, there were more identities, more personas all converging into this versatile painter’s space.
To fully understand the nuances of van Gogh, I spoke to Dr Karen Serres, Curator of Paintings at The Courtauld Gallery and more recently, curator of the exhibition.
Hi, Karen. I had the chance to visit the exhibition you and your team worked on. Was it challenging to set it up?
Yes, is the short answer, but not for the reasons that one would expect. There is always so many van Gogh exhibitions in the world and we wanted to do an exhibition that was different. We always knew that it was going to be something around the self-portrait of the bandaged ear, which is in our collection, but we didn’t know which direction to take it in.
What have you done?
We started looking at other self-portraits exhibitions. We were surprised that there hadn’t been one in the past, but that is because these works are so in demand, that it is just really difficult to get them all at the same time in the same place. We sent out our first loan letter seven years ago. All of the loans that we asked for were agreed, but the real challenge was finding the right date, then further complicated by the pandemic.
Why did you choose to focus on self-portraiture?
For van Gogh, there is a notion of just your own features being very familiar. They are ever shifting, but they are also very intimate. It is something very captivating to return to over time because you notice new things, you represent new things.
What was your goal?
We only have two rooms at The Courtauld and we really wanted the exhibition to move away from the myth of the tortured genius while being very focused, so as to let people leave having enjoyed the works but also having learned something and actually changed or perhaps challenged the way you think about some of his works.
Do you think you succeeded?
It was easy for a van Gogh exhibition to be very blockbuster-y as it is such a famous name, but I think it actually shows the evolution of his style and life through one single motif; it makes it more complicated. You can really take time and look at each work one by one, and then you’re also able to make relationships.
The idea you have when you are in the rooms is that van Gogh was many things at once. How many alter egos can visitors spot in the exhibition?
It is subjective, but a lot of his persona is really wrapped up and projected into those works. It is only when you look around that you have all these people looking at you, that there is a physical relationship which is very important. I think one identity is definitely the more traditional Parisian, bourgeois man that you do not know what his profession is. He is really just well-dressed and often with a felt hat.
Then you have his identity as a painter, when he’s wearing the blue smock and the straw hat. Later on, he employs self-portraiture when he is recovering from some kind of crisis. There, you really feel that there is much more charge and you can tell that he is almost using this as a lifeboat.
If we compare van Gogh to other artists who used self-portraiture, do you think we would discover a similar application of this technique?
There was an exhibition a few years ago at the Royal Academy by a Finnish artist called Helene Schjerfbeck who would illustrate her old age truthfully, in a very stark way. Previously, other artists like Gustave Courbet and Paul Gauguin had played much more with their identity. Some of them dressed up, sometimes they changed their periods or wore other clothing and they did that on purpose to unsettle the viewer.
How does van Gogh differ?
There is no faking in him and everything feels very honest. Moreover, I think what is unique about him is the timescale. He evolved so much during his time in Paris, and then just as he was finding this recognisable and very powerful style, his mental health crisis happened. It is thought-provoking to see these compressed moments work together or against each other.
Even colours tend to change over time. What can this transformation tell us about van Gogh as an artist and as a human being?
What is most fascinating, and that is also why we wrote down the months, is actually how quickly this happens. You can see this evolution almost from month to month. He goes from the darker colours that he took from Rembrandt and then as soon as he knows more, and looks at more works by the Impressionists, he definitely adopts their much lighter colours. And then as he evolves over those four years, he uses these very bold pure colours like pure orange or pure blue. This is a progression that you see in his other works as well, but it’s obviously not as easy to see because the motifs are different.
In the second room visitors can also find van Gogh’s chair and his portrait of the Belgian painter Eugène Boch, respectively from collections at the National Gallery and Musée d’Orsay, as if these paintings contributed to the overall idea of his identity. Why did you include them?
We wanted to slightly push the notion of self-representation a bit beyond, just having his self-portraits to make people think a little bit more and indeed to be able to compare how he represented himself and how he represented other people and things as well. We had a very long debate about Eugene Boch’s portrait.
Did you disagree?
Even during the time, people said that Boch and van Gogh looked alike. They had the same slightly angular features, the same little beard and the dark blonde hair. We were worried that people were going to think actually that it that it was van Gogh and it was going to get complicated. Yet one of the reasons why he did some portraits, he says, was as an exercise to become a really good portrait painter of other people. As he wrote about this person being an ideal artist, we felt that there was so much of his own projection into this work that we wanted to include it but to be honest we were not 100% sure how it was going to work.
What can you tell me about the background of this work?
The backgrounds in his own self-portraits are very vague, abstract. They don’t represent anything and the only one that actually depicts something is The Courtauld’s self-portrait with bandaged ear where you can actually have a recognisable backdrop. What is gripping in the Boch’s is that it is not only recognisable, but also imaginary. This starry sky is a really nice comparison between a real kind of identifiable background and then a dreamy scene that is so important for van Gogh.
Do you think the choice of self-portraiture contributed to the success of this exhibition?
I think self-portraiture has taken a new residence for people. Several people have commented that it you look at self-portraits differently after the pandemic. Maybe we now have a different relationship to it, as before there was a notion that if an artist was making a self-portrait, they were being very vain or narcissistic. I hope now that, looking at this exploration of our features, it is a little bit more nuanced in our minds and there is a moving aspect to it.
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This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
The exhibition is presented in The Courtauld’s new Denise Coates Exhibition Galleries and is the first in The Morgan Stanley Series of high-profile temporary exhibitions at The Courtauld.
Book your tickets here. This is how to get to the exhibition:
