A great painter, an example not to be followed

                                   By Leon Gard

                          (Van Gogh, self-portrait)

   How not to find moving the energy with which Van Gogh, who was to become insane, fight to remain balanced in its art, whereas so many others today give each other an unimaginable sorrow to appear foolish? In 1885, he wrote: "I preserve nature a certain order of succession and a certain precision in the placement of the tone, I study nature not to make foolish things, to remain reasonable, but it imports me less than my color is précisement identical to the letter, since it makes beautiful on my fabric like it makes beautiful in the life..." Although these reflexions are written by a Dutchman in incorrect French, they are sufficiently clear.

   They mean that so that the colors "make beautiful" on a table as they make beautiful in the life, it is necessary not to literally reproduce them such as one has them under the eyes at the time when his table is carried out. _ this rule go so much of oneself that it should be almost useless to state it and I me wonder why it be and be still the object of however violent polemize. When one passes in the street, the beauty of a subject (such flowers in a vase, I suppose) struck you. You seek to find the elements of them, but the elements reconstituted with the workshop do not express your feeling completely first: they are well the same flowers, but the vase of which you lay out has a form, a matter, a color different, the flowers do not receive the same light as at the place where had admired them to you, the bottom is not the same one, etc. With force to arrange your flowers and what surrounds them you can manage to bring you closer much your first vision, but it still misses there something: this something you can put at it if your memory is very sharp and your very pure technique, and it is quite obvious that in this case you will have contravened the exactitude of the literal reproduction of what you had in front of the eyes by making your table. It can be as made as in an aspect of the reality which you find admirable inopportunely comes to interpose an object which spoils all: pylon, telegraph pole, unspecified construction, tree badly placed, etc. No true artist will say to you that you do not have the right to remove this pylon, to modify the value or the color of such object which destroys your unit, and as made it Corot add a tree which is not precisely in your visual field, because the purpose of this kind of modification is précisement to preserve all its purity, all its glare, with the true thing which struck you. Lastly, you can be in front of a whole of objects whose color or form appears to you to be able to constitute the elements of a table. Among these objects which give you satisfaction as a whole, it is of them some of which the tone does not amalgamate with the general harmony, but that you cannot remove without all to destroy. What do you make then? You make an effort while combing them, to transpose them to make them take part in the harmony. Once again, you contravened the literal reality of the reproduction, and once again, no artist will blame you; moreover, transposition is not inaccuracy but on the contrary exactitude expressed in another range.

It is quite obvious that in art the exactitude which account is that of the nuances and the oppositions, the others are of no importance. And it is well there, I believe, the thought of Van Gogh referred to above: "It imports me less than my color is précisement identical to the letter, since it makes beautiful on my fabric like it makes beautiful in the life."

   But where the misunderstanding emerges, it is as from the moment when some are recommended of Van Gogh, and good of others, to justify their arbitrary claim nothing to paint which is not inaccurate of value, form and color, and especially when they affirm that art start only starting from the inaccuracy.

   I would like that one ceased continuously exploiting this word of exactitude, of which one endeavours since a few years to make a black animal of the artists.

   One can miss with exactitude by the small side or the large one. To miss with the exactitude of the small things can be negligible; it can be advisable insofar as this failure with the small things supports the large ones: that does not want to say that exactitude is needed of nothing. If I am not mistaken, exactitude is, apart from the direction of punctuality, the state of what is in conformity with the truth. It follows that it is not any truth without exactitude, and that consequently a painting not containing any exactitude does not contain either any truth. And finally, that a painting not containing any truth does not have any weight.

   For me, I acknowledge that the effects which charm me more in the paintings of Van Gogh are effects which I constantly notice in nature and which I am filled with wonder to see translated by this major and delicate genius. Even the effects which could, at first sight, being judged completely invented, such as for example the lullaby, have natural harmonies learnedly applied. In this last case Van Gogh lines up in the large decorators like the glassmakers of the Average Age, the enamellers, the ceramists hispano-Moorish. It again did not find anything after them, and one can say that all the large decorators also found the laws of the natural harmonies to apply them various ways to the embellishment of the decoration of the life.

   However, I arrive from there at the aspect of Van Gogh by whom I think that it was a disastrous example for many painters. It acts of the time when start to appear in its paintings of the excessive deformations, the lines tortuous and blazing. Good Cézanne says to him one day without mischievousness and envisaging the catastrophe: " Sincerely, you make a painting of insane." It is necessary well to acknowledge that it is the truth; Van Gogh kept at the bottom of her spirit a terrible crack and this provision worsening ends up giving to its works a strange aspect. This pathological evolution does not decrease the size of the painter. I even think that the case this being called, watched for by another world, loan to be absorbed forever by him, being so to speak only with half on the ground and preserving through the shipwreck its single genius of painter, has something of imposing and solemn.

   But this is why that is not imitated. However, when one sees quantities of painters who are neither insane nor of genius to apply to singer the insane brilliant one, while overbidding on extravagances, one cannot prevent oneself from finding the comedy rather antipathetic, without speaking about works which are extremely ugly and tedious.