Feeling Blue? Art Criticism in Van Gogh's Paris Self-Portraits
Jason Wu, Princeton Class of 2009Self-Portrait with Straw Hat (1887), a van Gogh self-portrait done in Paris, is one of his most intriguing yet most neglected works. The artist’s morose eyes stare out from his face in half-profile, facing to the left, and the world-weary expression initially appears to support the view of critics such as James Risser, who explains van Gogh’s self-portraits as a sustained search for identity.
“The unfolding image portrayed in [the self-portraits] seemingly parallels the life of the artist…We see in [them] what we know all too well of this painter’s life: the growing frenzy of an unfinished life more and more out of control” (Risser 151).
Self-Portrait with Straw Hat (1887) initially appears amenable to Risser’s evaluation. In this work, the painter depicted himself wearing a smock of intense blue before a background done almost entirely in gray but with noticeable smudges of blue—most notably in the top right corner. Overall the painting appears to be unfinished, a hastily done portrait that the painter abandoned to create more lasting works.
In its incomplete state we can precisely read “an unfinished life,” and in the wild strokes of haphazard blue in the background and splashed across the artist’s garments we are instantly confronted with the sense of growing “more and more out of control.”
But is this an accurate evaluation? On the one hand, Risser seems to have legitimate cause for envisioning van Gogh’s self-portrait as psychological self-analysis, a painting that “[reveals] an emotional intensity hiding beneath the surface” (Risser 151). But is the chaotic surface effect of the blue in this painting actually a form of self-criticism, the artist’s own intense and emotional despair over his loss of control—or is it representative of an underlying aesthetic whose focus is not the painter himself? An intriguing alternative exists: van Gogh may not have painted the self-portraits as psychoanalytical evaluations of himself, but instead merely as experiments in technique. The artist often stated that he painted himself only because he lacked other models (van Gogh 3: 201), a view found in the critical work of both Richard Kendall (Kendall 84) and T.J. Shackelford (Shackelford 121). Perhaps, then, van Gogh was not trying to learn about himself but about art as a whole while painting these portraits and hence we ought to read the self-portraits as a series of statements about art itself. The key to this analysis may be a careful exploration of the idiosyncratic color symbolism van Gogh attached to the color blue. Unlike our everyday association of blue with melancholy or ennui, the artist imagined blue as a symbol for the infinite or the limitless (Estienne 34). Such a view calls into question the trope that self-portraits such as van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with Straw Hat (1887) were a psychological profile of the artist’s melancholy or despair. Instead, when we consider blue’s special symbolic role as the infinite in van Gogh’s Paris self-portraits, we discover a new narrative describing the painter’s own aesthetic: his insistence that the future of art lay in expressive rather than realistic methods.
The Exhibit
Context
The Developing Aesthetic
Much To Do about Blue Halos
Artist at the Easel
The Neglected Portrait Revisited
Works Cited
The Gallery
Anomalies of Realistic Portraiture
For My Friend Gauguin: Another Blue Portrait
Worlds of Blue: Other Van Gogh Paintings
Blue: History of a Color
About the Author
