Just Stop Oil activists Phoebe Plummer, 23 and Anna Holland, 22, were sentenced to two years and 20 months in jail for throwing soup over the iconic Sunflowers picture painted by Van Gogh.  No damage was done to the picture itself although the National Gallery claimed £10,000 was spent restoring the antique frame.

Nadya Tolokonnikova, a founder of the Pussy Riot collective who protested Putin’s repression, defended the protesters’ action.  She said Van Gogh would have probably been quite sympathetic. Is she right?

Although you cannot reduce an appreciation of Van Gogh’s art to a narrow political categorisation there is some truth in her contention.

Radical in his art – not the ‘crazy artist’

Along with Picasso or Frida Kalho, he is probably one of the most well-known artists among the general public. People are more likely to have seen one of his pictures than most other artists.  His life has been immortalised in Hollywood films and Don Mclean had a hit song called Vincent. His paintings now sell for millions while in his lifetime he only really sold one. His life story is also quite well known – living in Arles in Provence he fights with Gaugin, a successful painter, cuts off ear, confined to a mental hospital, paints more masterpieces and then commits suicide.

This exhibition is curated in a way that goes against a popular narrative of Van Gogh as the individual tormented genius, painting with passion and feeling but who was unrecognised as a great artist during his lifetime.  Actually he saw himself as part of an artistic community and his paintings were shown at four major exhibitions. He worked collaboratively with other painters and wanted to develop a new movement in art. True there is only one documented case of him selling a painting but when he committed suicide in 1880 he was on the cusp of breaking through.

Far from how he is presented in the big movies, notably Lust for Life in 1956 with Kirk Douglas or in At Eternity’s Gate in 2018 with William Dafoe, Van Gogh was highly cultured and familiar with contemporary literature and music. He was aware of his role in taking art into the future, using new techniques and ideas. He wished to go forward from Neo-Impressionism to develop a Symbolist and Expressionist style. He was the link to the flowering of Expressionist art from the turn of the new century.

Van Gogh wanted to move on from capturing a realistic impression of nature or people. He used colours and composition to express his feelings and ideas – a symbiosis or infusion of the landscape or portrait.  For him the landscape or people were a palate to convey emotions about love, poetry, sadness, torment and joy.

Describing his painting of a man sowing, he wrote in June 1888: “There are many touches of yellow in the soil … but I couldn’t care less what the colours are in reality.”

 

He was keen too on artists having more control over the exhibition of their art outside of the academy and the dealers. He envisaged the famous Yellow House in Arles as a sort of artistic community. Van Gogh was eager to develop a new artistic movement.

In some respects the bourgeois establishment is happier with the passionate individual artistic genius dislocated from society and outside of rebellious artistic movements. Such a representation can fit into the ‘entrepreneurial’ narrative of the individual struggling against the odds, succumbing to or triumphantly overcoming them. It ends up presenting us with a superficial and false understanding of the relationship of the artist to society. As a tormented, isolated genius he constitutes much less of a threat to bourgeois order.

Nor did he do all his painting outdoors but brought back work to be constructed and remodelled in the studio. There was an intellectual, even classical side to his art. His great understanding of Japanese art informed his final compositions. Van Gogh recognised he influence of artists like Millet or Seurat . He was in contact with a number of established and emerging artists.  

Radical relationship with Nature

I think many people today, faced with the existential threat to our planet are rediscovering an intense affinity to the natural world. This may take many forms: growing flowers or vegetables; regularly getting away from concrete and all electronic communication to ‘bathe’ ourselves in the forests, hills or coasts. Van Gogh lived his emotions and ideas through a deep relationship to nature. Not unlike the two eco activists who smeared the glass covering his beloved sunflowers with soup.

The two activists made a conscious, relevant choice of picture. Take a look closely again at the Sunflowers. In the exhibition, two versions of the picture are hung either side of the Berceuse (Lullaby or woman who rocks the cradle) which depicts an older woman. In traditional religious art this is like a Triptych which you can see in classic altarpieces. Deliberately placing pictures together was one of the radical things Van Gogh was doing so that there would be an additional artistic effect. You could not conceive of a more evocative expression of bountiful natural energy. The yellow shades, thickened with impasto technique bathe you in warmth. Imitating Japanese wood block prints. There is no perspective and an indistinct background. The strong green or red/orange edging lines reinforce the colours and impact. We are used to such illustrative techniques today but at the time they were radical in Western Art

 These activists were protesting about how fossil fuels are disrupting and destroying nature and life. Sunflowers grow through the natural interaction of the earth, water and sun. The woman is caring for new born life. Solar energy is one way we can replace fossil fuels. If you look at the flower heads you can also see that the painter is symbolically referencing a cycle of life since the heads are in varying phases of bloom.  The artist dubbed it as the flower of gratitude. We should be grateful for the beauty of the world we live in. It needs to be defended and cared for.

A personal radicalism

In his earlier works Van Gogh often depicted the lives of the working class and rural communities, reflecting the struggles and hardships of peasant life. Works like “The Potato Eaters” highlight the dignity of labourers and the harsh realities they faced.

He was religious and worked as a preacher for a time. Van Gogh started to ruffle some feathers with his superiors when he gave away his nice lodgings over a bakery to a homeless man, and moved to a hut near the workers where he slept on straw. He was eventually dismissed for these acts as they were seen to be undermining the church.

Van Gogh lived for several years in England working at an art dealer in London. Apart from introducing him to Japanese prints that influenced his compositional style, he devoured the novels of progressive novelists like Charles Dickens and George Eliot. He read the Graphic, an art magazine which advocated art that reflected social reality. Certainly he was also aware of William Morris, the artist and socialist who wanted art to be of the people.  The catalogue to the exhibition records how he stayed up late talking about socialism.

Can Art be free of politics?

More than 100 artists, curators and art historians – including Fiona Banner and Peter Kennard – made a plea for both women to be spared a jail sentence in a  protest letter organised by Greenpeace UK and Liberate Tate. The letter states:

‘ Plummer and Holland knew the painting was protected from the soup by a solid pane of glass when they threw the red-orange missive, making a Pollock-esque splatter across the mustard yellow, drooping blooms. Their iconoclasm was temporary, a sight to behold to make their protest

As artists, art workers and art historians, we are concerned by the courts’ defence of a false notion of artistic purity in their judgement and sentencing. Art can be and frequently is, iconoclasm. These activists should not receive custodial sentences for an act that connects entirely to the artistic canon’

Phoebe and Anna are still in jail. This is what Phoebe said at her trial:

‘In Parliament Square, the beating heart of democracy in the UK, there are statues of Pankhurst, Gandhi, and Mandela … Why? Because these people fought for our democracy. They battled to bring about the rights we see today. And how did they do that? They broke the law to bring about justice when the society they lived in was unjust.’

I think Van Gogh would have probably agreed

.If you want to support the imprisoned activists go to https://actionnetwork.org/forms/january-appeals-free-political-prisoners/