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(jazzy piano music)
Female: We left the PIcasso and we're walking
to the 19th century room and we pass
Van Gogh's Portrait of Joseph Roulin,
the postman, from 1889.
You stopped and said this is one of your
favorite Van Goghs.
Male: It is.
I find it much more interesting than
Starry Night.
Maybe it's because I can get in front of it
and it's usually ignored.
Female: No one is standing here
and looking at it at all.
Male: Exactly, but also because this is
a painting that, at least in his handling of
the paint itself, is much flatter.
The paint is much thinner.
Female: That's true.
There's no real sense of pushing around
gooey gobs of paint as there is in Starry Night.
Male: That's right.
Immediately in this painting you don't
have to get through the thing that people
criticize about Van Gogh, and you can start
to see what he did that was much more interesting,
especially in terms of color and in terms
of making things difficult.
This is in some ways a really difficult painting.
It's a portrait.
It's straight on.
Portraits, traditionally, are at three-quarter
to be much more flattering, but here it's straight on.
It's like a mug shot.
Female: It's Byzantine almost.
It's like an icon of Christ;
frontal and very powerful
with a decorative background.
It's very much like a Byzantine mosaic to me.
Male: I think that's absolutely right.
Then even more, sort of, unnerving for me
is that there's far too much space
above the man's head.
Female: He's very low down in his seat.
Male: He is; so that his eyes are almost perfectly centered.
Female: That's true.
And they're almost directly parallel
to ours as we stand here.
Male: That's exactly right.
It gives him a sense of rootedness
and a sense of solidity
and a sense of almost sort of a low sense of gravity
that makes him even more powerful
and accentuates that sense of his permanence.
Female: There's a Christ-likeness about him
in his beard as well.
Male: I want to talk a little bit about
the back story here because I think
it informs all these ideas.
Roulin was one of the first people
that Van Gogh befriended when he came
to Arles towards the end of his life.
He worked in the train station.
This painting was actually made after
the postman actually left this town
for a better job.
I think it was in Toulouse.
Art historians are wondering whether or not
this was painted from memory or perhaps
it was a temporary visit.
But it was somebody who had become
a kind of father figure to the artist.
In fact, this was the man who looked after
the artist after he had cut his ear
and had that terrible fight with Gauguin.
Here he is, it becomes a kind
of a memorial in some sense.
It's somebody that the artist has lost in his life
and somebody who had been very important to him.
That sense of permanence, I think, is valuable.
Female: Sort of capturing the essense of someone,
the idea of someone, instead of who they are
in a kind of transient, momentary way.
Male: Can I point out one of the aspects
of the painting that I love?
Female: Sure.
Male: Which is color.
Female: He's obviously thinking a lot about color,
and complimentary colors.
Male: Absolutely.
In a traditional portrait, not only is this wrong
in all the ways that we've already discussed,
at least according to tradition,
but there is no shadow.
Look at the way that he's able to turn
the architecture of the face without actually
referring to the shift of tone of light and shadow.
There's no chiaroscuro in the traditional sense.
Female: It's not only by color.
Male: It's and by line.
Female: The hatching actually reminds me
of tempera painting from the Renaissance
when they would
Male: Turn the face.
Female: Because you couldn't mottle with tempera paint
and blend the paint the way you can with oil.
But here, Van Gogh is using oil, but still using
that hatching to mottle the face.
Male: Exactly, and he's also, as you mentioned,
using complimentary colors.
Look especially at the way in which the eyelids
protrude from the concavity of the socket of the eye.
He's doing that by placing that beautiful
red-orange against that green.
The tension pushes that eyelid forward
in the most visible and really successful way.
He's doing it really without light and shadow.
Female: Yeah, it almost looks like it's
entirely structured on thinking about
complimentary colors.
There's blue and yellow.
There's green and red.
It's almost the subject of the painting.
Male: His ability, his sort of intense
meditation on how color functions with structure
that I find most interesting about this artist.
By the way, I think that it will be people
like Mastisse that really take these ideas
into the 20th century and really think about
the way that color functions as a structural element.
(jazzy piano music)