Dali House

We were just over at Van Gogh’s house in Arles the other day, and here we are again, having a good old nosy poke around.

This is what he sees.
It’s the middle of October 1888, and Vincent Van Gogh has just polished off five large canvases in one week. He writes to his brother Theo in Paris, complaining that he’s beat and, besides, the autumn winds are blinding him and coating the trees with white dust.
He stays inside and paints a picture of his room, “a new idea … this time it’s just simply my bedroom, only here colour is to do everything … “to be suggestive here of rest or of sleep in general. In a word, to look at the picture ought to rest the brain rather than the imagination.”
It doesn’t seem particularly restful to anyone else, Vincent.
“I use colour more arbitrarily in order to express myself forcibly.”
There are all three pairs of complementary colours – red and green, yellow and violet, blue and orange. Vincent was going for chromatic equilibrium to convey calm. “Diverse tones,” he wrote Gauguin, “to express an absolute restfulness.”
The perspective pulls the viewer in. Pictorial distortions, deliberate or otherwise?
Maybe the far wall with the window really was at an skewed angle. His bed overlaps the doorframe, jutting toward us. Gauguin slept on the other side of that door, in a bigger bedroom, with three windows. He had to walk through van Gogh’s room from it to the stairs to the ground floor.
There’s a tacit order. Even the cane texture at the centres of the chairs matches the other lines around them. There are two pillows, two Japanese prints, two chairs and two portraits – himself and a mysterious blonde woman who became a brunette in a later version, having been decapitated in the interim.
This was painted just before Gauguin’s visit, apparently to hang on the wall and spruce the place up a little for his expected guest, his anticipated collaborator in the great commune, the Studio of the South.
Vincent shipped the piece to Theo seven months later, long after the bickering had driven Paul away, and it arrived in Paris damaged by the late-spring humidity. Theo said he’d mend it, but first sent it back so Vincent could make a copy in case something went wrong with the original. The repairs went well, in any event, and the original now sleeps at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Van Gogh did the copy, on the top at left, in September 1889 at Saint-Rémy, where he was trying not to be crazy. It’s not a “copy”, per se; there’s a lot of re-remembering going on. Bedroom Mark II snoozes at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
He also made a third, smaller version at the same time (the lower one at left), intending it for his sister and mother. Was he fading away already? You can see it resting at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

The canvases moved often in years gone by, but the furniture in them never did, only the colours, riding the boiling clouds of Vincent’s storm through his last few sunrises and sunsets.

In Arles they’ve rebuilt the bedroom. The Provencals thought the tourists would like to see what it looked like, but the Maison jaune was levelled by a bomb in World War II (they don’t say whose), so they hired a scenographer and a set designer to fashion the famous bedroom in the museum a few steps away. “The whole idea is to recreate the feeling,” it says on a website. Even without the tracklights that’s hard to believe.

The faux room would be nice to see only because it’s in Arles. More interesting, though, and dozing handily on the Internet, is Peter Clements’ “3D” Van Gogh bedroom. Clements’ original website is being dismantled and moving here, so there are glitches between the two at the moment, but you can still see most of the fine work he’s done with a pair of software programs, Illusionist in 1993 and Atmosphere a decade later.
This is not homage to the Dutchman. He shows us the volte-face of an iconic scene, so it’s actually more like cubism. One ready starting point would have been the realisation that if you walked to the head of Van Gogh’s bed, to the window and the mirror beside it, and turned around, the first thing you’d notice would be an easel holding the famous painting.
Clements goes from there – the view from the fedora hung above the bed, for example, and a closer look at the chair in the foreground from the other side, discovering there’s a paintbox there with the name “Vincent” scratched on it. That’s just “out of view” on the bottom left in the coveted paintings.
Then there’s the view from the ceiling, the way the geckos in my apartment see me as I move through life’s days. The colours and textures of the wall and floor are all wrong, but those are the constraints of dispassionate technology. The walls, sadly, seem perfectly aligned, waiting for the World Wide Web to warp them.

Clements seems almost relieved to have found a fellow traveller on the road through Van Gogh’s imagination in Carlos Zapata, a Colombian living in Britain who builds and sells automata.
Zapata’s website has dozens of intricate mechanical contraptions that move gaily with the poke of a finger. It’s not clear exactly what his Van Gogh head does, movement-wise, but apparently it shows Vincent in the process of creating “Chair and Pipe”.