MEETING VINCENT VAN GOGH

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Vincent van Gogh, Antonin Artaud, pic: Musée d’Orsay

Who is the world’s longest-lived person? That record belongs to the Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment (1875-1997), who died in Arles at the age of 122.

Calment spent her whole life in the same village. It was there, in her early teens, she met Vincent van Gogh. Several times, in her father’s shop, she sold the artist his cloth and colours.

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Jeanne Calment, who believed in life to the full

Calment described the painter as dirty and unattractive; she also remembered him as rough and “impolite”. To her was a clochard, a scary street person she usually tried to avoid.

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Entry to the show, pic: Musée d’Orsay

I thought about Jeanne Calment at the Musée d’Orsay show Van Gogh/Artaud. The exposition marries two artists who were obsessed with suicide: the red-headed painter and the actor-author Antonin Artaud. Really, Artaud’s story is just as tragic as that of Van Gogh. An actor whose unique face haunts the show in movie clips, he is famous for his book The Theater of Cruelty.

Officially a manifesto for the stage, it advocates showing truths the spectator may not want to see. Artaud longed for more than role-playing onstage; he wanted rituals, gestures and transcendence. His idea of spectacle was how Van Gogh saw everyday life.

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Artaud as Marat in the epic Abel Gance film “Napoleon”

Their shared exhibition is structured around an essay – Artaud’s Van Gogh le suicidé de la socièté (Van Gogh, death by society). In 1947, after years in a psych ward, the actor went to see a Van Gogh show in Paris. Stunned by what he felt was the critical condescension to it, he penned a personal defense of the painter’s vision.

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“Sunflowers”, Vincent van Gogh; pic: Musée d’Orsay

Chilling but compassionate, it makes a vivid guide to the works: As I write, the bleeding face of the painter appears to me. In a mass of gutted sunflowers, in an astounding conflagration, in a thick cloud of hyacinth purple and brilliant blue pastures. And all of this amidst an almost meteoric bombardment of atoms, all of which make themselves visible grain by grain.

Artaud felt the viewer could not accept what Van Gogh showed. The public’s rejection of it, he claimed, impelled the artist’s death. Standing in front of works which vibrate so intensely, one can see that both Artaud – and Calment – had a point. Up close, the short, vehement brush strokes clearly seem violent.

"Wheat Field with Crows" projected; pic: Musée d'Orsay

“Wheat Field with Crows” projected; pic: Musée d’Orsay

The only major Van Gogh missing is “Wheat field with Crows” – the painting which represents his final working hours. Too frail to travel, it is shown as a wall projection. A booming soundtrack of Artaud’s text fills the room.

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Jardin des Plantes, pic: Steve Sampson

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Jardin des Plantes, pic: Steve Sampson

There was one eerie coincidence in the show. Only days earlier, in the Jardin des Plantes, I was drawn by a crowd admiring some stunning flowers. I’d never seen them before but they were orange fritillaria. Suddenly, in the show, here they were again – a calm oasis midst a haze of hallucination.

It was a bouquet – now well over a hundred years old – that had once entranced Van Gogh. It was a different Paris spring.

VG2• Jeanne Calment did well all round. Marriage to a wealthy first cousin brought her a life of ease (and she survived him by fifty-five years). At 90, she sold her property to their lawyer via viager – a deal where one pays an older owner monthly “in advance” of their death. But Calment outlived her purchaser and his widow was still paying when she died.

When she was 114, Jeanne played herself in a film called Vincent et moi. In 1996, she even cut a rap CD, La Farandole.

Entry to the show, pic: Musée d'Orsay

Entry to the show, pic: Musée d’Orsay

Everyone gets in on a good museum show...

Everyone gets in on a good museum show…