It's time to get back to Write...Edit...Publish..., I do hope all WEPers are coping and doing well. Keeping in
mind the ongoing pandemic situation and the personal challenges we are all
facing, WEP is going Lite this month. I'm sticking to my comfort zone of
photo-essays, aka non-fiction ramblings. I have done better this month on the
wordcount control, finally! -
Pigeon. Panic. Pandemic.
There
is nothing you can see that is not a flower; there is nothing you can think
that is not the moon.
~
Matsuo Basho
Right
in the middle of the urban nightmare to beat all nightmares, the pigeon desperately
wants to fly home. But it can’t. Borders are closed. The mind can go wherever
it wants, it can think only flowers, it can think beyond the moon, it can morph
into whatever it desires, but the body? The body is governed by the natural
laws, physics and biology and biochemistry and abstruse electrochemistry. It is
subject to boundaries both physical and geographical. There is no shaking off
its shackles. There is no escape from this city. And so it burrows back into
the mind, where it can devise its own escape and try on the grasshopper wings
again.
 |
| Credit: View from Studio (1886) |
The
rise of the city is inexorably linked to settled agriculture. And art as
we know it today is linked to it as well. If there were no public buildings –
the monuments, the necropolis, the places of worship, the town square, the
library, the parks, as also the private grounds and the sitting room, there
would be no need to hang art on walls or install statues or design frescoes and
fountains and what have you. The beginnings of Homo sapiens’ art, as with most other
beginnings, lie in Africa, in Tan-Tan
and Blombos.
Some of the prehistoric art we have remnants of, were either made to decorate living
humans with – beads and a mix of pigments to hang around and ornament various
limbs; or were independent free standing, portable figurines. A purely nomadic hunter gatherer life does not lend
itself to monumental art for obvious reasons. Rock art which dates from around
35,000-40,000 years ago or even 200,000 ya is clearly an attempt to beautify or
glorify a cave/surface which humans were at for long enough to create those
artworks. Therefore, we can safely assume that though art happened
pre-agriculture, wall art required a surface that humans stayed put at for some
time or they knew they would come back to. If there are no walls, they can’t be decorated, right?
The
ancient cities rose on the back of the Neolithic
Revolution – or settled agriculture,
in the region commonly known as the Fertile Crescent. The oldest cities such as
Jericho (9000 BCE) and Ur (6500 BCE) coalesced along its curve. The first
writing and recordkeeping happened in Ur in fact, slicing off the ‘pre-‘ from
prehistory in one fell swoop. Cities were predicated on an agricultural surplus
and humans changed profoundly, from foragers into a society based on
specialisation of labour. Not everyone needed to be growing food, so some
turned their minds and skills to other things. A non-farming class of residents
- that of the artists/artisans – grew as a corollary to settled agriculture.
The
earliest civilisations rose out of these communities in the river valleys of
Mesopotamia, India, Egypt and China. Settled agriculture meant an exponential
growth in the population, as the same piece of land could now support many
times the original inhabitants. As the civilisations grew, their cities became
political capitals, centres of education, trade and commerce hubs, forums for
artistic and creative exchange. But there was also a price to pay for this
luscious, spanking new lifestyle. An organised society meant more rigid class
divisions and inequalities leading to high crime rates. Living in close
proximity meant higher pollution, and last but not the least, diseases on an
epidemic scale. The urban nightmare started early - from ancient times.
***
***
Normality is a paved road:
it’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it.
~ Vincent van Gogh.
Vincent’s
nightmares were both urban and various. The most famous of them is the ear
incident in Arles. That happened after a heated debate with Paul Gauguin. But
there are others as well. Let the grasshopper stop whirring about for a minute
and recap his time in Paris.
In
1886, Vincent moved to Paris where his brother Theo was already working at an
art dealers. Paris had acquired the reputation of being the art capital of
Europe in prior centuries. By the time van Gogh moved there, it was in its
artistic prime – it had some of the finest painters and the art schools
associated with them. Paris was the centre where several art movements – Romanticism,
Impressionism, Cubism, Fauvism, Art Deco etc evolved. Van Gogh arrived in Paris
splat in the middle of the Impressionist movement - Monet and Pissarro were
already established. Vincent admired the old masters he saw in the Paris museums,
at first he didn’t like the Impressionists much. But that changed a year on –
he started experimenting with the loose brushstrokes and lighter, brighter colour
palettes of the Impressionists. His art evolved at an exponential, breath-taking
pace. He worked in the studio of Fernand Cormon and found inspiration from his
circle of artist friends such as Emile Bernard and Paul Gauguin.
However,
living in Paris drained him, even as it elevated his art and grew him as an
artist. He smoked and drank too much, ate poorly, the pace of the big city wore
him down.
It seems to me almost impossible to be able
to work in Paris, unless you have a refuge in which to recover and regain
your peace of mind and self-composure. Without that, you’d be bound to get
utterly numbed.
~ Letter to Theo van Gogh, Arles, 21st Feb 1888
I could never get used to climbing the
stairs in Paris, and was always dizzy in a dreadful nightmare that
has left me here, but recurred regularly there.
~ Letter to Willemien van Gogh,
Arles, June 1888
The
self-portrait he painted in Paris reflected this, he looks exhausted and
depressed. And he described it as such to his sister Wil ‘with…wrinkles in forehead and around the mouth, stiffly wooden, a
very red beard, quite unkempt and sad.’
 |
| Credit: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam |
Paris
ultimately gave Vincent the artistic lift-off he had sought, but he had had to pay
a heavy price.
WC - 1054
FCA
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