No Blue Without Yellow

It seems that Emile Bernard, van Gogh's pen-pal, was soon to cross the Mediterranean to North Africa, to serve with Lieutenant Milliet in the French Army. VG was waxing on, artist to artist, about perceived local color.
"What I should like to find out is the effect of an intenser blue in the sky. Fromentin and Gérôme see the soil of the South as colourless, and a lot of people see it like that. My God, yes, if you take some sand in your hand, if you look at it closely, and also water, and also air, they are all colourless, looked at in this way. There is no blue without yellow and without orange, and if you put in blue, then you must put in yellow, and orange too, mustn't you?"
The compliment was the thing to our man van Gogh.

External Evidence of van Gogh's Appearance

Vincent in Conversation with Felix Feneon, Paris 1888. Lucien Pissarro (1863-1944).



Here is a photo of a street scene in Paris showing Emile Bernard facing, and the famous keener's back to us. Darn!


This is very fresh, given our subject of the collaboration in the Yellow House:
Vincent at the easel, Paul Gauguin, 1888.

Toulouse-Lautrec de Henri has given us this very nice drawing of van Gogh. Ritratto di Vincent van Gogh, 1887. It shares, I think, the same pigments VVG used in his self portrait shown in my last post. It is also a pastel, which Lautrec was known to have used.

Paul Gauguin's Vision of the Sermon

Vision of the Sermon, Gauguin 1888

This painting, of Breton women observing
Jacob wrestling the angel, was one of the works that fed the collaboration at the yellow house.

The flat plane of red, with figures sort of floating about, the use of pure colors, and the use of imagination are breakthroughs evidenced in this work, and others from this time.

Van Gogh and Gauguin, and also Emile Bernard by postal connections, were creating one the greatest "synergies" of artistic change in history at this "Studio of the South". Read some interesting history (The Art Institute of Chicago) and criticism (author not named, Telegraph U.K.) here and here.


Arles, France residence of Gauguin and van Gogh