Vincent

The 2018 film by Julian Schnabel titled At Eternity’s Gate is a real gem, which somehow escaped my attention till now. Willem Dafoe brilliantly plays the painter Van Gogh in his last, highly productive years in Arles in the south of France and then Auvers-sur-Oise near Paris, up to his death there in 1890. 

The portrayal of Vincent’s inner turmoil, artistic drive and the mostly unsympathetic social environment that oppressed him, creates a compelling and mesmerising atmosphere. The hand-held cinematography takes full advantage of the famous fields and landscapes that later became synonymous with the painter. A masterly ‘art film’ about art that held me fascinated to the last scenes. 

Vincent’s death by gunshot was traditionally put down to suicide due to his mental illness, but the film shows the more recent theory that he was (accidentally?) shot by two teenagers in the area who liked playing cowboys with real guns.

Japanese art prints inspired Vincent, changing his perceptions, as he developed his own post-impressionist and original painterly style. I’m not sure though that he would have appreciated the Van Gogh iconography seen in Japan last year, which celebrates his eminent position in the Western art canon. 

In Naruto on the island of Shikoku is the weird but remarkable ‘Otsuka Museum of Art’, which reflects a reciprocal long-held Japanese fascination with European art. Possibly the largest exposition space in Japan, built into the side of a hill, it contains full size ceramic copies of masterpieces of Western art from antiquity onwards. 

A discombobulating Disneyland style experience if you ever happen to be in the area, but leave any art pretensions at the bottom of the escalator entrance, which takes you to a full-scale replica of the interior of the Sistine Chapel. Vincent occupies a special place in the Otsuka complex. Harmless fun, and of course the ceramic copies will probably outlast the originals by tens of thousands of years!