This Van Gogh exhibition had to do some pretty heavy lifting. My initial reaction had been cynical - a good money spinner to help pay for the Sainsbury Wing renovation. The National Gallery might never have held an exhibition dedicated to arguably the world's most famous artist, but everywhere else has. What more is there to be said? Having queued outside in the rain and faced with a wall of bodies and the ubiquitous camera phone junkies between me and every painting, I was pretty determined to not like this. And yet, one look across a crowded room....
Van Gogh is always better in the flesh. His work sings, his colours glow, his brushwork comes alive so that the canvases dance off the walls and into your heart. This is the great irony - an artist known for his traumatic life and death story is actually the producer of some of the most joyous, life-enhancing paintings in the history of art. And the National Gallery curators have pulled off the remarkable feat of reminding you of that. By ignoring the biography and almost forcing their visitors to just look, they have given Van Gogh new life. I took their aims to heart, ignoring the accompanying booklet which does flesh out the backstory and just soaking up the paintings and drawings on the walls. Sixty one works, which seemed to end far too quickly, which banished dreary December and pre-Christmas anxiety and belied all the cliches about self-mutilation and mental instability, about impossible friendships and unsold artworks.
The curator's premise, laid out in the opening display, of Lieutenant Milliet (The Lover), Eugene Bloch (The Poet) and The Poet's Garden, is a stretch, but a clever, convincing one. More importantly, it sets the mood, because for all that he painted the world and the people around him, Van Gogh was a dreamer, a romantic, whose representation of life was filtered through his emotional response. He has been straight-jacketed into the Impressionist/Post-Impressionist narrative but he was constrained by Paris, and rubbed up fractiously against Gauguin - there seems a far greater affinity in his work with those early twentieth century Expressionists who found love, life and community in villages like Murnau. That opening room creates a mood which successfully permeates the whole show: scrubby town parks become exotic and paradisiacal, everyday figures become iconic folk heroes.
It is not that Van Gogh is perfect. You see his weaknesses on repeat: he struggled to work out what to do with the foreground often creating canvases of two awkward halves; he was obsessed with unnecessary figures, men with splayed legs and women with angled parasols; his Japonism was often heavy-handed. He was not afraid to acknowledge his influences, rather he foregrounded them. This exhibition might only cover the period 1888-90 - the development from Dutch grunginess through anxious Impressionism is not included - but you see his homage to Jean Francois Millet, the majestic Sower, haloed by the sun who strides across a landscape sliced in two by that angled, Gauguinesque tree; you see him deliberately reference Emile Zola, Charles Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe; you see him working through the choice of flattened, blocked colour or hatched impasto. You see too, through much less familiar drawings, how much of a craftsman he was, walking miles to sketch, returning to the same images, experimenting with new materials. It is hard not to look at Van Gogh's drawings and feel the lack of colour but Weeping Tree, with the characteristic reed pen softened by black chalk, is boldly other-worldly, a mixture of Art Nouveau patterning and Mondrian's early experimentation. It doesn't weep so much as centre the whole landscape, the trunk like a spinal cortex connecting the canopy with the grasses.
The last room feels slightly anticlimactic - perhaps inevitable after the starriness of all those celebrities - the chair, the bedroom, the sunflowers, the man himself. Both the last theme (variations) and the examples feel forced - what can we do now - and there is the inevitable sense that the end isn't the end, not quite. There are exceptions: Tree Trunks in the Grass with its two strong columns of bark reduced to patchwork patterns against a fluff of greenery and almost three dimensional white flowers. As with so many of the canvases, there is no horizon, the world reduced to this tiny corner, teeming with life. Sometimes you don't need the big picture; sometimes it doesn't help to know the context, biography, the future. Van Gogh brings you into the moment with such a raw connection that you can feel the hand holding the brush at your shoulder. No other artist manages to collapse time so effectively. There is only the here and now.