Vincent van Gogh, The Bedroom, 1889

Vincent van Gogh, The Bedroom, 1889, oil on canvas, 29 x 36-5/8 inches / 73.6 x 92.3 cm (Art Institute of Chicago)

'Only here colours do everything

and by its simplification a grandeur style do things

is to be suggestive here first of rest or of sleep in general in a world looking at the picture or to rest the brain

or raven the imagination.'

So the passage that you've just read came from a letter

Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo and it actually refers to the first version of this painting.

But the passage that stands out for me in this painting 'colour has to do everything'.

It applies equally well to this painting and when I think about that phrase,

I think about a radical idea that happens in the end of the ninteenth century

with painting in the formal elements of colour, the lines, the shapes.

Painters began to explore the way that these elements can be expressive on their own.

When you are talking about this root of abstraction itself, so it's not that this is the representative.

It's that formal qualities of painting itself can have its own experiential aspect.

Rather like music which is pure tone, colour also, form also could have an emotional value.

That is right! That the lines that make up this painting, that the sense of solidity, that the colours,

that the harmonies between the colours, the relationship of the shapes, that these things could suggest an idea

or emotion. Regardless of what they represent. Moving away from the idea of art copying the real world.

And in this case the idea that Van Gogh wanted to represent was one of peacefulness and harmony, and repose.

For so many people, they think about van Gogh's brushwork and they think about his biography.

But listening to artist's own words, you realize that his intention was on the structural qualities and emotional qualities of colour.

And although we can see his brushwork and the pillows where the paint almost seems to describe the puffiness of the pillows.

And even other is the sense of space tilting up when rushing backward too quickly and things seeming slightly askew.

I do get that sense from the painting of Van Gogh trying to create a world here in this yellow house in Arles Lamartine

moved from Paris, a place that could be the basis for a community, a place for artists to come and a place to focus on making art.

And there is something about the simplicity of the space that feels so different than the materialism and sophistication of Paris.

So this is a refuge and a deeply personal one, but he has created the space with such love and such care.

He is in a sense inviting us to feel right at home. And loving, care in a diferent way that we may normally expect.

The care that I meant was the care that is based on his observation. His experience in this room, his having touched that seat,

his having slept in that bed, his intimate experience that he has been able to convey to us with an extraordinary immediacy.

Think for a second of the sophistication of the Paris art world and the expectation of a Parisian audience

and look at that wooden night-standard toilet table as he called it in his letter.

It looks like it was drawn by a child. It has no modulation, it has blue outer lines and the colour is otherwise flat,

the perspective doesn't make sense. I think this painting must have looked like it was made by an artist who wasn't trained properly.

And, yet his professionalism does really work through a catalogue of the styles of the ninteenth century beginning, for instance

with the art of people like Millet and moving through impressionists, and then really paying attention to

the neo-impressionist people like Seurat and here finding a very direct application of paint

that I think for Van Gogh felt absolutely authentic. Authenticity is the keyword I think for a lot of artists

including Gaugin and at the end of the eighteen 80s and the beginning of the eighteen 90s.

This idea of finding authentic experience and that being not the the experience of the city.

This looks back to some of the ideas that surround the works of Rysselberghe. But this is clear contrast

between the sophistication of the city and in the sense that the truth and directness of the country.

Van Gogh has been able to convey beautifully. This is a painting that is also meant to be a kind of invitation

to his friends form the North that he was hoping would come down and join him.

He has an idea of creating a rather utopian setting for artists to make art away from the city in some sort of communion with nature.

Van Gogh gives us a kind of an extraordinarily sophisticated innocence.