Partners in art: an international exhibition examines the art of van Gogh and Gauguin in light of their contentious yet crucial relationship. Combining a wealth of significant loans, fresh technical data and an inventive installation, the show promises to become a landmark of both scholarly research and museumship - Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South

Art in America, May, 2002 by Charles Stuckey

Of course, that generalization about signature colors is seemingly at odds with the yellow background color of Gauguin's Self-Portrait Dedicated to Vincent van Gogh (Les Miserables), painted in late September 1888, a month before he came to Arles. This is among the exhibition's many highlights, since the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has previously been reluctant to lend the extremely fragile work. It is the first of many interrelated self-portraits, all seemingly based on a single lost photograph or transfer drawing, in which Gauguin asserts the prominence of his own nose as if it were a sign of character or heritage. (9) In a famous letter to van Gogh, Gauguin provided his own eloquent explanation for the painting of himself in the role of the fictional criminal Jean Valjean, from Victor Hugo's stirring novel Les Miserables (1862). Although Gauguin had already portrayed himself as an outcast in a garret in the 1885 Self-Portrait at the Easel, painted around the time he abandoned his family in Copenhagen to return to Paris, Druick and Zegers suggest that he probably first read Les Miserables in 1888, thanks to van Gogh's encouragement. (10) As for the self-portrait's background of yellow floral wallpaper, did Gauguin, knowing van Gogh had leased the Yellow House in Arles, design the picture to harmonize with van Gogh's decor? The painting was, after all, undertaken as a gift to send to Arles in exchange for a self-portrait by van Gogh. Or does the yellow background indicate how, even before his arrival in Arles, Gauguin decided to see himself in van Gogh's terms? That seems unlikely. Yellow backgrounds were still exceptional in van Gogh's own works in September 1888, around which time the Dutch artist was mostly under the influence of the leading Impressionists. Auguste Renoir had painted heads with yellow backgrounds in 1880, and one of these was re-exhibited in Paris in May 1888, but van Gogh was already in Arles by then, and Gauguin was in Brittany. (11)

Whether or not Gauguin should be understood as indebted to van Gogh with respect to the color yellow, van Gogh was rather more clearly in Gauguin's debt when he decided on a floral wallpaper motif background for Madame Roulin Rocking the Cradle, begun in December 1888. Writing to Gauguin in January 1889, van Gogh explained that he had just started back to work on this painting, which had remained incomplete with respect to the hands. Without mentioning the floral wallpaper background to Gauguin, van Gogh judged the painting to be the finest Impressionist arrangement of colors he had yet invented. (12) Except for a few paintings by Pissarro and Cezanne and a few late works by the Impressionists' mentor, Edouard Manet, however, such floral wallpaper backgrounds are not an Impressionist concern. Just when van Gogh added the floral wallpaper is unclear, but when he first refers to it in letters of January 1889, he gives no credit to Gauguin. Gauguin's Self Portrait (Les Miserables) was seemingly on van Gogh's mind, however, as he went on to paint four additional versions of Madame Roulin Rocking the Cradle, as well as three new versions of a portrait of her husband the postman and a portrait of Dr. Felix Rey, all with the same sort of floral wallpaper background.