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

Considering their interest in the dialogue between the two artists, it is baffling that Druick and Zegers make so little of this connection. After all, they include the most minute details that might be understood as evidence of what they characterize as Gauguin's "shameless" dependence on van Gogh's ideas. To suggest how obsessively Gauguin recollected van Gogh during the summer of 1889, for example, they claim that he then took to playing Schumann's Cradle Song on his mandolin. Yet there is no record that van Gogh ever mentioned Schumann. Would Gauguin, as the father of five children, need van Gogh's prompting to play lullabies? Indeed, Gauguin's earliest works with decorative wallpaper backgrounds are portraits of his children fallen asleep, perchance with lullabies. (13)

A part from splitting hairs over who did or did not influence whom, the weighty catalogue demonstrates Druick and Zegers's truly formidable command of visual details. Among their numerous new insights, for example, is the close connection between the rope held by the sitter in Madame Roulin Rocking the Cradle and a vignette illustration showing a piece of cut rope that appeared in Tartarin sur les Alpes, Alphonse Daudet's 1885 novel about mountain climbers who abandon one another. This signals how van Gogh, in characteristic fashion, recognized a parallel between the situation in the book and the collapse of his partnership with Gauguin in Aries. (14)

Another remarkable Observation, which the authors credit to their conservation colleague, Cornelia Peres, is the fact that the sitter's corsage in van Gogh's The Arlesienne, one of his yellow-background paintings, is a fairly exact copy of one of the pale pink flowers from the wallpaper background of Gauguin's Self-Portrait (Les Miserables). (15) Given van Gogh's tendency at the end of 1888 to paint monochrome backgrounds, it is tempting to wonder whether Gauguin himself added the detail as a sort of commentary.

By the time he first met Gauguin in Paris at the end of 1887, van Gogh was extremely well read, and his Parisian Novels, a still life including nearly two dozen books, could be understood as a serf-portrait by proxy. With impressive book learning to share, van Gogh had the capacity, .according to Druick and Zegers, to contribute ideas for a new persona to Gauguin. For example, they point out that Gauguin first explicitly staked a claim to Peruvian ancestry shortly after they met. He received two "Sunflowers" paintings in an exchange with van Gogh, who would have realized that the sunflower, originating in Peru, provided a perfect emblem for his new colleague. (16) Assuming it was van Gogh who encouraged Gauguin's consideration of the Inca, van Gogh presumably played some catalytic role in the genesis of one of the late 19th century's most bizarre sculptures, a ceramic vase by Gauguin that was exhibited in Paris under the auspices of Theo van Gogh, in January 1888. Its subject unidentified until now, this object was unfortunately not available for exhibition in Chicago. But it is illustrated in the catalogue, where Druick and Zegers explain that it must be the strange portrait of the last Inca ruler referred to in a January 1888 review by Felix Fenron, who probably relied on the artist or the dealer for his information: "the head of an ancient long-lived ruler, some dispossessed Atahualpa, his mouth rent gulflike," (17) In fact, the mouth itself is hardly like a gulf, but the absence of the entire head above the mouth surely creates one. How Feneon or Gauguin came to associate a goatee with the Inca remains a mystery.