“Sunflowers” comes to the M.V. Film Center and virtually this weekend. Directed by David Bickerstaff, this extraordinary documentary is the story of Vincent van Gogh’s world-famous still-life paintings of sunflowers.
“Sunflowers,” produced by Exhibition on Screen, is among the first of the many van Gogh films to concentrate on the painter’s most famous work. Other well-known films include Vincente Minnelli’s Oscar-winning “Lust for Life” (1956), starring Kirk Douglas. Robert Altman’s “Vincent and Theo” with Tim Roth (1990) follows, and Dorota Kobieta and Hugh Welchman’s Oscar-nominated animation, “Loving Vincent” (2017). More recently comes Julian Schnabel’s “At Eternity’s Gate” (2018), also Oscar-nominated, and starring Willem Dafoe. In each of these, the focus is on the artist and his turbulent life rather than the work itself.
“Sunflowers” focuses on the exhibit of five of the 11 famous still-life paintings at Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum, drawn from London, Tokyo, Amsterdam, Munich, and Philadelphia museums. From the perspective of a series of experts, including museum directors and art historians, it views these paintings in close detail, reinforced by excerpts from van Gogh’s letters. The actor Jamie de Courcey effectively portrays van Gogh.
The first four sunflower paintings were made in Paris, and represent Van Gogh’s early color exercises. They illustrate the remarkable variety of these flower paintings. Because he lacked money for models and loved nature, he turned to sunflowers instead. He described them as representing gratitude. A good source of oil and other culinary attributes, that was not what they were known for in France. He gave two of his sunflower paintings to his friend, the painter Paul Gauguin.
After two years in Paris, where he was influenced by a number of impressionists including Édouard Manet and Henri Fantin-Latour, in 1888 he moved to Arles in Provence. He said Arles provided more natural surroundings, as well as more light and warmth. Van Gogh welcomed Gauguin to live with him, and hoped to establish a colony of artists there. The mistral, the winds characteristic of the region, kept van Gogh from working on landscapes, so he focused on sunflowers, with their dramatically tall stalks and large flower heads.
He produced the first sunflower paintings with color contrasts while there. Influenced by Japanese art, his work began to emphasize a flatness, the painting becoming an object in and of itself. One sunflower painting under discussion employed a blue-green background, making it a very idiosyncratic composition. According to one expert, the mixture of yellow and blue as complementary colors is what distinguishes it. In a letter to his brother Theo, van Gogh wrote that he found in his painting “more music and less sculpture.”
In another aspect of his work, van Gogh said he made abstractions, not in the conventional sense of the word, but painted from memory, no longer finding it necessary to look at objects for inspiration.
Tensions grew between van Gogh and Gauguin, leading to a falling-out in which Gauguin returned to Paris. As a result, van Gogh had a mental breakdown, famously cutting off his ear, and was institutionalized. Once he left the hospital at Arles, he returned to the subject of sunflowers, including production of a triptych consisting of a portrait of a postpartum woman, “La Berceuse,” in the center, with sunflower still-life works on either side. He also sent Gauguin a sunflower still life with a yellow background. As he developed his theories of color, he made copies of his own paintings. Yet these “copies,” as the experts call them, were unique constructs.
An artist who was enlisted to copy van Gogh’s work explained that one of the ways it was a challenge was that the pigments used at the time have different qualities now. Another issue under discussion is the application of varnish, which van Gogh didn’t use, and its impact.
In the sunflower, van Gogh found a motif central to his imagination. Each one of his sunflower paintings is different, developed from a sense of experimentation that came out of his study of the subject. His sunflower painting has been called by the experts “the rock star of painting,” and was what van Gogh was all about. It offers a feeling of the man behind the work that explains why the sunflower painting is among the world’s most recognizable and iconic works of art. As van Gogh wrote to Theo, “I am not giving up, and I am plodding on quietly.”
The fragile nature of the five sunflower paintings makes it unlikely that they will ever be exhibited together again. Because of its close and spectacular visual attention to the paintings and its extensive analysis of them, “Sunflowers” ranks among the finest films about van Gogh and his work.
For information and tickets to “Sunflowers,” visit mvfilmsociety.com.
