Even if you’re an art historian, I’ll wager you’ve given little or no thought to what painters Artemisia Gentileschi and Vincent van Gogh – she of 17th-century Italy, he of 19th-century Holland – have in common.
Despite seeing major exhibitions of each artist’s work during the past year, I sure hadn’t. But then I attended back-to-back performances of David Simmons’ Dear Theo (Fermat’s Last Theater) and Lauren Gunderson’s Artemisia (Forward Theater) in Madison as part of the World Premiere Wisconsin festival of new plays.
So what might these two artists, separated by centuries and circumstance, have to say to each other – and, through their work, to us?
Plenty.
First and most obviously, both Artemisia and Vincent were revolutionaries in their field.
Artemisia’s chiaroscuro – stunningly recreated in Forward’s production through Noele Stollmack’s lighting – places her among a handful of artists from the period who forever changed how we think about and see light.
Vincent’s post-Impressionist obsession with how color might be used symbolically and expressively rather than just naturalistically forever changed how we think about and see color.
Both Artemisia and Vincent trained their attention and devoted their work to the lives of everyday people.
Even as the rising 17-year-old painter we first meet in Gunderson’s play, Artemisia is impatient with the way generations of artists had placed idealized women on a pedestal rather than painting them as they are. “They paint women by the bushels but no one seems like they’ve actually met one,” Gunderson’s Artemisia says. “I want to paint real women.”
“I have tried to emphasize that these people eating their potatoes in the lamp-light have dug the earth with those very hands they put in the dish,” Vincent wrote about his painting The Potato Eaters, in one of more than 600 glorious letters to his brother Theo. “It speaks of manual labor, and how they have honestly earned their food.”
Both Artemisia and Vincent created numerous self-portraits capturing how reflective they were while ensuring they’re forever alive to us.
“There are pieces of me in every painting,” Artemisia tells us in Gunderson’s play. “That’s why I can paint them.” Frequently using mirrors rather than models, Artemisia had the courage to train her gaze on herself, in an era when people who’d long imagined themselves as types were first developing the interiorized self-recognition allowing them to see themselves as individuals.
“People say . . . that it’s difficult to know oneself,” Vincent wrote to Theo, in one of the many letters to his brother comprising the script for Fermat’s production. “But it’s not easy to paint oneself either,” Vincent continued, noting that he was “working on two portraits of himself” – among the many such self-portraits through which he now haunts us.
Both Artemisia and Vincent were poor – underscoring what was and still is a continual challenge for artists whose creativity is underappreciated and who are themselves therefore underpaid; I’ll have much more to say on this topic in a future WPW essay.
From the very beginning of Artemisia, money impedes its heroine’s choices. Her father’s concern about making ends meet winds up exposing Artemisia to the man who rapes her. Everything from the cost of materials to the commissions upon which she depends determines what Artemisia paints and, as debts mount, even where she lives.
From the very beginning of the letters included in Dear Theo, Vincent is focused on money. Gauguin is broke and desperate, he writes in one. Artists must organize as a collective to ensure they’re adequately supported and paid, he insists in a second. Models are too expensive, he complains in a third. And always – always – he is pleading with Theo to send more money.
Both Artemisia and Vincent are frequently defined by events distracting attention from their greatness as artists.
As Gunderson’s play makes clear, Artemisia spent her entire life trying to move beyond the rape that not only shaped how she was seen, but also what sort of work by her others wanted to see. “I’m tired of being the story behind the story,” Artemisia says toward the end of Gunderson’s play. “They still want me to paint the young women attacked by men . . . I’m a freak act.”
“People think that Van Gogh’s madness produced the paintings,” Simmons said to me, while pointing out that Vincent actually didn’t paint during his attacks. We’ve ignored Vincent’s “concern for solving artistic rather than emotional problems with his painting – both of which are fully manifest in his letters,” art historian Rachel Esner has written.
Paying Attention
Fermat’s Dear Theo and Forward’s Artemisia don’t just challenge us to see the artists they bring to life in new ways, while simultaneously helping us to see all that Vincent and Artemisia share.
Both productions also challenge us to think about what and how we see, living as we do in an image-saturated age in we’ve paradoxically never seen less. In short, they challenge us to pay more attention to what it means to pay attention.
Fermat’s documentary theater demands that even as we see Vincent’s paintings, we listen to his words; accompanied by violinist Diana Wheeler’s wide-ranging selections, the entire 75-minute production consists of Melvin Hinton giving voice to Vincent’s letters, occasionally interspersed with narration by Maggie Schenk.
Yes: Dear Theo includes projections of various Vincent paintings, artfully juxtaposed by Simmons to accompany the text.
But the focus in Fermat’s production is on the words; it’s through his beautifully articulated reflections on painting and literature that the Vincent we meet here most fully comes to life. His words help us see things within the paintings we’d never known were there. And they help us better understand the man who made them.
Listening to Hinton read those letters demanded a different form and level of attention than we’re often required to give when viewing art, which usually involves a drive-by with selfies through a museum exhibition.
Conversely, Dear Theo demanded that we actively listen, which in turn enriched how much and how well we could see. I wasn’t just looking at Vincent’s peach blossoms and fields of wheat, cypress trees and starry skies. I was truly seeing them, in a way I never had before – even when I was right in front of these masterpieces four months ago in Detroit’s acclaimed exhibition.
Driving home to Milwaukee after Dear Theo, I was ready to cosign what Schenk had told us early in the show: Vincent’s letters “can stand alone as great literature.”
Forward’s production similarly suggested that we slow down and take our time when we look, truly examining an image rather than passively and quickly consuming it from a vantage point comfortably distant from the frame.
Projections of Artemisia’s work on the black-draped back wall of Overture’s Playhouse don’t give us her paintings whole, the better to be quickly digested and dismissed.
Instead we’re given thematically resonant close-ups:
Portions of bodies, revealing how well and realistically Artemisia painted women; a hand gripping the spiked wheel (and recalling Artemisia’s own torture) from Self-Portrait of Saint Catherine of Alexandria; the joyous ecstasy, suggesting Artemisia’s own passionate affair, suffusing the face of her best Mary Magdalene; the determination, matching Artemisia’s gritty resolve, in several close-ups from her Judith and Her Maidservant.
As with Cubism – or, to take a salient recent example, artist David Hockney – seeing a work of art in this way doesn’t allow us to voyeuristically objectify an image we already assume to be true. “There are a hundred separate looks across time from which I synthesize my impression of you,” Hockney writes of his fragmenting method. “And this is wonderful.”
If we want to create a narrative of ourselves, our loved ones, and the world, we must do the work involved in assembling it. Similarly, we must connect the dots between word and text in Fermat’s production. And we must imagine what’s being made on the empty frames on stage in the Forward production – with each one driving home that all stories must be actively built, one piece at a time.
Such a process “forces us to notice our own ‘construction’ of every scene that we perceive as living beings in a living world,” Jenny Odell writes in How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019). Most important, Odell adds, such a process allows us “begin to see ourselves seeing.”
“By inviting us to perceive at different scales and tempos than we’re used to,” Odell suggests, art can “teach us not only how to sustain attention but how to move back and forth between different registers. As always, this is enjoyable in and of itself. But if we allow that what we see forms the basis of how we can act, then the importance of our attention becomes all too clear.”
Among its many virtues, World Premiere Wisconsin fosters such new ways of seeing – not just involving how we collaborate, but also how artists and their work might connect, changing our sense of what’s being made and of what a genuine communal conversation between art, artists, and audience might look like.
The “only way to make a work of art,” George sings in Sondheim and Lapine’s Sunday in the Park with George, is by “putting it together,” “bit by bit” and “piece by piece.”
Forging connections through World Premiere Wisconsin isn’t just a cool way to see a lot of shows and celebrate Wisconsin’s vibrant theater scene. As these two provocative WPW portraits of artists drive home, it’s also about teaching us how to see – in a way that doesn’t just interpret the world, but also reminds us that we can change it.
Fermat’s one-night reading of Dear Theo took place on Thursday, April 13. Forward’s production of Artemisia continues through April 30 at the Overture Center’s Playhouse, 201 State St. in Madison. For more information and tickets, visit https://worldpremierewisconsin.com/event/artemisia-2/.
