Semantic Understandings outside The Real Van Gogh, the Artist and his Letters, Royal Academy, London (12th February 2010).
Do we not always lie when we write? he had asked the day before. As an extension of speech, I thought to add, all these different tongues and translated words.
Do we not lie just as much in paint or music, and in the other arts? I had replied, meaning those arts which do not employ words for us to remember what they are.
No, he had replied emphatically…
– If one wants truth, life as it is… (to) satisfy that need which we have, that people tell us the truth. (from letter 574)
– Ces toiles vous diront ce que je ne sais dire en paroles (These canvases will tell you what I cannot say in words). (from a letter on display in the exhibition ‘Room’ on Literature)
… From the letters from Vincent (mainly) to his brother Theo.
– Il y a l’art des lignes et couleurs, mais l’art des paroles y est et y restera pas moins. An (unreferenced) stencil written high on the walls of the Octagon Room inside the entrance to the exhibition (along with the English translation underneath which ended with the phrase “- of words that will last just the same”)…
…I remembered also reading, as well as the painting Une Roman Liseuse (1888) in the major exhibition in Amsterdam, which I had seen some years previously, the woman sat in an armchair facing a large green bookcase luminous with light, her identity, as I remembered, hidden, except that the photographic reproduction in the reference book, which I was looking into at that moment with my back to the Octagon Room, to my surprise now showed her face in profile.
It would be the same for Walter Benjamin in his examinations of the ‘Living-System-Object’, including his own ‘Jour de Sinistre’, which was the phrase Theo used in one of his surviving letter written immediately after his brother’s death.