Wheatfield with Crows and Drones

Vincent van Gogh: Korenveld met kraaien (1890) 

Oil on canvas 50.5 x 103 cm 

Van Gogh Museum (Amsterdam)

Many people like to believe that Wheatfield with Crows captures the violent turmoil of Van Gogh's mental state at the time and that it was the final canvas he produced; i.e., a picture painted a year-and-a-half after the Xmas ear cutting incident in Arles, but only moments before he shoots himself in the chest with a revolver in Auvers-sur-Oise, a commune on the outskirts of Paris, in the summer of 1890.

 

But that's a cinematic fiction invented by the makers of Lust for Life (1956); a biographical film directed by Vincente Minnelli and starring Kirk Douglas as everybody's favourite Dutch artist (although it was Anthony Quinn who won the Oscar for his performance as Gauguin).  

I don't know why he shot himself - dying in bed a couple of days later - but it wasn't due to his annoyance with the birds and, as a matter of fact, he finished several other works after completing Wheatfield with Crows [1].  

However, as I've said many times, people believe what they want to believe, particularly if their Romantic version of events has been reinforced by a Hollywood movie. And the fact remains that this elongated double-square canvas is rightly regarded as one of his greatest works, albeit one weighed down by critical interpretations of a depressingly predictable and simplistic psycho-symbolic character.

 

 

II.   

The above is intended as art historical background to the work I really wanted to comment on; Ai Weiwei's playful (yet deadly serious) reimagining of Van Gogh's Wheatfield with Crows using coloured interlocking plastic toy bricks, or what most of us now generically refer to as Lego [2]. 

 

Replacing some of the crows of the original painting with far-more menacing drones, Ai Weiwei has produced a powerful comment (I'm guessing) on the war in Ukraine; a country known for its pale golden wheatfields and its strategic use of advanced aerial technology for the purposes of reconnaissance, surveillance, and precision strikes against Russian targets, transforming modern warfare and battlefield tactics in the process.  

As the press release for his new show at the Lisson Gallery (London), puts it: "This transformation highlights the ongoing relevance of historical artworks, revealing how they can serve as mirrors reflecting our current societal challenges." [3]

I think that's probably true, although I'm less convinced by his claim that an individual life can be conceived metaphorically as a building brick, or, indeed, as a series of pixels belonging to the digital plane, but that's something to be discussed another day ... 

 

Here, then, is Ai Weiwei's reworking of Van Gogh; along with a close-up to allow a better view of the brickwork in detail:   

 

Ai Weiwei: Wheat Field with Crows (2024) 

Toy bricks (WOMA) 320 x 160 cm  

Lisson Gallery

 

 

Notes

[1] Van Gogh's letters indicate that Wheatfield with Crows was completed around 10 July 1890 and predates such paintings as Auvers Town Hall and what is probably his final work, Tree Roots. He died on the 29th of July. 

[2] As pretty much everybody in the world knows, LEGO is a brand of plastic building blocks that snap together to create models of objects, manufactured by the LEGO Group; a Danish company founded in 1932. Whilst the LEGO Group actively discourage the use of the word 'Lego' as a generic term for any interlocking brick toy, it is, of course, commonly used as such in everyday language. 

      For the record, the bricks used by Ai Weiwei in his work are manufactured by Woma Toys; a Chinese company that produces custom designed building blocks.     

 

[3] This press release, written entirely by Chat GPT4 at the artist's request (apart from a few clarifications and the insertion of quotes taken from an unpublished text in which Ai Weiwei explains how Lego bricks allow a new method of artistic creation), can be found on (and downloaded from) the Lisson Gallery website: click here. 

      Photos of works included in the exhibition - Ai Weiwei: A New Chatpter [sic] - can also be found on the gallery's website. The show, which opened on 7 February, runs until 15 March 2025.

 

 

Why Was I Not Made of Stone Like Thee? (Notes on the Hunchback of Notre Dame)

Charles Laughton as Quasimodo in 
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939)

It's interesting to recall that when Victor Hugo wrote his great Gothic novel, Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), he was - as the title indicates - more concerned with celebrating the Cathedral and preserving medieval architecture from modern redevelopment, than with the romantic story of poor Quasimodo, a deaf, half-blind, inarticulate hunchback and Esmeralda, a beautiful young Gypsy with a heart of gold and the power to enchant handsome soldiers, lecherous clergymen, and monstrous bell-ringers alike.   

But modern movie-going audiences didn't give a damn about the work's magnificent setting or Hugo's views on the aesthetics and politics of building design; they paid to see a freak crowned King of the Fools and swing down on a rope in order to save the sexy Gypsy girl as she is being led to the gallows for a crime she didn't commit ...

As most readers will be aware, there've been many adaptations for the cinema over the years, including, for example, the 1923 version starring Lon Chaney as Quasimodo and Patsy Ruth Miller as the lovely Esmeralda - a production that became Universal's most successful silent movie. But probably the most famous film version was released in 1939, starring the classically trained English actor Charles Laughton and the Irish-born beauty Maureen O'Hara. It's certainly the case that whenever I think of Quasimodo, it's Laughton's pug-ugly mug that comes to mind.

Mention should also be made of the 1956 Franco-Italian version starring Anthony Quinn as a far less monstrous Quasimodo and Gina Lollobrigida as a far more voluptuous Esmeralda than previously imagined. It was the first film adaptation of the story to be made in colour and also one of the very few that remains faithful to Hugo's original ending set in the graveyard where Quasimodo goes to be with the body of his beloved Esmeralda - joining his corpse bride in a deathly embrace (an ending that the 1996 Disney version unsurprisingly chose not to go with).

For me, however, the attempt to downplay Quasimodo's deformity and disability in this production is fundamentally mistaken. For as Zarathustra says, if you taketh the hump from the hunchback, you rob him of his soul.       


See: Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Book II, section 42.