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.