Years ago, we carried out a project in France with a group of art intellectuals, painters and writers to discuss “Rethinking Modernism through Van Gogh’s artistic personality, his passionate thoughts and passionate journey”. Our aim was to travel towards him by seeing the places he lived in France, following his traces. One summer day, we set off from the crowded, buzzing Gare de Lyon to Arles and watched endless wheat fields, sleepy rivers and green plains for hours from the window of the high-speed train. Each of us began to wander around Vincent Van Gogh’s mute map, guided by what we had read/known about him. When we reached the south, the Mediterranean, we were in his city, Arles. He painted in the last 10 years of his 37-year life. He painted most of his most famous paintings of nearly two thousand in Arles. It’s as if Van Gogh’s muse resided in Arles. According to David Brooks, “Although Van Gogh began producing masterpieces as early as 1885, it was during his Arles period that he truly blossomed as an artist.” Arles left a deep mark on Van Gogh, and Van Gogh left a deep mark on Arles.
When you take a night tour, you think as if Van Gogh had just passed by with his felt hat full of burning candles and had painted everything you saw and stuck them on the streets (Cafe Terrace, Starry Night) and when you came to the quay of the Rhone River, Van Gogh painted the bending and twisting “Starry Night” in front of you in blue and hung it in the sky.
He is also one of the artists who painted olive trees the most. When you walk around Arles and Saint Remy, you are greeted by the pictures of the many olive groves he painted on panels. There are traces of him on the streets you walk on, in the olive groves, in the most secret places of nature. He himself is silently hidden somewhere in nature, looking at us from there. In fact, I think he always looks at us from inside his paintings. Van Gogh loved olives very much. He painted his paintings to glorify their magic. He tried to reflect the relationship between man and life with the life cycle of the olive and to symbolize his feelings with them.
In one of his letters, he wrote, “Olive trees are very characteristic and I try to capture these characteristics. They are silvery, sometimes bluish, sometimes greenish, sometimes a bright white on yellow, pink, purple, earth orange, iron red… But it is difficult, really very difficult. But I like it and the idea of working with gold and silver attracts me. Perhaps one day I will convey these as a personal impression, similar to what I did for yellows in sunflowers.” Van Gogh reflected olive trees as the most basic theme in at least eighteen of his paintings. He blessed them with his paintings.
Olives are a noble tree that smiles at life with the Mediterranean light reflected from their silvery leaves, and that blesses the past and the future with joys full of life. According to some writers, it is one of the “extraordinary plants that shape our world.” Paleontologists say that olives have a history dating back fifty thousand years. Olives are the most mentioned in books from ancient times. The olive branch on the coins of that period represents fertility. There are olive leaves on the gold earrings left by the women of Troy. Our most ancient memory is the most important plant in mythology, the olive. It has always been blessed in religious books and mythological stories. The olive is the tree that said to Homer, “I was here before you came. I will be here after you leave.” From miniature to fresco, the history of art is sealed with olive figures. “A measure of wheat for a dinar and three measures of barley for a dinar and do not lose olive oil and wine,” says the Bible.
Pierre Auguste Renoir spent his last years in a house with a century-old olive tree in the garden. In a letter he wrote to his friend, he wrote, “Full of colors. The color tone of my olive trees changes with a slight breeze. The color is not in the leaves, but in the space between the leaves. Olive tree, oh monster! If you only knew how many problems you cause me.” Many painters have drawn olive trees in different styles and forms to glorify their magic. Monet, a nature lover, was greatly inspired by olives. Degas’ painting of olive trees is one of the unique paintings of impressionism. El Greco, who mostly reflected religious subjects, painted “Christ in the Garden of Olives” with his own characteristic figures.
Henri Matisse’s “A Walk Among the Olive Trees” is one of his most important paintings. John Singer Sargent painted olive trees that reflected the surprising effects of realism and impressionism. Salvador Dali also painted olive landscapes from Cadagues in southern Spain. Boticelli, Dürer, Delacroit, Monet, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Dali, Picasso and many other painters used olives as an image in their paintings. Pushkin blessed “Bread, olives and dates” in a poem. Rainer Maria Rilke wrapped rose vines around the olive branch. The olive is a metaphor in the poems of Oscar Wilde, Nazım Hikmet and Lorca.
The relationship between Federico Garcia Lorca and the olive saddened me the most. Lorca is one of the most enthusiastic artists of Spain. Lorca is a poet/writer with a delicate soul, filled with a passion for freedom and love for humanity, who measures the power of art with his perspective on social problems, reflects the heartbreaking social inequality through the mirror of life with images while shedding light on people's souls, tightly embracing the world with human sensitivity and warmth. He is an extraordinary poet who filters all the pain of life through the prism of his soul and transforms his memory into poetry. Death, the fight against fascism and the screams of the poor are his most important themes. The olive is one of his most important images. There are "olive trees loaded with screams" in his poems.
Thousands of people were killed in the Spanish Civil War between 1936 and 1939. One of them was Lorca. He was killed in front of an olive tree in the north of Granada on August 18, and the line in his poem became real, “olive trees loaded with screams” witnessed his death. However, he remains in the memory of both the Spanish and the great humanity with his strongest images. The olive tree that witnessed his death is a place frequented by Lorca lovers. Thousands of people visit there every year and thousands of people touch Lorca’s spirit there. After Franco’s death, the place where he died was organized as “Lorca Park”. Lorca used to say, “The dead in Spain are more alive than the dead in other places.” He still lives under an olive tree and will always live…
İbrahim Karaoğlu
August 4, 2024, Ankara