Spot the tea towel ... Daubigny's Garden by Van Gogh. Photograph: Evert Elzinga/AFP
If anyone were in doubt about van Gogh's position as a great artist of the 19th century, then the discovery that he painted on tea towels when he had no canvases should confirm it. Van Gogh encompasses all the attributes we seek in a great artist. He was misunderstood, suffered from manic depression, lived on the boundaries of society, was passionately inappropriate and to top it all, couldn't stop painting even when the materials ran out.
How did it get this way? A show at the National Gallery last year sought to explain our love of anguished artists by dating it back to the Romantics, when artists stopped bowing and scraping to their patrons and began to style themselves as messiahs and prophets. The most famous example, of course, is Courbet's painting The Meeting, in which the artist, shirtsleeves and staff in hand, is greeted by his humbled patron and servant on the outskirts of Montpellier.
But back to the tea towels for a minute. The romantic notion that only a genius can create great art on poor materials is a powerful one. From Picasso's old tin cans and cutlery sculptures to Joseph Beuys' use of fat and felt, the cheaper and more disposable it seems, the better. Of course any art historian will tell you that the impetus for this was the rise in manufacturing and the status of the art object (and its high prices), but what about the bombastic personality of the artist?
The ego that painted The Meeting would also use unorthodox materials. After all, it is the athlete who competes and wins with a sprained ankle or the gifted musician who composes even when deaf that we revere. Perhaps artists also use shoddy materials in a bid for brilliance.
