When the Tate Gallery held its first big Van Gogh retrospective (it was shortly after the Second World War), so many people came that their trudging feet wore a shallow trough in the floor. I mention this because "Van Gogh and Gauguin: the studio of the south", at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, presents a similar, albeit updated, spectacle. A crowd roughly six deep shuffles from picture to picture as though on an invisible conveyor belt, a warm human tide, to resist which is to invite tuts and frowns. Not only this, but everyone moves at the same somnolent pace, dictated by the soothing tones of the ubiquitous electronic tour guide. Downstairs in the gift shop, you can buy Lacoste-style polo shirts with the great man's signature in place of the crocodile logo, Sunflowerr sunblock and - get this - a tea towel emblazoned with that final, terrifying painting of crows over a cornfield. That's right, a suicide note you can dry the dishes with.
The irony of all this is that, far from being merely another gratuitous rehash of the Van Gogh myth, "The Studio of the South" is the culmination of a serious piece of scholarship. Focusing on the two months that he and Gauguin spent together in Arles late in 1888 (that brief, ill-starred cohabitation that ended with the famous ear-slicing episode), it juxtaposes their work in an attempt to trace the influence, if any, that they had on one another. The "studio" of the title refers on the one hand to the monastic community of artists whose foundation was an increasing obsession for Van Gogh. More specifically, it was the "yellow house" that he immortalised, sulphur-coloured against a blue sky of fathomless intensity, in the celebrated painting of the same name. The Yellow House was painted in an unseasonal September heatwave shortly before Gauguin's arrival, and expresses Van Gogh's overweening ambitions for the place. Here, in this humble cottage on the outskirts of town, they would work together in harmony and invent a new form of art. As it happened, things panned out somewhat less smoothly.
Part of the problem lay in Gauguin's endless delays in coming south. The long months during which he had put off his departure time after time (the reasons he gave were financial, but an instinctive aversion to Van Gogh's character surely played a part) had given rise to a lengthy and impassioned correspondence. This in turn had fostered an illusion of shared ideals that obscured the men's fundamental differences, both in temperament and as artists. So, when the guarded, circumspect Gauguin eventually arrived and was shown to his room, festooned in his honour with the blazing, barely dry sunflower paintings, they were both wholly unprepared.
The canvases they completed on their first day of working together merely confirmed the distance between them. Van Gogh's Sower and Old Yew Tree are constructed with swift, spiky, dancing brush strokes, the strange charge of the colours (yellows, violets and pale blues predominate) working in direct proportion to their lack of realism. In stark contrast to these oriental visions, the ordered structure and peculiar vacancy of Gauguin's Farmhouse in Arles aspires to the "intense tranquillity" that he admired in Cezanne. United at last, their art seems to draw them pointedly apart.
Their differences become even more apparent in the works where they recorded the same or broadly similar scenes. Van Gogh's The Night Cafe, painted the month before Gauguin's arrival, shows a cavernous, infernal interior whose uptilted floor and blaring contrasts of red and green convey his sense of a place "where one can destroy oneself, go mad or commit crimes". While retaining the basic colour scheme, Gauguin's Night Cafe turns Van Gogh's open furnace into something that more closely resembles a frieze. The atmosphere of impending absinthe psychosis is replaced by one of vague intoxication, Madame Ginoux's sly glance adding a welcome hint of forbidden pleasures to the proceedings.
The paintings done after an evening walk through the vineyards are also worlds apart - whereas Van Gogh takes the scene's livid brightness as his subject, Gauguin mutes it for use as the backdrop to a dreamlike allegory of human suffering. In fact, juxtaposing their work in this way does not do Gauguin any favours. Next to the juicy, jagged, still-wet look of Van Gogh's mad canvases, Gauguin's seem to be veiled beneath a layer of dust. Van Gogh's forms are always on the verge of bursting ferociously out at you: Gauguin's seem safely interred in a slow realm of myth. And here, surely, lies the key to their acrimonious split. What Van Gogh sought in his art was an equivalent for the electric brilliance of the world as seen without the mediation of any form of myth or ideology. Sensing perhaps the enormous dangers of this task, Gauguin simply turned tail and fled.
"Van Gogh and Gauguin: the studio of the south" is at the Van Gogh Museum, 7 Paulus Potterstraat, Amsterdam (00 31 20 570 5200), until 2 June
