At times, one feels like Vincent Van Gogh when he cut his ear off;
King of Payne
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/gogh/
Gogh, Vincent van
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Gogh, Vincent (Willem) van (b. March 30, 1853, Zundert, Neth.--d. July
29, 1890, Auvers-sur-Oise, near Paris), generally considered the
greatest Dutch painter and draughtsman after Rembrandt. With Cézanne
and Gauguin the greatest of Post-Impressionist artists. He powerfully
influenced the current of Expressionism in modern art. His work, all
of it produced during a period of only 10 years, hauntingly conveys
through its striking colour, coarse brushwork, and contoured forms the
anguish of a mental illness that eventually resulted in suicide. Among
his masterpieces are numerous self-portraits and the well-known The
Starry Night (1889).
Self-Portraits
Portraits
Irises
Still-Lives with Sunflowers
Views from the Asylum
Works after Millet
Vineyards
Fields and Cypresses
Other Landscapes
His uncle was a partner in the international firm of picture dealers
Goupil and Co. and in 1869 van Gogh went to work in the branch at The
Hague. In 1873 he was sent to the London branch and fell
unsuccessfully in love with the daughter of the landlady. This was the
first of several disastrous attempts to find happiness with a woman,
and his unrequited passion affected him so badly that he was dismissed
from his job. He returned to England in 1876 as an unpaid assistant at
a school, and his experience of urban squalor awakened a religious
zeal and a longing to serve his fellow men. His father was a
Protestant pastor, and van Gogh first trained for the ministry, but he
abandoned his studies in 1878 and went to work as a lay preacher among
the impoverished miners of the grim Borinage district in Belgium. In
his zeal he gave away his own worldly goods to the poor and was
dismissed for his literal interpretation of Christ's teaching. He
remained in the Borinage, suffering acute poverty and a spiritual
crisis, until 1880, when he found that art was his vocation and the
means by which he could bring consolation to humanity. From this time
he worked at his new `mission' with single-minded frenzy, and although
he often suffered from extreme poverty and undernourishment, his
output in the ten remaining years of his life was prodigious: about
800 paintings and a similar number of drawings.
The Potato Eaters
1885 (180 Kb); Oil on canvas, 81.5 x 114.5 cm; Rijksmuseum Vincent van
Gogh, Amsterdam
From 1881 to 1885 van Gogh lived in the Netherlands, sometimes in
lodgings, supported by his devoted brother Theo, who regularly sent
him money from his own small salary. In keeping with his humanitarian
outlook he painted peasants and workers, the most famous picture from
this period being The Potato Eaters (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam;
1885). Of this he wrote to Theo: `I have tried to emphasize that those
people, eating their potatoes in the lamp-light have dug the earth
with those very hands they put in the dish, and so it speaks of manual
labour, and how they have honestly earned their food'. In 1885 van
Gogh moved to Antwerp on the advice of Antoine Mauve (a cousin by
marriage), and studied for some months at the Academy there. Academic
instruction had little to offer such an individualist, however, and in
February 1886 he moved to Paris, where he met Pissarro, Degas,
Gauguin, Seurat, and Toulouse-Lautrec. At this time his painting
underwent a violent metamorphosis under the combined influence of
Impressionism and Japanese woodcuts, losing its moralistic flavour of
social realism. Van Gogh became obsessed by the symbolic and
expressive values of colors and began to use them for this purpose
rather than, as did the Impressionists, for the reproduction of visual
appearances, atmosphere, and light. `Instead of trying to reproduce
exactly what I have before my eyes,' he wrote, `I use color more
arbitrarily so as to express myself more forcibly'.
The night café
1888; Yale University Art Gallery
Of his Night Café, he said: `I have tried to express with red and
green the terrible passions of human nature.' For a time he was
influenced by Seurat's delicate pointillist manner, but he abandoned
this for broad, vigorous, and swirling brush-strokes.
La chambre de Van Gogh à Arles (Van Gogh's Room at Arles)
1889 (200 Kb); Oil on canvas, 57 x 74 cm (22 1/2 x 29 1/3 in); Musee
d'Orsay, Paris
Vincent's Room, Arles
1888; Vincent Van Gogh Foundation, Amsterdam
Entrance to the Public Garden in Arles
1888 (240 Kb); Oil on canvas, 72.5 x 91 cm (28 1/2 x 35 3/4 in); The
Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear
1889 (250 Kb); Oil on canvas, 60 x 49 cm; Courtauld Institute
Galleries, London
In February 1888 van Gogh settled at Arles, where he painted more than
200 canvases in 15 months. During this time he sold no pictures, was
in poverty, and suffered recurrent nervous crisis with hallucinations
and depression. He became enthusiastic for the idea of founding an
artists' co-operative at Arles and towards the end of the year he was
joined by Gauguin. But as a result of a quarrel between them van Gogh
suffered the crisis in which occured the famous incident when he cut
off his left ear (or part of it), an event commemorated in his
Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear (Courtauld Institute, London).
Landscape at Saint-Rémy
1889; Ny Carlsberg Glypotek, Copenhagen
Mountains at Saint-Remy
1889 (220 Kb); Oil on canvas, 71.8 x 90.8 cm (28 1/4 x 35 3/4 in);
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
In May 1889 he went at his own request into an asylum at St Rémy, near
Arles, but continued during the year he spent there a frenzied
production of tumultuous pictures such as Starry Night (MOMA, New
York). He did 150 paintings besides drawings in the course of this
year. In 1889 Theo married and in May 1890 van Gogh moved to
Auvers-sur-Oise to be near him, lodging with the patron and
connoisseur Dr Paul Gachet. There followed another tremendous burst of
strenuous activity and during the last 70 days of his life he painted
70 canvases. But his spiritual anguish and depression became more
acute and on 29 July 1890 he died from the results of a self-inflicted
bullet wound.
Dr Paul Gachet
L'église d'Auvers-sur-Oise (The Church at Auvers-sur-Oise)
1890 (220 Kb); Oil on canvas, 94 x 74 cm (37 x 29 1/8 in); Musee
d'Orsay, Paris
Village Street in Auvers
1890 (230 Kb); Oil on canvas, 73 x 92 cm (28 3/4 x 36 1/4 in);
Ateneumin Taidemuseo, Helsinki
He sold only one painting during his lifetime (Red Vineyard at Arles;
Pushkin Museum, Moscow), and was little known to the art world at the
time of his death, but his fame grew rapidly thereafter. His influence
on Expressionism, Fauvism and early abstraction was enormous, and it
can be seen in many other aspects of 20th-century art. His stormy and
dramatic life and his unswerving devotion to his ideals have made him
one of the great cultural heroes of modern times, providing the most
auspicious material for the 20th-century vogue in romanticized
psychological biography.
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Montmartre
Vegetable Gardens in Montmartre
1887 (170 Kb); 96 x 120 cm
Starry Night over the Rhone
1888 (160 Kb); 72.5 x 92 cm
The Starry Night
The White House at Night
June 1890 (Auvers); Oil on canvas, 59 x 72.5 cm (23 1/4 x 28 1/2");
No. 3KP 511. Formerly collection Otto Krebs, Holzdorf; Last exhibited
1924
At the end of WWII, as the Soviets pulled back from Germany, they took
with them many German-owned works of art. These masterpieces were
stored in the basement of the Hermitage in Leningrad, a Soviet state
secret for nearly a half century. They have now been put on public
exhibition. -- Mark Harden
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© 19 Aug 2002, Nicolas Pioch - Top - Up - Info
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