Famous Birthday Today: Vincent Van Gogh
Vincent Van Gogh , March 30, 1853 Zundert, Neth.- July 29, 1890, Auvers-sur-Oise, France, generally considered the greatest Dutch painter after Rembrandt. With Cezanne 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.
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 unanswered 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 dirtiness woken up a religious enthusiasm. 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 poor miners of the grim Borinage district in Belgium. In his passion, 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 ached from extreme poverty, his output in the ten remaining years of his life was colossal: about 800 paintings and a similar number of drawings.
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’.
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).
'The Starry Night' was not Van Gogh's first depiction of a night sky. In Arles, he had been proud of his painting of the stars and the reflection of the lights of the town in the River Rhône, one of the first results of a plan intimated to Emile Bernard in April 1888. He wanted to paint a starry night as an example of working from the imagination, which could add to the value of a painting: 'we may succeed in creating a more exciting and comforting nature than we can discern with a single glimpse of reality', he wrote. In a letter to Theo of the same date, Vincent was more explicit about the motif: 'a starry night with cypresses or possibly above a field of ripe wheat'. With his 'Starry Night', painted in Saint-Rémy, he fulfilled that promise and did so at a time when he was more determined than ever to prove himself the equal of his fellow artists.
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.
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.
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.
The Poet’s Garden, October 1888 Private collection One of several paintings of the public park, a site dear to the holiday mood of the Impressionists. The true theme here is the magnificent blue pine, which van Gogh admired; it becomes idyllic through the two lovers in blue who emerge hand in hand in its shadow; they dwell in the strength of the venerable prolific tree, which shades and protects them. The image is startling in the diagonal division of the canvas: one half all richly coloured vegetation, the other mainly sandy walk. This bold partitioning, unstable and strange to the eye, but true to van Gogh's love of sharp perspectives -here applied to a narrow, even intimate, space-is stabilized, quietly reconciled with the normal banding of ground and background, by the lights and shadows of the path and by the spread of the gigantic pine across the entire canvas; it is planted on a deep horizontal shadow which continues, in a greyed tone, across the lighter path. The two figures on the shadow, the only verticals in the canvas, help to fix the place of the tree in the middle distance. And yet the tree's outline at the left prolongs the diagonal of the path-a purposive continuity of a line in depth with a line in surface, practised in Renaissance art and renewed in recent painting.The harmony of tones is especially delightful. Into the ruling bluish tonality van Gogh has worked a richness of greens and blues and their whitened tints, with a few dispersed touches of warm colour as minor contrasting accents. This blue and green world contains within itself a wide range from light to dark, warm to cool, intense to neutral. In the sandy tones of the path is another order of contrasts, from the smoothness of the warmer, distant lighted part to the vehemently brushed shadows of the foreground, related in their greyed hues to the saturated tones of the vegetation. Above all, the picture owes its vitality to the fervour of the brushwork which, in the luxuriant tree, is a marvel of graphic characterization through rapidly drawn coloured lines. In their diagonals and convergences, these pick up the larger diagonals of the work and the thrust of unaccented angular elements in the surroundings-the lights on the path, the angle of its bend, the man's legs.- from Meyer Schapiro, "Vincent Van Gohg"
Self-Prtrait 1889 Musee d'Orsay, Paris This, the last of his self-portraits and one of the greatest, was painted only months before his death.The compulsive, restless all-over ornament of the background, recalling the work of mental patients, is for some physicians an evidence that the painting was done in a psychotic state. However, the self-image of the painter shows a masterly control and power of observation, a mind perfectly capable of integrating the elements of its chosen activity. The pulsing forms of the background, schemata of sustained excitement, are not just ornament, although related to the undulant forms of the decorative art of the 1890's; they are unconfined by a fixed rhythm or pattern and are a means of intensity, rather, an overflow of the artist's feelings to his surroundings. Beside the powerful modelling of the head and bust, so compact and weighty, the wall pattern appears a pale, shallow ornament. Yet the same rhythms occur in the figure and even in the head, which are painted in similar close-packed, coiling, and wavy lines. As we shift our attention from the man to his surroundings and back again, the analogies are multiplied; the nodal points, or centres, in the background ornament begin to resemble more the eyes and ear and buttons of the figure. In all this turmoil and congested eddying motion, we sense the extraordinary firmness of the painter's hand. The acute contrasts of the reddish beard and the surrounding blues and greens, the probing draughtsmanship, the liveness of the tense features, the perfectly ordered play of breaks, variations, and continuities, the very stable proportioning of the areas of the work - all these point to a superior mind, however disturbed and apprehensive the artist's feelings.
The best books about Vincent Van Gogh:
Myra Schapiro, Meyer Schapiro
This Harry Abrams-published book is an excellent and economical introduction. Meyer Schapiro was one of the greatest, most readable, art critics. The reproductions are not the greatest (this was published originally in 1983), but the writing more than makes up for any graphical deficiencies.
The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh
Vincent Van Gogh, Ronald De Leeuw (Editor), Arnold Pomerans (Translator)
The letters from Vincent to his beloved brother Theo are required reading for anyone who wants to understand the tortured artist. In them, van Gogh provides deep insights into his working process, providing details on his motifs and compositional decisions. These letters, with the sensitive commentary of De Leeuw, are almost an essential accompaniment to his paintings.
Vincent : A Complete Portrait : All of Vincent Van Gogh’s Self-Portraits, With Excerpts from His Writings
Bernard Denvir
Excellent graphics and an even more attractive price make this compilation hard to resist. Van Gogh’s most searching artistic analysis was of himself, as his famous self-portraits show…and this book includes them all.
Van Gogh in Saint Remy and Auvers/D2212P
R. Pickvance
This is the catalog to a 1986 show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The reproductions are good quality, and the essays well chosen, written by the world’s foremost experts on van Gogh. This exhibition covered the final phase of Vincent’s tragically short career.
The New Complete Van Gogh: Paintings, Drawings, Sketches
Jan Hulsker
When he says COMPLETE, he means it…this is the real thing, with a price to match.
And finaly you must watch this film!
The best film about Vincent Van Gogh is not one of the many biopics of the painter, but this stirring, ardent documentary. Forgoing a conventional biography’s and-then-he-cut-his-ear-off approach, the gifted Dutch-Australian director Paul Cox opts for pure evocation: he trails his camera through the places where Van Gogh walked, as though trying to dream his way into the artist’s mindset. Meanwhile, the beautiful voice of John Hurt reads from Vincent’s amazingly searching letters to his brother, Theo. (Hurt’s voice probably deserved an Oscar for this vocal-cord performance alone.) Van Gogh’s journey as struggling artist and tormented man of soul is thus made strangely direct–it will not only send you to see Vincent’s paintings but to locate a copy of his collected letters as well. Many film directors have grappled with this subject: Vincente Minnelli with Lust for Life, Robert Altman with Vincent & Theo, Maurice Pialat with Van Gogh. But the perpetually underappreciated Cox (Innocence) has trumped them with simplicity and sheer intensity of feeling.
Enjoy!
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March, Tuesday 2009 at 1:16 am
Dear Vorsta,
Areally good piece you have written on the painter. I would like such pieces to be written on my above-cited website also by you. Please consider. I have kept an upper limit for article size of 1000 words.
Ram Bansal
April, Thursday 2009 at 1:38 am
Happy Birthday Vincent! He is a true legend, my favourite artist alongside Klimt and i appreciate this insightful piece that you have written here.
July, Wednesday 2009 at 5:23 pm
Hi,
Many 2 happy returns of the day to Vincent.
He is real hero for me.
Thanks.