Van Gogh E-Book

Jp. A. Calosse

• Herausgeber: Parkstone International
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 56

Beschreibung

Van Gogh

Leseprobe

Author: Jp. A. Calosse

Layout: Baseline Co. Ltd.

61-63AVo Van TanStreet

4thFloor

District3, Ho Chi Minh City,

Vietnam.

©Confidential Concepts, worldwide, USA

©Parkstone Press International, New York, USA

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced or adapted without the permission of the copyright holder, throughout the world. Unless otherwise specified, copyrighton the works reproduced lies with the respective photographers. Despite intensive research, it has not always been possible to establish copyright ownership. Where this is the case, we would appreciate notification.

ISBN: 978-1-78160-595-0

Jp. A. Calosse

TABLE OF CONTENS

“As through a looking glass, by dark reason…”

Feeling nowhere so much myself a stranger as in my family and country… ” Holland, England and Belgium, 1853-1886

“The spreading of the ideas”. Paris, 1886-1888

“An artist’s house”. Arles, 1888-1889

“I was a fool and everything I did was wrong”. Arles, 1889

“What is the good of getting better?” Saint-Rémy, 1889-1890

“But there’s nothing sad in this death…” Auvers-sur-Oise, 1890

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

NOTES

1. Self-Portrait (dedicated to Paul Gauguin), Arles, September 1888.

Oil on canvas, 62 x 52 cm.

Cambridge, Massachussetts,

Fogg Art Museum, Havard University.

2. Vincent’s Chair with his Pipe,Arles, December 1888.

Oil on canvas, 93 x 73.5 cm.

London, The National Gallery.

“As through a looking glass, by dark reason…”

Vincent Van Gogh’s life and work are so intertwined that it is hardly possible to see his pictures without reading in them the story of his life: a life which has been described so many times that it is by now the stuff of legend. Van Gogh is the incarnation of the suffering, misunderstood martyr of modern art, the emblem of the artist as an outsider.

It became apparent early on that the events of Van Gogh’s life would play a major role in the reception of his works. The first article about the painter was published in January, 1890 in the Mercure de France. The author of the article, Albert Aurier, was in contact with a friend of Van Gogh’s named Emile Bernard, from whom he learned the details of Van Gogh’s illness. At the time, Van Gogh was living in a mental hospital in Saint-Rémy, near Arles. The year before, he had cut off a piece of his right ear.

Without explicitly revealing these facts from the artist’s life, Aurier nevertheless introduced his knowledge of the apparent insanity of the painter into his discussion of the paintings themselves. Thus, for example, he uses terms like “obsessive passion”[1]and “persistent preoccupation.”[2]Van Gogh seems to him a “terrible and demented genius, often sublime, sometimes grotesque, always at the brink of the pathological.”[3]Aurier regards the painter as a “Messiah [...] who would regenerate the decrepitude of our art and perhaps of our imbecile and industrialist society.”[4]

With this characterization of the artist as a mad genius, the critic lay the foundation for the Van Gogh myth which began to emerge shortly after the death of the painter. After all, Aurier didn’t believe that Van Gogh would ever be understood by the general public.

A few days after Van Gogh’s funeral in Auvers-sur-Oise, Dr. Gachet, who looked after the painter at the end of his life, wrote to Van Gogh’s brother Theo: “This sovereign contempt for life, doubtless a result of his impetuous love of art, is extraordinary. [...] If Vincent were still alive, it would take years and years until the human art triumphed. His death, however, is, so to speak, the glorious result of the fight between two opposed principles: lightand darkness, life and death.”[5]

In his letters, nearly seven hundred of which have been published, he often writes about his desire for love and safety: “I should like to be with a woman for a change, I cannot live without love, without a woman.”[6]Van Gogh’s rather bourgeois dreams of hearth and home never finally materialized. His first love, Ursula Loyer, married someone else. His cousin Kee, already a mother and widow, refused him partly for material reasons: Van Gogh was unable to care for her and her child. He tried to build up a family life with a prostitute named Sien. He finally left her because his brother Theo, on whom he depended financially, wanted him to end the relationship. Van Gogh’s relationship with the twenty-one-year-old Marguerite Gachet is only known by rumor. Van Gogh not only sought the love of women, but also that of his family and friends, although he never achieved it in the measure he would have wished. Several days before his suicide, he summed up his lifelong failure to find a satisfying intimacy in the following enigmatic remark: “As through a looking glass, by a darkreason – so it has remained.”[7]The parson’s son had taken his analogy from “The excellencies of love” in the first epistle to the Corinthians: “For now we see through a glass, darkly: but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

This longing for a place in the community and the struggle for renown are two themes which can be traced throughout Van Gogh’s life.

3. The Yellow House (Van Gogh’s House at Arles), Arles, September 1888.

Oil on canvas, 72 x 91.5 cm.

Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum.

4. TheParsonage Garden at Nuenen in the Snow, Nuenen, January 1885.

Oil on canvas, 53 x 78 cm.

Los Angeles, The Armand Hammer Museum of Art.

5. The Potato Eaters, Nuenen, April 1885.

Oil on canvas, 82 x 114 cm.

Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum.

Feeling nowhere so much myself a stranger as in my family and country… ” Holland, England and Belgium, 1853-1886

“On March 30th, 1852, a dead son was born at the vicarage of Zundert, but a year later on the same date Anna Van Goghgave birth to a healthy boy.”[8]Pastor Theodorus Van Gogh gave his second born son the same name as the first: Vincent. When the second Vincent walked to his father’s church to attend services, he passed by the grave where ‘his’ name was written on a tombstone. In the last months of his life, Van Gogh reminisced about the places of his childhood, and often wistfully mentioned the graveyard of Zundert.

Very little is known about Van Gogh as a child. A neighbor’s daughter described him as “kind-hearted, friendly, good, pitiful,”[9]while a former servant girl of the family reported that “Vincent had ‘oarige’ (funny, meaning unpleasantly eccentric) manners.”[10]