Vincent van Gogh

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Template:Redirect {{Infobox Celebrity | name =Vincent Willem van Gogh | image = VanGogh 1887 Selbstbildnis.jpg | caption = Self-portrait (1886). | birth_date = March 30, 1853 | birth_place = Zundert, Netherlands | death_date = July 29, 1890 | death_place = Auvers-sur-Oise, France | occupation = Painter | salary = | networth = | website = | footnotes = }} Vincent Willem van Gogh Template:Audio (March 30, 1853 – July 29, 1890) was a Dutch painter, classified as a Post-impressionist, and is generally considered one of the greatest painters in the history of European art. His work shows the objects, people and places in his life with bold, usually distorted, draughtsmanship and visible dotted or dashed brushmarks, which are intensely yet subtly coloured.

He is popularly known as much for his embodiment of the myth of the tortured romantic artist as for his work, which is seen as the visual expression of his life. Three of the most widespread myths about him are that he cut off his ear (it was only the lobe), that he killed himself because no one recognised his talent (in the last six months of his life he received generous accolades which he found very disturbing), and that he painted as he did because he was mad (he painted during his lucid periods).

He produced all of his work (some 900 paintings and 1100 drawings) during the ten year period before he committed suicide. Most of his best known work was produced in the final two years of his life. In the two months before his death he painted 90 pictures.

He was afflicted with increasingly recurrent periods of mental ill health, spending time in a sanatorium. His state of mind was not helped by overwork (especially in the hot sun), bad dietary habits and reliance on tobacco, coffee and alcohol. It is widely belived he suffered from a severe case of bipolar disorder. His career was cut short too early for him to reap success during his lifetime; his fame then grew slowly, helped by the devoted promotion of it by his widowed sister-in-law. A major show of 71 paintings was held in Paris eleven years after his death.

In the English-speaking world, the enormously influential Bloomsbury art critics Roger Fry and Clive Bell were his champions. Fry, in an important 1924 essay, "Vincent Van Gogh," reported that after Van Gogh's death, he "disappeared" and "scarcely any picture dealer in Bond Street gave him another thought" until the 1910 show titled "Post Impressionist Exhibition" in which "his works dazzled, astonished and infuriated all cultured England." Fry's essay canonized Van Gogh as "a saint" of art, "the victim of the terrible intensity of his convictions-- his conviction that somewhere one might lay hold of spiritual values compared with which all other values were of no account." His works gave "an expression in paint for the desperate violence of his spiritual hunger...." (Transformations, NY: Doubleday, 1956, pp 235-236). That set the topic for Van Gogh studies, which are intensely biographical to this day: was Van Gogh a saint? Van Gogh fit modern culture's attempt to find secular substitutes for a religion it no longer believed in, as M.H. Abrams describes in his classic "Natural Supernaturalism" (1970).

But once Van Gogh had been popularized by a very middle-brow author, Irving Stone; and given the Hollywood treatment in a Kirk Douglas film; and embraced by the many; some art critics tired of Van Gogh as saint. John Rewald was one of the first to attempt an anti-hagiography; books showing how neurotic Van Gogh was, proliferate to this day. Yet even the most casual reading of Van Gogh's three volumes of letters, themselves often masterpieces of prose, convinces one that Roger Fry, amazingly, got it pretty much right. (New York: Bulfinch imprint of Little, Brown, 1958, 1978, 1991). Nor has high culture ever abandoned Van Gogh. Like Shakespeare and Dickens, he is acknowledged to be both popular and great.

Grouped by critics with the Post Impressionists, a pioneer of what came to be known as Expressionism, Van Gogh has had an enormous influence on 20th-century art, especially in the early part of the century, when many paintings of the Fauves and German Expressionists, particularly Die Brücke are highly derivative. His energetic approach to the painted surface follows a lineage to the Abstract Expressionism of Willem de Kooning and beyond.

His brother Theo, who worked at the art dealers Goupil & Cie, was a central part of Vincent's life, continually providing financial support. Their lifelong friendship is documented in the large collection of letters they exchanged from August 1872 onwards. These letters provide much insight into the life of the painter, and show him to be a talented writer with a keen mind.

In Dutch, the name Gogh is pronounced Template:IPA; however common pronunciations used in English include Template:IPA, Template:IPA, and Template:IPA. Using the Dutch pronunciation for this School of Paris painter was once a popular affectation. Writers do refer to him as "Vincent" with some justification, for he made that his signature.

Contents

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Early life 1853-69

Vincent Willem van Gogh was born in Zundert in the Province of North Brabant, in the southern Netherlands, the son of Anna Cornelia Carbentus and Theodorus van Gogh, a Protestant minister. He was given the same name as his first brother, who had been born exactly one year before Van Gogh in 1852 and had died within a few hours.

Four years after Van Gogh was born, his brother Theodorus (Theo) was born on May 1, 1857. He also had another brother named Cor and three sisters, Elisabeth, Anna and Wil. As a child, Vincent was serious, silent and thoughtful. In 1860 he attended the Zundert village school, where 200 pupils had one teacher, a Catholic. From 1861 he and his sister Anna were taught at home by a governess, until October 1, 1864, when he went away to the elementary boarding school of Jan Provily in Zevenbergen, The Netherlands, about 20 miles away. He was distressed to leave his family home, and recalled this even in adulthood. On September 15, 1866, he went to the new middle school, "Rijks HBS Koning Willem II", in Tilburg, The Netherlands. Constantijn C. Huysmans, who had achieved a certain success himself in Paris, taught Van Gogh to draw at the school and advocated a systematic approach to the subject. In March 1868 Van Gogh abruptly left school and returned home. His adult comment on his childhood was: "My youth was gloomy and cold and barren..."

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Art dealer and preacher 1869-80

In July 1869, at the age of 16, he obtained a position with the art dealer, Goupil & Cie in the Hague, through his Uncle "Cent", who had built up a good business which became a branch of the firm. After his training, Goupil transferred him, in June 1873, to London (where he lodged in Stockwell). There he became increasingly isolated and fervent about religion, and suffered from unrequited love. His father and uncle despatched him to Paris, where he became increasingly resentful at treating art as a commodity and manifested this to the customers. On April 1, 1876, it was agreed that his employment should be terminated.

His religious emotion grew to the point where he felt he had found his true vocation in life, and went to England to do unpaid work, first as a supply teacher in a small boarding school overlooking the harbour in Ramsgate, and then as a Methodist minister's assistant in Isleworth, Middlesex, wanting to "preach the gospel everywhere".

At Christmas he returned home and worked in a bookshop in Dordrecht for six months. His family sent him to university in Amsterdam, where he studied the theology entrance exam, for a year, before having to give up. He then studied, but failed, a three-month course at a Brussels missionary school, and returned home yet again in despair about himself.

In 1878 Van Gogh became a preacher in the coal-mining district of La Borinage in Belgium, following his father's profession, but taking Christianity to a literal extreme, wishing to live like the poor and share their hardships to the extent of sleeping on straw. This did not endear him to his flock, or to the appalled church authorities, who dismissed him for "undermining the dignity of the priesthood". On his own initiative, he stayed for a further year, during which time he became increasingly interested in the everyday people and scenes around him, which he recorded in drawings.

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Beginning artist (Nuenen) 1880-86

In 1880, Vincent followed the suggestion of his brother Theo and took up art in earnest. In autumn 1880, he went to Brussels, intending to follow Theo's recommendation to study with the prominent Dutch artist Willem Roeloff, who persuaded Van Gogh (despite his aversion to formal schools of art) to attend the Royal Academy of Art. There he not only studied anatomy, but the standard rules of modelling and perspective, all of which, he said, "you have to know just to be able to draw the least thing."

In April 1881, Vincent went to live in the countryside with his parents in Etten and continued drawing, using neighbours as subjects. That summer his recently widowed cousin, Kee Vos, visited and became the focus for Van Gogh's (unreturned) amour. Van Gogh went to The Hague where he called on his cousin-in-law, the painter Anton Mauve, who encouraged him towards colour by giving him a box of watercolours. In the autumn in Amsterdam, Kee refused even to see him and he burned his left hand in a candle flame to prove his commitment. At Christmas he quarrelled violently with his father, even refusing a gift of money.

In January 1882 he left for The Hague, where he was taught for a while by Mauve, but soon fell out with him, disapproving of drawing from plaster casts. He lived with an alcoholic prostitute, Clasina Maria Hoornik (known as Sien) and her young daughter. His uncle Cornelis, an art dealer, commissioned 20 ink drawings of the city from him. He spent 3 weeks in hospital for gonorrhoea. In the summer, Van Gogh began to paint in oil.

In Autumn 1883, after a year with Sien, he left her reluctantly, feeling family life was irreconcilable with his artistic development. He moved to the Dutch province of Drenthe in the north of the Netherlands, and in December, driven by loneliness, to stay with his parents who were by then living in Nuenen, North Brabant, also in the Netherlands.

In Autumn 1884, a neighbour's daughter, Margot Begemann, ten years different in age, accompanied Van Gogh constantly on his painting forays and fell in love, which he reciprocated (though less enthusiastically). They agreed to marry, but were opposed by both families.

Image:VanGogh thepotatoeaters.png On March 26, 1885, Van Gogh's father died of a stroke. Van Gogh grieved deeply. For the first time there was interest from Paris in some of his work. In spring he painted what is now considered his first major work, The Potato Eaters (Dutch Aardappeleters). In August his work was exhibited for the first time, in the windows of a paint dealer, Leurs, in The Hague. In September he was accused of making one of his young peasant sitters pregnant and the Catholic village priest forbad villagers from modelling for him.

It should be noted that during this time Van Gogh's palette was of sombre earth colours, particularly dark brown, and as yet he had shown no sign of developing the vivid colouration which distinguishes his later, best known work. (When Vincent complained that Theo was not making enough effort to sell his paintings in Paris, Theo replied that they were too dark and not in line with the current style of bright Impressionist paintings.) During his two year stay in Nuenen, he had completed numerous drawings and watercolours, and nearly 200 oil paintings.

In November 1885 he moved to Antwerp, studied colour theory and looked at work in Museums, particularly Peter Paul Rubens, gaining encouragement to broaden his palette to carmine, cobalt and emerald green. He also bought some Japanese woodblocks in the docklands.

In January 1886 he matriculated at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Antwerp, studying painting and drawing. Despite disagreements over his rejection of academic teaching, he nevertheless took the higher level admission exams. For most of February he was ill, run down by overwork and a poor diet (and excessive smoking).

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Transitional artist (Paris) 1886-88

Image:Paris rue lepic 54.jpg In March 1886 he moved to Paris, soon studying at Cormon's studio, where he meets fellow students, Emile Bernard and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Later he and Bernard exchange paintings to commemorate this occasion.

In May 1886 his mother and sister Wil moved to Breda. 70 of Van Gogh's abandoned paintings were bought by a junk dealer, who burnt some and sold others at very low prices.

Theo introduced Vincent to the Impressionist circle, including Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Edgar Degas, Camille and son Lucien Pissarro (with both of whom he became friends), Paul Signac and Georges Seurat. Van Gogh liked Impressionism's use of light and color, more than its lack of social engagement (as he saw it).

He especially loved the technique known as pointillism (where many small dots are applied to the canvas that blend into different hues when seen from a distance. He was also strongly committed to the use of complementary colours in proximity—especially blue and orange—in order to enhance the brilliance of each. (He wrote in a letter: "I want to use colours that complement each other, that cause each other to shine brilliantly, that complete each other like a man and a woman.")

In June he took a flat with Theo at 54 Rue Lepic in Montmartre, and adopted the pointillist style to paint Paris scenes. He used the paint store run by Julien "Père" Tanguy, who introduced him to more artists.

In the winter of 1886 he met and befriended Paul Gauguin, who had just arrived in Paris. For a time Theo found shared life with Vincent "almost unbearable".

In Spring 1887 Tanguy commissioned two portraits of himself.

In 1888, when city life and living with his brother proved too much, Van Gogh left Paris, having painted over 200 paintings during his two years in the city.

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Mature artist 1888-90

Image:VanGogh-still-life-vase with 12 sunflowers.jpg

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Arles, February 1888 - May 1889

He arrived on 21 February, 1888, at the Hotel Carrel in Arles, Bouches-du-Rhône, France, where he intended to found a Utopian art colony . His companion for two months was the Dutch artist, Christian Mourier-Petersen. In March, he painted local landscapes, using a gridded "perspective frame". Three of his pictures were shown at the Paris Salon des Artistes Indépendents. In April he was visited by the American painter, Dodge MacKnight, who was resident in Fontvieille nearby.

Image:Gogh4.jpg In May he paid 15 francs a month to rent the four rooms in the right hand side of the "yellow house" (so called because its outside walls were yellow) in Place Lamartine. Because of a disagreement about the price, he stayed at Joseph and Marie Ginoux' station café and became friends with them. In June he visited Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. He gave drawing lessons to a Zouave second lieutenant, Paul-Eugène Milliet, who also became a companion. He was introduced to Eugen Boch, the Belgian writer and painter, who stayed at times in Fontvieille (they exchanged visits in July). Gauguin agreed to join him in Arles. In August he painted sunflowers; Boch visited again. Finally in September he moved into the "yellow house" with minimal furnishing.

Image:Red vineyards.jpg On 23 October Gauguin eventually arrived in Arles, after repeated requests from Van Gogh. During November they painted together, Van Gogh deferring to Gauguin's lead that this should be (uncharacteristically for Van Gogh) from memory. Van Gogh painted The Red Vineyard.

In December the two artists visited Montpellier and viewed works by Courbet and Delacroix in the Museé Fabree. However, their relationship was deteriorating badly. They quarrelled fiercely about art. Van Gogh felt an increasing fear that Gauguin was going to desert him, and what he described as a situation of "excessive tension" reached a crisis point on December 23, 1888, when Van Gogh stalked Gauguin with a razor and then cut off the lower part of his own left ear, which he wrapped in newspaper and gave to a prostitute called Rachel in the local brothel, asking her to "keep this object carefully". Gauguin left Arles and did not speak to Van Gogh again. Van Gogh was hospitalised and in a critical state for a few days. He was immediately visited by Theo (whom Gauguin had notified), as well as Madame Ginoux and frequently by Roulin.

In January 1889 Van Gogh returned to the "yellow house", but spent the following month between hospital and home, suffering from hallucinations and paranoia that he was being poisoned. In March the police closed his house, after a petition by thirty townspeople, who call him fou roux ("the redheaded madman"). Signac visited him in hospital and Van Gogh was allowed home in his company. In April he moved into rooms owned by Dr. Rey, after floods damaged paintings in his own home. Theo married Johanna Bonger in Amsterdam.

Image:VanGogh-starry night.jpg

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Saint-Rémy, May 1889 - May 1890

On May 8, 1889, Van Gogh, accompanied by a carer, Rev. Salles, was admitted to the mental hospital of Saint-Paul-de Mausole in a former monastery in Saint Rémy de Provence, Bouches-du-Rhône, France, a little less than 20 miles from Arles. It was run by a former naval doctor who had no specialist qualifications. Van Gogh had two small rooms, one for use as a studio. During his stay there, the clinic and its garden became his main subject. At this time some of his work was characterised by swirls, as in one of his best-known paintings, Starry Night. He took some short supervised walks, which gave rise to images of cypresses and olive trees, but because of the shortage of subject matter due to his limited access to the outside world, he painted interpretations of Millet's paintings, as well as his own earlier work (in September 1889 two of Vincent's Bedroom in Arles), and in February 1890 four of L'Arlésienne (Madame Ginoux), identical to a charcoal sketch by Gauguin.

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Auvers-sur-Oise, May - July 1890

In May 1890, Vincent left the clinic and went to the physician Dr. Paul Gachet, in Auvers-sur-Oise near Paris, where he was closer to his brother Theo. Dr. Gachet had been recommended to him by Pissarro, as he had previously treated several artists and was an amateur artist himself. Here Van Gogh created his only etching, a portrait of the melancholic Doctor Gachet. As it turned out the doctor was as much in need of help as his patient: Van Gogh commented that Gachet was "sicker than I am, I think, or shall we say just as much". [1]

Wheat Field with Crows with its turbulent intensity is often, but mistakenly, thought to be Van Gogh's last work (Jan Hulsker lists seven paintings after it). Daubigny's Garden is a more likely candidate. There are also seemingly unfinished paintings, such as Thatched Cottages by a Hill in the National Gallery, London.

Van Gogh's depression , (one he had for quite sometime) deepened, and on July 27, 1890, at the age of 37, he walked into the fields and shot himself in the chest with a revolver. Without realising that he was fatally wounded, he returned to the Ravoux Inn, where he died in his bed two days later. Theo hastened to be at his side and reported his last words as "La tristesse durera toujours", (French for "the sadness will last forever"). He was buried at the cemetery of Auvers-sur-Oise.

Theo had contracted syphilis (though this was not admitted by the family for many years) and, not long after Vincent's death, was himself admitted to hospital. He was not able to come to terms with the grief of his brother's absence, and died six months later on 25 January at Utrecht. In 1914 Theo's body was exhumed and re-buried beside Vincent's.

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Myths

Legend has grown up about Van Gogh. One of the myths is that no one recognised his work. In fact it was praised in Le Mercure de France and he was called a genius. He was invited to participate in Les Vingt, an exhibition of avant-garde painters in Belgium and Monet said that his work was the best in the show. Toulouse Lautrec challenged someone to a duel because they had insulted Van Gogh's work. Another myth is that he cut off his ear, and although he did cut his ear, it was not the whole ear but part of it, at least the lobe and probably a little more with a diagonal cut. Van Gogh is sometimes thought of as the mad painter, but he could not paint during his disturbed episodes, only the time in between. Sometimes it is said that he did not sell any work, or only one painting in his lifetime, but this is stretching the point, as he did receive some commissions, which are sales, and he also bartered work for meals etc, which is another form of sale.

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Legacy

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Art

Image:Grave of Vincent van Gogh.jpg Van Gogh's fame grew steadily after his death. Large exhibitions were organized in Paris (1901), Amsterdam (1905), Cologne (1912), New York City (1913) and Berlin (1914). These had a great influence over a new generation of artists. The French Fauves, including Henri Matisse, extended both his use of colour and freedom of applying it, as did German Expressionists in the Die Brücke group. 1950s Abstract Expressionism is seen as benefiting from the exploration Van Gogh started with gestural marks. In 1957, English artist Francis Bacon did several paintings based on reproductions of Van Gogh's The Painter on his Way to Work (which had been destroyed in World War II).

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Contemporary Homages

In 1997 Cameron Cross began "The Van Gogh Project" to erect giant easels with Van Gogh's sunflower paintings around the world. In 1999 the Stuckists art movement saw themselves as a continuation of Van Gogh's vision.

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Other

Van Gogh's letters, most of them to Theo, were published in 1914.

The artist's life forms the basis for Irving Stone's biographical novel Lust for Life (later turned into a multiple Oscar Award-winning film).

In 1972 in honour of Van Gogh, singer Don McLean wrote the ballad Vincent — also known as "Starry Starry Night", the song's opening words, which refer to the painting Starry Night. It was also sung by Josh Groban in 2002 and the punk band NOFX did a version on a rarities and b-sides double album.

In 1986-87, the composer Einojuhani Rautavaara wrote an opera, Vincent, based on several events in Van Gogh's life, and later used some of the same themes in his 6th symphony, Vincentiana.

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Notable works

Image:Portrait of Dr. Gachet.jpg

† Denotes paintings which are recent recordholders for the highest price paid for a painting at an auction: see list of most expensive paintings. On March 30, 1987, Irises was sold for a record US$53.9 million at Sotheby's; on May 15, 1990, his Portrait of Dr. Gachet was sold for US$82.5 million at Christie's, thus establishing a new price record (which was exceeded in 2004 by a Picasso painting).

The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is dedicated to Van Gogh's work and that of his contemporaries. The Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo (also in the Netherlands), has another considerable collection of his paintings.

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Influences on Van Gogh

(see also above)

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Illness

Image:Vincent van Gogh Wax Sculpture.jpg Debate has raged over the years as to the source of Van Gogh's mental illness and its effect on his work. Over 150 psychiatrists have attempted to label his illness, and some 30 different diagnoses have been suggested.<ref name="Blumer">The Illness of Vincent van Gogh, Dietrich Blumer, American Journal of Psychiatry 2002.</ref> Some of the theories which have been suggested include schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, syphilis, poisoning from swallowed paints, and temporal lobe epilepsy. Any of these could have been the culprit and been aggravated by malnutrition, overwork, a fondness for the alcoholic beverage absinthe, and insomnia. Some people have argued, in the case of temporal lobe epilepsy, that the disease may have led to his prolific body of work. (TLE cases tend to show symptoms of hypergraphia and hyperreligiosity and it has been suspected by some as being sources of religious visions and creativity.)

In the November 2005 issue of Archives of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Paul L. Wolf, M.D., presented his analysis of how disease, drugs, and chemicals might have influenced the retinal vision of Van Gogh. Wolf speculates that the Yellow Color Vision defect in van Gogh developed as a side effect of his love of a type of liqueur known as absinthe, containing a neurotoxin called thujone found in wormwood oil.

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Spelling

Template:Main When the surname is written without the first name the 'v' is usually capitalized in English: 'Van Gogh'. However, both upper and lower case usages can be found in books.

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See also

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Books

  • Ingo F. Walther and Rainer Metzger, Van Gogh: the Complete Paintings, 1997, Benedikt Taschen ISBN 3822882658
  • Dieter Beaujean, "Vincent van Gogh: Life and Work", 1999, Könemann ISBN 3829029381
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References

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External links

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