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Van Gogh Vincent
(Willem)
(b. March 30, 1853, Zundert, Neth.--d.
July 29, 1890, Auvers-sur-Oise, near Paris)
Gogh, Vincent (Willem) van is generally
considered the greatest Dutch painter and
draughtsman after
Rembrandt. With
Cézanne and
Gauguin
the greatest of Post-Impressionist artists.
Van Gogh powerfully influenced the current of
Expressionism in modern art. Van Gogh
Vincent's 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 Van Gogh Vincent's masterpieces are numerous
self-portraits and the well-known The Starry
Night (1889). |
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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 Van
Gogh 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 Van Gogh Vincent's unrequited passion affected
him so badly that Van Gogh was dismissed from
Van Gogh Vincent's job. Van Gogh returned to England in 1876 as an
unpaid assistant at a school, and Van Gogh
Vincent's experience of urban squalor awakened a
religious zeal and a longing to serve Van
Gogh Vincent's fellow men. Van Gogh
Vincent's father was a Protestant
pastor, and van Gogh first trained for the
ministry, but Van Gogh abandoned Van Gogh
Vincent's studies in
1878 and went to work as a lay preacher
among the impoverished miners of the grim
Borinage district in Belgium. In Van Gogh
Vincent's zeal
Van Gogh gave away Van Gogh Vincent's own worldly goods to the poor
and was dismissed for Van Gogh Vincent's literal
interpretation of Christ's teaching. Van
Gogh remained in the Borinage, suffering acute
poverty and a spiritual crisis, until 1880,
when Van Gogh found that art was Van Gogh
Vincent's vocation and
the means by which Van Gogh could bring
consolation to humanity. From this time Van
Gogh worked at Van Gogh Vincent's new `mission' with
single-minded frenzy, and although Van Gogh often
suffered from extreme poverty and
undernourishment, Van Gogh Vincent's output in the ten
remaining years of Van Gogh Vincent's life was prodigious:
about 800 paintings and a similar number of
drawings.
From 1881 to 1885 van Gogh lived in the
Netherlands, sometimes in lodgings,
supported by Van Gogh Vincent's devoted brother Theo, who
regularly sent him money from Van Gogh
Vincent's own small
salary. In keeping with Van Gogh Vincent's humanitarian
outlook Van Gogh painted peasants and workers, the
most famous picture from this period being
The Potato Eaters (Van Gogh Museum,
Amsterdam; 1885). Of this Van Gogh 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 Van Gogh moved to Paris, where
Van Gogh met Pissarro, Degas, Gauguin, Seurat, and
Toulouse-Lautrec. At this time Van Gogh
Vincent's 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,' Van Gogh wrote, `I use
color more arbitrarily so as to express
myself more forcibly'.
Of Van Gogh Vincent's Night Café, Van Gogh said: `I have tried to
express with red and green the terrible
passions of human nature.' For a time
Van Gogh was
influenced by Seurat's delicate pointillist
manner, but Van Gogh abandoned this for broad,
vigorous, and swirling brush-strokes.
In February 1888 van Gogh settled at Arles,
where Van Gogh painted more than 200 canvases in
15 months. During this time Van Gogh sold no
pictures, was in poverty, and suffered
recurrent nervous crisis with hallucinations
and depression. Van Gogh became enthusiastic for
the idea of founding an artists'
co-operative at Arles and towards the end of
the year Van Gogh 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 Van Gogh cut off Van
Gogh Vincent's left ear
(or part of it), an event commemorated in
Van Gogh Vincent's Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear (Courtauld
Institute, London).
In May 1889 Van Gogh went at Van Gogh
Vincent's own request into
an asylum at St Rémy, near Arles, but
continued during the year Van Gogh spent there a
frenzied production of tumultuous pictures
such as Starry Night (MOMA, New York). Van
Gogh 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 Van Gogh Vincent's life Van Gogh painted 70 canvases. But
Van Gogh Vincent's spiritual anguish and depression became
more acute and on 29 July 1890 Van Gogh died from
the results of a self-inflicted bullet
wound. |