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Vincent
Van Gogh
Text by Meyer Schapiro (written in 1952)
Department of Fine Arts and Archaeology, Columbia University
Blossoming Pear Tree | |
What makes Van Gogh a unique artist is his power of giving us at the same time a most vivid sense of the qualities of things and an equally compelling revelation of his own feelings. In his painting of a sunflower or peasant or wheat field, we enjoy the beauty and vitality of simple objects; but he communicates also his overflowing passionateness, his ecstatic appreciation and something of the loneliness and need for love which had brought him to art as a means of reaching others. He achieves this high expressiveness by a daring use of color, more intense than in previous art, with new and surprising harmonies; and also by the vigor of his brush strokes and lines. In all the elements of his art we experience the force of his conviction and his exaltation before things.
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In realistic painting, artists are more often subdued by the task of minute observation, and in romantic art we are taken far from the everyday world into a rarefied and artificial atmosphere. In van Gogh the opposites of reality and emotion are united and reconciled. The familiar objects he paints belong both to nature and to loving, desiring, suffering man. his art has helped to educate our eyes and to unloosen our feelings. It is an art that springs not from ideas - although van Gogh was a thoughtful mind - but from a great faith in humanity and an urgent , irrepressible need for communication. That faith and need mark his whole life-story - a tragic struggle ending in madness and suicide.
Vincent ban Gogh was born in 1853 at Groot Zundert, the son of a country parson. As a boy he was shy, fond of books and pictures, a solitary rambler in the woods and fields. At sixteen, through an uncle, he went to The Hague to work in a picture gallery, and for the next seven years was employed in branches of the same firm in Brussels, London, and Paris. During this time he got to know painting intimately. Rembrandt and Millet were his great loves, but he admired also the sentimental artists who pictured the sufferings of the poor and abandoned.
In London, he began to doubt himself and his job; a rebuff from a girl he loved was the starting point of his despair. Intensely religious, he became a lay preacher, and after some years prepared for the ministry. Failing to meet the requirements - theology and Greek were too much for his passionate nature, eager for a direct communion with souls - he turned to missionary work among the Belgian miners. He wished to share their poverty and to comfort them, but his radical Christian zeal scandalized his church. Drawing this wretched world and finding some consolation in his clumsy efforts to represent what he saw and felt, he resolved at twenty-seven, after a period of wandering and depressing uncertainty, to become a painter; art, he thought, was his only means of salvation, a solitary and pure activity, in which he would be free, responsible to himself alone, and yet might create a work that would give joy and understanding to others. it would also unite him with the great masters, men who for Vincent had the spiritual quality of saints and martyrs.
For a short while, he studied with Mauve, a respected painter of landscape; but for the most part he learned by himself, drawing, painting, reading, studying the pictures of others, with a fanatical earnestness. During this period of preparation between 1880 and 1885, he provoked hostility and misunderstanding; he was frustrated in a passionate love by a woman's family;; his own parents stood in the way of his marriage with another woman; and a drunken prostitute whom he nursed in compassion and with whom he lived for a while, supporting also her two illegitimate children, disappointed him. By this time he had lost his Christian faith. His one sure support was his younger brother, Theo, an employee in a gallery in Paris and a loyal friend of the still unpopular Impressionists and their disciples. Without Theo's generous help, Vincent could scarcely have managed to paint. His letters to Theo are a monument to the two brothers, a testimony of a great friendship as well as a masterpiece of self-revelation.
In 1885, after four years of intense study in holland, Vincent left for Antwerp, and some months later, in 1886, came to Paris. here he discovered a new art, of a luminosity and a richness of color he had not known before; under the influence of the impressionists and of japanese prints, his palette lightened, his stroke became freer, and his subject matter more joyous. he met toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, Seurat, Pissarro and Cezanne during his two years in Paris.
The Courtyard at the Hospital in Arles | |
But unhappy in the metropolis, sick, hungry, and ill at ease among people, with whom he often quarreled, he left for Arles in February 1888, hoping to find in the south of France a more healthful climate and a world of color congenial to the new aims of his art. He returned to the peasant and landscape subjects of his Holland days, but now they were themes of vitality and love and joy in living, completely free of the somberness of his first pictures.
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He dreamed of creating in Arles a colony of painters who would work together, sharing a common life. Gauguin joined him in October. There on Christmas Eve, after weeks of strain, van Gogh suffered a mental crisis; he attacked his friend and cut off his own ear. Recovering, he ws able to paint pictures with little or no trace of his disturbed condition. But after recurring crises, in deep melancholy, he moved to an asylum at St. Remy, near Arles.
Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear and Pipe | |
His work now entered a new phase, of a brooding, tragic expression, with subdued colors and intricately coiling lines, yet no less masterly than the paintings of Arles. In May 1890, he put himself under the care of a Dr. Gachet in Auvers, a village near Paris. By this time Vincent was becoming known as an artist; he was invited to exhibit in an important show in Brussels, where Cezanne, Renoir, and Seurat had also exhibited; and in the first number of the Mercure de France, in January 1890, appeared a warm appreciation of his art and personality. His painting in Auvers is sometimes joyous, sometimes filled with anxiety. In despair over his persisting depression and the prospect of further struggles (he feared also to be a burden to Theo who had married and was not doing well financially), he shot himself on July 27, 1890. Theo died not long after and was buried beside him in the cemetery of Auvers.
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Van Gogh books, prints, and other items available through Amazon.com:
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