Word: gogh
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...perhaps connect this yearning for stabilization with Van Gogh's fear of his own ailment, whatever it was (epilepsy complicated by syphilis is a likely guess). It is as though the calmer color, the growing penchant for structuring his work as a process of sequential research into a given motif -- a walled field near the asylum, the olive grove outside it, the pines in the asylum garden -- had an apotropaic use for him, keeping at bay the demons of the unconscious. He wrote incessantly; his letters from the asylum, unmarred by a single note of self-pity, are among...
...tether, are the most tenderly scrupulous in their treatment of fact. One has only to go to Saint-Remy and stand on the edge of the olive grove outside the asylum, looking south toward the chain of limestone hills called the Alpilles, to realize that Van Gogh changed nothing essential in the view when painting Olive Trees with the Alpilles in the Background in the spring of 1889. The heaving stratification of the limestone, its caverns and holes, and the turbulent profile of Mount Gaussier to the west do look exactly like that, just as the writhing strokes...
...idea that landscapes like this are fantasies, mere projections of psychosis on the mundane, is wrong and does no justice to Van Gogh's exquisite sense of reality. The matter is more complicated than that. It is true that Van Gogh applied the formal system he preferred to the Provencal landscape: the rapid, shifting notation of dots, speckles and slashes in the drawings, with the white paper burning like noon light behind the sepia ink; the characteristic spirals of the paintbrush, which link back to the decorative line work of Edo Japanese screens and point forward to the whiplash rhythms...
...jacket, with its emphatic parallel stripes of blackish-blue, is as explicitly stylized as anything produced within the next quarter-century by Klimt or, for that matter, Miro. But in the head, this graphic energy is subordinated to volume, to the immobile self-containment of a man who, Van Gogh realized, "has seen an enormous amount of suffering and death." The chin and mouth are compressed, but the brow bulges irresistibly from its pale background, the relation between head and coat subtly maintained by the black strokes of hair and mustache and the unwavering darkness of Trabuc's eyes...
...such portraits, Van Gogh attained the grave humane fullness of his great model Rembrandt; the landscapes are like nothing anyone had painted before. No wonder the little asylum, with its worn flagstone corridors and pine-shadowed garden, remains one of the sacred sites of modernist culture. Here, as in Manet's Paris and Cezanne's Aix-en-Provence, art turned on its pivot in the 19th century to face the 20th. One does not see many exhibitions like this in a lifetime...