Word: gogh
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Viewing Van Gogh...
...reviewing the "Van Gogh in Aries" exhibit in New York City [ART, Oct. 22], Robert Hughes notes that the enormous crowds who attend such exhibits make it nearly impossible to see, let alone appreciate, the pictures. This is tragic for observing the works of Van Gogh, which need careful study of the dashes and slashes that create his unique style. This matter concerned Van Gogh as well. While he was at Aries, he wrote to his brother Theo, "When anyone says that such and such is done too fast, you can reply that they have looked at it too quickly...
...landscape, its patchwork of fields and tree-lined roads, were already embedded in his Dutch background-"it reminds one of Holland: everything is flat, only one thinks rather of the Holland of Ruisdael or Hobbema than of Holland as it is"-but the color was like nothing in Van Gogh's previous life. Seeing his desire for "radical" color confirmed in the actual landscape gave him confidence. It affected even those paintings in which no landscape occurs, like the self-portrait of Vincent with a shaved head, gazing not at but past the viewer with an intensity (conferred...
This, not the madman of legend, was the real and visionary Van Gogh. The notion that his paintings were "mad" is the most idiotic of all impediments to understanding them. It was Van Gogh's madness that prevented him from working; the paintings themselves are ineffably sane, if "sanity" is to be denned in terms of exact judgment of ends and means and the power of visual analysis. All the signs of extreme feeling in Van Gogh were tempered by his longing for concision and grace. Those who imagine that he just sat down in cornfields...
...Gogh's Arlesian work offers one of the most moving narratives of development in Western art: a painter-and, needless to repeat, a very great one-inventing a landscape as it invents him. The inevitable result is that one cannot visit Aries without seeing Van Goghs everywhere. The fishing boats on the dark beach of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer have gone, and the fishermen's troglodytic cottages are now replaced by anthill apartment buildings. But to see an Arlesian orchard foaming into April bloom is to glimpse Van Gogh rendering them ("Absolutely clear ... A frenzy of impastos...