Word: gogh
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...plagiarizing apprenticeship followed by a sudden "second birth" into originality. One is grateful to see the painter whole, but one wearies of sentences like, "The drawings are superb, yet the paintings that followed ... are even more extraordinary." These canonizations of the Self-Martyred Master (an Armenian-American Van Gogh, in effect) have an anesthetic effect. One senses that Gorky's hesitations and failures were as essential to the man's identity as his real successes. Nobody could expect that in so short and racked a life, Gorky could have resolved all the tensions and contradictions of his work...
Their work, after all, was precisely what the founders of modern art - Cezanne, Seurat, Van Gogh, Matisse " - had set themselves against: | pompier realism, with its gleaners, nuns and goosegirls, its moralizing illusionism, heavy sentiment and lentil-soup colors. It was "photo graphic" - a single word, damnation enough. But in 1 98 1 taste in such matters has not merely shifted, it has come full circle. The exhibition now on view at the Brooklyn Museum, "The Realist Tradition: French Painting and Drawing, 1830-1900," would not even have been attempted by an American museum 15 years ago; the subject...
Part two closes with "Jump Jump," which makes the necessary quantum leap in order to escape the world he has been surveying. Though decrying Les Miserables as "too serious," he accumulates similar artistic visions from all around him--Van Gogh's. Cezanne's--which represent something lasting and attractive amidst the cool cruel world; he shows the way to escape through art to a higher reality. Dedicating the song to John Lennon makes the statement even more powerful: Even death does not stop the music...
Physicians, however, have never been completely satisfied with Van Gogh's self-diagnosis. Over the years they have come up with alternative explanations for his bizarre behavior, including mania, schizophrenia, even sunstroke. Because his late paintings were dominated by swirls of color, some observers believe he also suffered from glaucoma or cataracts...
...Thomas Courtney Lee of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., offers yet another possibility. Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, he suggests Van Gogh suffered from unintentional digitalis poisoning. Lee's evidence is tenable although admittedly circumstantial. Digitalis, a heart stimulant, was a treatment for epilepsy in the late 1800s. In two portraits of his physician, Van Gogh included the flowers of the foxglove plant, which is the source of digitalis. Most significant, halos and predominance of the color yellow-prevalent in his late paintings-are characteristic of the visual disturbances that accompany digitalis intoxication...