Word: gogh
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...such a price for Sunflowers? It is one of the larger Van Goghs, if not necessarily the best. Thanks to mass reproduction, it is exceptionally popular and famous. Its clones have hung on so many suburban walls over the decades that it has become the Mona Lisa of the vegetable world. What is more, everyone associates it with Van Gogh's madness; it is the embodied sign of what all persons of cultural pretension long ago learned to call his "last outburst of frenzied genius," or words to that effect. Thus, apart from its merits as a painting...
...million or, in real money, some 5.8 billion yen. This was the highest price ever paid for a work of art. The multimillion-dollar marvel is now a commonplace of the '80s: a Turner went for $10 million in 1984, a Mantegna for $10.4 million and a Van Gogh for $9.9 million in 1985, and a Rembrandt for $10.3 million and a Manet for $11 million in 1986. Nevertheless, this one brought in more than three times the previous record established in 1983 with the sale of the 12th century illuminated Gospels of Henry the Lion for $11.9 million...
...lucky object was by Vincent van Gogh -- the largest and best known of seven paintings of sunflowers in a pot that he had done in Arles between August 1888 and January 1889. It was bought through telephone bids by an anonymous collector. It was the next to the last in the sunflowers series still left in private hands, since four are in museums and one was destroyed in Yokohama during World...
...strange man," Christie's auctioneer Charles Allsopp said of Van Gogh amid the clamor that followed the fall of the gavel. "He wasn't very good at marketing it." Not only a deep epitaph but a modest understatement: Van Gogh sold, as everyone knows, one painting in his life, and it was not Sunflowers. If only he had had what we have today -- a million millionaires clamoring for art, corporate art advisers breeding like Gucci-shod mice in every cranny from Tokyo to Stuttgart, the whole grotesque edifice of sanctimony, hype, greed and social mummery that has been raised above...
...Renoir dancer; N is for an Audubon nest; V is for a Degas violinist. Mayers also offers a matching blue volume (Abrams; $9.95), with works from the Museum of Modern Art in New York: F is for a Jasper Johns flag; N is for a starry night by Van Gogh; G is for an appropriate goat by Pablo Picasso. After all, he was the artist who said it took him a lifetime to paint like a child...