Word: gogh
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Each painting shows van Gogh's desire to experiment with color and pose to convey emotion. About this series, van Gogh wrote, 'if I manage to do this whole family better still, at least I shall have done something to my liking and something individual.' The placement of two different versions of a portrait of Augustine and the different versions of 'The Postman Joseph Roulin' make clear van Gogh's desire to see how background affects mood, reflecting an artist at play and alive...
Easy to overlook in this section of the exhibit, due to the focus on the Roulin family, are two subjects unusual for van Gogh, 'Italian Woman' (1888?) and 'The Zouave' (1888), which offer a different side of the artist from his portraits of weavers and peasants...
...Arles section, van Gogh's tragic life at last truly emerges in full force. Fascinated by the idea of an artist colony, van Gogh begged Gauguin and Bernard to join him in Arles. The three exchanged portraits. Yet the MFA exhibit only shows the self-portrait van Gogh sent to Gauguin, which portrays him as a thinking man, deeply committed to art, in vibrant, unrealistic colors suggesting a remove from reality. If the curators had borrowed van Gogh's portraits of Gauguin and Bernard from Amsterdam, a much clearer reflection of van Gogh's insecurities and hopes might have emerged...
Nonetheless, the exhibit offers an explanation of van Gogh's breakdown after working with Gauguin in Arles for two months. Van Gogh, after a heated argument, mutilated his ear. Yet only one image of the artist without his ear appears in the exhibit - an important curatorial decision. Instead of focusing on van Gogh as 'the crazy artist who cut his ear off,' the exhibit moves on to the tragedy of what this fit implied for van Gogh - as the exhibit undersores, van Gogh is more than a mad genius...
Scared of himself and his disease, now thought to be a type of epilepsy, van Gogh placed himself in a mental institution in St.-RŽmy. The last room of the exhibit, treating the last year of the artist's life, is flurried and rushed, and once again painted in somber blue. Even the text on the wall reads like a timeline - first St.-RŽmy, then Auvers and Dr. Gachet, then suicide with a shot in the chest...