Word: gogh
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WHAT AILED VINCENT? "I am either a madman or an epileptic," wrote Painter Vincent Van Gogh. Certainly the facts of his life seem to bear him out. In his last years he cut off part of his left ear, drank kerosene, ate paint, and was in and out of a French asylum. In 1890 he shot and killed himself...
...stubborn black lump distributing flakes of seed under the vast Apollonian wheel of the setting sun. Yet although these images have joined the noble cliches of art history, they can be seen afresh through their relationship with the work of other artists. The service this show does for Van Gogh is to place him in a clear but somewhat unfamiliar cultural context, so that he is seen not as an inspired half-madman working out his obsessions in isolation, but as an artist in constant dialogue with his comrades...
...Thus Van Gogh's painting of the café terrace on the Place du Forum in Aries (1888), with its harsh contrasting color -deep nocturnal blue against yellow lamplight under the awning, streaks of orange opposing the absinthe green of the cafe tabletops-was both a direct act of natural vision and a tribute to Louis Anquetin's Avenue de Clichy: Five O'clock in the Evening, 1887. Anquetin, drawing on childhood memories of seeing his parental garden through stained-glass lozenges in the front door, had suffused his view of a Paris street in a deep...
...work of the painter will be something like painting by compartments, analogous to cloisonne ..." If impressionism had banished the boundary line from art, Gauguin, Van Gogh and their colleagues put it back with a vengeance...
Obviously, these early modernists were formalists; what artist, at some level, is not? But their ambitions went beyond that, into the realm of symbolic meaning. This was particularly true of Van Gogh and of Gauguin, who eventually went to Tahiti in order to paint huge allegories of human fate. One sees this interest already in Brittany paintings like Woman in the Hay, an image drenched in anonymous sexuality, whose half-nude peasant woman sprawled on the hay is quoted directly from one of the female slaves in Delacroix's Death of Sardanapalus. These early modernists were not, after...