Word: goghs
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...seem to be a universal objective among the travelers, but they're going all over. One of today's graduates will be climbing the Swiss Alps within a few weeks; another will be exploring the Norwegian fjords; and a third intends to wander among the cypress trees of Van Gogh's Arles...
...most popular painter in the world today is probably Vincent Van Gogh. The public of today, that honors him, is prone to feel superior to his own public of yesterday, that ignored him, and to forget that a better way to judge its taste is in the respect it pays to the original talents of its own day. The 14 Van Gogh masterpieces on exhibition in a Manhattan gallery last week had all been painted in the last years of his life. Looking back, it was hard to see how anyone could have been blind to them...
Toward the end, before he killed himself, Van Gogh considered his painting a kind of therapy. Writing from an insane asylum to his brother Theo, he said: "I am struggling with all my energy to master my work . . . if I win that will be the best lightning conductor for my illness." That illness was possibly epilepsy, but it has also been defined as manic depression. Today, it might have been given electric shock treatment. As gallerygoers could see, Van Gogh's self-prescribed therapy was also a "shock treatment...
...electric force in Van Gogh's art was sheer color. Describing his famed Night Café-in which a green billiard table squats like a beast under the bright yellow lights of a red room-he could say without the least self-consciousness: "I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green." When he was very ill, he sent his brother a self-portrait head which seems to burn like an electric bulb, with nerves for filaments. "You must look at it for some time," he wrote. "You will see, I hope...
Like Icarus, Matisse has flown close to the sun; his most recent pictures are so richly dazzling that beside them such bold 19th Century colorists as Renoir and Van Gogh fade to dimness. And like Icarus, Henri Matisse has not much time. Sitting up in bed, the old man puts importunate visitors off with a serene apology: "I'm very busy," he murmurs, "packing my bags for the next world...