Word: goghs
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...move towards founding such a community. Van Gogh suggested they trade pictures. The painting Van Gogh received was historic. Entitled Les Miserables, it was a self-portrait of Gauguin, and included the profile of their friend Emile Bernard. 20, with whom Gauguin had just discovered a new way of painting flat areas with brilliant, arbitrary colors that marked the beginning of postimpressionism...
...streaks of flame as though a furnace were blazing before one's eyes, seat of all the painter's mental struggles. And all this on a background of chrome yellow with childish little bouquets of wild flowers. A room for a pure young girl . . ." To Vincent van Gogh, to whom nature was everything, it was Gauguin's sunken eyes that spoke. He wrote his brother Theo: "He looks like a prisoner, ill and tormented." Theo struggled to raise Gauguin's fare to Aries...
...Less than three weeks later. Gauguin arrived for the nine weeks' stay with Van Gogh that moved inevitably towards disaster as Gauguin finished his Van Gogh Painting Sunflowers. Gauguin, who urged that painting be done from memory, dispensed with Van Gogh as model. Van Gogh, anxiously watching the painting grow and trying hard to learn from Gauguin, acknowledged: "At times I look like that, absolutely exhausted yet charged with electricity." But after a tiresome day in a nearby museum had set the two men arguing their rapidly diverging views of art, Gauguin cruelly finished off the portrait. Said...
Gauguin's portrait proved prophetic. A few days later. Gauguin returned to find Van Gogh upstairs, unconscious, a bloody bandage wrapped around his head. Van Gogh, in despair at Gauguin's decision to leave Aries, had severed his left ear with a razor, handed it as a gift to the prostitute who had befriended him. Van Gogh recovered to paint some of his greatest works, including one self-portrait with his disfigured head shrouded in bandages. But after two years of living on the borderline of madness, he shot himself...
Gauguin, selling his paintings to pay the passage, turned his proud-beaked head toward Tahiti and the unknown future. Toulouse-Lautrec, grown famous for his paintings peopled with characters from Parisian cafés and brothels, remained a staunch defender of Van Gogh until his own death eleven years later...