Word: goghs
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...highlight of the Van Gogh exhibition at Manhattan's Wildenstein Gallery last week was the portrait of a bluff, tough French colonial officer of Zouaves. The soldier had posed for some of Van Gogh's most famed portraits and had even taken drawing lessons from the unhappy master. Last week the old soldier's reminiscences were published for the first time...
...officer was Paul-Eugéne Milliet, a policeman's son and professional soldier who rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel, retired soon after World War I. He died in bed during the Nazi occupation of Paris, but not before he had given his impressions of Van Gogh to a literary friend, who compiled them for the French Communist weekly, Les Lettres Françaises...
Milliet, in Aries in 1888 to rest up from a campaign in Indo-China, met Van Gogh in the town and posed for him now and then. In return, Van Gogh taught him a little about drawing and perspective. The artist was "an odd, good-natured man," Milliet recalled. "He was a bit crazy, like someone who has lived a long time in the strong sun of the desert . . . We would frequently take beautiful walks around Aries and out to the country, where we'd both feel the urge to sketch. Sometimes he'd take his canvas...
...like a staff officer . . . He painted top lavishly and paid no attention to details . . . And his color . . . Extreme, abnormal, inadmissible. Sonic tones were too warm, too violent, not tame enough. You see, the artist should paint with love, not with passion. A canvas should be 'caressed'; Van Gogh would rape it . . . At times he was a real brute, a tough...
...sketches into a flood of prints showing the nation's famed views, stopping places, bridges, rivers and fairs in all kinds of weather. Bales of Hiroshige's prints found their way to Europe, did as much as anything to spark modern painting. Manet, Degas, Lautrec and Van Gogh all learned from Ukiyo-e art. But after Hiroshige's death in 1858, the art itself descended permanently to a postcard level...