Word: van
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Van Gogh's paintings have made the squares, houses and bridges of Saint-Remy and Aries among the best-known scenes of France. But neither town as yet has raised a monument to the artist who made them famous. This oversight is now being corrected by Los Angeles Sculptor William Earl Singer, 57, who has cast a large head of Van Gogh, designed to reflect varying emotions as the sun passes over it, and has offered the sculpture as a gift, to be set up in a public place in Aries...
...Although Van Gogh labored diligently to perfect his draftsmanship, he had nothing but contempt for it as an end in itself. "Art," he wrote a friend, "is something not created by hands, but something that wells up from a deeper source out of our soul, and in the cleverness and technical knowledge with regard to art, I find something that reminds me of what in religion one would call self-righteousness." As a Dutch preacher's son preparing for the Protestant ministry, he taught himself to draw the dour peasants and bleak countryside almost as a form of spiritual...
Later, when he had forsaken evangelism for a career as an artist, Van Gogh used the pen and pencil as a way of storing up details or of working out the organization of scenes he wanted to do in oils. In the last ten years of his life, he produced 800 oils and an even larger number of preliminary drawings and watercolors. The process of distilling the essence of dozens of sketches into one painting "was something like an electric discharge," says Vincent W. Van Gogh, his nephew and chairman of the foundation from whose collection the current display...
Nonetheless, many of the minor works are high-voltage pictures in themselves. A savage chop of cross-hatching and rapid brush strokes give Van Gogh's watercolor foliage as much urgency as one done in a heavy oil impasto; the extravagantly translucent turquoise shadows of his barred window at the Saint-Remy asylum emphasize the manic oppressiveness of the room's yellow walls...
MOTS d'HEURES: GOUSSES, RAMES: THE d'ANTIN MANUSCRIPT. Discovered, Ed/fed and Annotated by Luis d'Antin van Rooten. 55 pages. Grossman...