Word: vincent
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...Vincent Benedict Jr. Ardmore...
...once thought Vincent the Dutchman had been a trifle oversold, from Kirk Douglas gritting his mandibles in the loony bin at Saint-Rémy to Greek zillionaires screwing his cypresses to the stateroom bulkheads of their yachts, you would be wrong. The process never ends. Its latest form is "Van Gogh in Aries," at New York City's Metropolitan Museum. Viewed as a social phenomenon rather than as a group of paintings and drawings, this show epitomizes the Met's leanings to cultural Reaganism: private opulence, public squalor. Weeks of private viewings have...
...with Van Gogh than with flabby events like last year's Vatican show. For if there was ever an artist whose oeuvre wants to be seen carefully, whose images beg for the solitary and unharried eye to receive their energy, pathos and depth of conviction, that man was Vincent Van Gogh-much of whose best work was done at Aries in the 15 months between February 1888 and May 1889. This rhapsodic outpouring of creative energy produced some 200 paintings, more than 100 drawings and watercolors and 200 letters, written in Dutch, French and English. Of this mass...
...Vincent was ill when he arrived in Aries, jittery from booze, racked with smoker's cough. He had expected, curiously enough, that the place would look like one of the Japanese prints by Hokusai or Utamaro that had been circulating among avant-garde painters in Paris. In a way it did: the ground was covered with snow, like the top of Fuji. But soon it (and he) melted, and in his letters no less than in his paintings one sees the colors that sign his Arlesian period, the yellow, ultramarine and mauve. In the late spring, "the landscape gets...
...Hobbema than of Holland as it is"-but the color was like nothing in Van Gogh's previous life. Seeing his desire for "radical" color confirmed in the actual landscape gave him confidence. It affected even those paintings in which no landscape occurs, like the self-portrait of Vincent with a shaved head, gazing not at but past the viewer with an intensity (conferred by the unearthly pale malachite background) that verges on the radioactive...