Vincent van Gogh - Artist of his Time [antikvár]

The drama of his life did not embellish but obscure the value of his work. MAX LIEBERMANN There is certainly an affinity between a person and his work, but it is not easy to define what this afllnity is, and on that question many judge quite wrongly. VINCENT VAN GOGH Born on 30 March 1853, Vincent van Gogh died on 29 July 1890 from self-inflicted wounds. He was subject to a neurophysio-logical disorder, known as psychomotor epilepsy, which only began in the late 1880s. During the brief periods of sporadic attacks he experienced changes of perceptions, moods and states of mind. This condition did not affect what or how he painted. Van Gogh left home at the age of sixteen to be apprenticed to an art dealing firm, Goupil Company, in the Hague. In 1880 he decided to become an artist after a decade of experiment with a variety of careers: art dealing (1869-76), teaching (1876), bookselling (1877), studying theology and evangelizing (1877-9). When van Gogh left his home in rural Brabant in 1869 the full effect ofthe Industrial Revolution had yet to be felt in Holland. However, the change of sensibility which this economic and social upheaval had demanded of writers and artists in the more advanced industrialized countries, England and France, was already familiar to van Gogh by 1880 through his intense reading of nineteenth-century novelists, George Eliot, Charles Dickens and Emile Zola. His reading was complemented by an equally passionate admiration for the painters of seventeenth-century Holland, and the modern French and Dutch schools of peasant painters and landscape painters whose work was infused with a romantic nostalgia for a timeless, rural past. He was probably also acquainted with Dutch criticisms of the commercial and colonial aspects of modern society in the influential anarchist novel Max Havelaar (1865) by Multatuli. In the spring or early summer of 1880, van Gogh wrote to thank his brother, Theo, for a gift of fifty francs, the first of what were to become regular financial payments which enabled him to commence and pursue his work as an artist. This letter (133), which broke a long silence and period of estrangement between the brothers, gives a lengthy exposition of van Gogh's situation at this turning-point. A careful analysis of the text provides the keys to Vincent's future concerns and practice as an artist. It reveals his uncompromising determination and his conscious and deliberate manipulation of his younger brother for the fulfilment of his ambitions. Van Gogh's letters require careful and critical reading. Useful as they may be as documentation, they should not be regarded as merely spontaneous outpourings or un-selfconscious reflections. They are carefully considered. They constitute a discourse on modern art and the role of the artist in modern society. Van Gogh saw his correspondence as a necessary adjunct, as a complementary ouvre to his paintings and drawings. The letters are his deliberate contribution to