1000 artworks to see before you die: Vincent van GoghAbout Vincent, all the myths are true. In popular fiction he is the intense martyr played by Kirk Douglas in Lust for Life, an almost kitsch kitsch [Ger.,=trash], term most frequently applied since the early 20th cent. to works considered pretentious and tasteless. Exploitative commercial objects such as Mona Lisa scarves and abominable plaster reproductions of sculptural masterpieces are described as icon of doomed idealism, artistic courage pushed to breaking point, and the descent into self-injuring madness. In reality he was all that and more. The first person to dramatise Verb 1. dramatise - put into dramatic form; "adopt a book for a screenplay" dramatize, adopt authorship, penning, writing, composition - the act of creating written works; "writing was a form of therapy for him"; "it was a matter of disputed authorship" Van Gogh's life was Van Gogh. If all his paintings perished tomorrow he would survive through the long series of letters he wrote to his brother Theo Brother Theo is a character in the Babylon 5 science fiction universe, played by Louis Turenne. Brother Theo was the leader of a group of Roman Catholic monks living on the station, who appeared in a few episodes of season 3. — the richest literary work ever penned by an artist, a Dostoevskian novel of his emotional life in which he broods on the connection between art and madness. In one letter he ponders a painting of a Flemish artist's mental crisis called The Madness of Hugo van der Goes, and wonders if that is his fate, too. He was shortly to paint his own picture of the artist in extremis [Latin, In extremity.] A term used in reference to the last illness prior to death. A causa mortis gift is made by an individual who is in extremis. in extremis (in ex-tree-miss) adj. facing imminent death. IN EXTREMIS. : in his Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear he displays the martyr's wound he inflicted on himself after chasing Gauguin through Arles with a knife. His solitude and longing for love, for human connection, for shared redemption from the inhumanity in·hu·man·i·ty n. pl. in·hu·man·i·ties 1. Lack of pity or compassion. 2. An inhuman or cruel act. inhumanity Noun pl -ties 1. of the modern world give even the most neutral subjects a compacted yet glorious emotional fire. In his lovely landscape The Blue Cart there's a feeling for the life of peasants in the Provençal countryside that goes beyond compassion and becomes ecstatic longing. He finds vulnerable reflections of his own outsiderdom in portraits of friends like the Postman Roulin. Yet there's savagery Savagery Apache Indians once fierce fighting tribe of American West. [Am. Hist.: NCE, 123] bandersnatch imaginary wild animal of great ferocity. [Br. Lit. too: The Night Café, with a man staring back at you under cruel lights, is deeply sinister. Van Gogh is the man suicided by society, as the dramatist Artaud put it. In his most poignant self-portrait, he has already disappeared. It is a painting of his plain wooden chair. He painted it in homage to an illustration in an English magazine portraying the chair of the deceased Charles Dickens. He has left his pipe and tobacco on the straw seat — he isn't here any more. Key works • Portrait of Père Tanguy (1887-1888)• Sunflowers (1888)• Van Gogh's Chair (1888)• Postman Roulin (1888)• The Night Café (1888)• Café Terrace at Night (1888)• The Blue Cart (1888)• Vincent's Bedroom in Arles Bedroom in Arles (French: La Chambre à butts; Dutch: Slaapkamer te Arles) is the title given to each of three similar paintings by 19th-century Dutch Post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh. (1889)• Starry star·ry adj. star·ri·er, star·ri·est 1. Marked or set with stars or starlike objects. 2. Shining or glittering like stars. 3. Shaped like a star. 4. Illuminated by stars; starlit. Night (1889)• Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear (1889)• Church at Auvers-sur-Oise (1890)• Crows in the Wheatfields (1890) 
|
|
||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion