The sermons of Vincent van Gogh
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- Startpage
- About Vincent Van Gogh in the history of fine art: Page: 1 | 2 | 3
- The sermons of Vincent Van Gogh: Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
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Paris 1886-88: Learning the facts of life
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In Paris (1886-88) Vincent van Gogh meets the great impressionist painters. He is welcome. All together enjoy life. He learns that the unrestricted use of color does not lead into frivolity - as it did not even in the cases of Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec. He opens up.
In Paris (1886-88) Vincent van Gogh meets the great impressionist painters. He is welcome.
All together they enjoy life. He learns that the unrestricted use of color does not lead into frivolity - as it did not even in the cases of Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec. He opens up.
Vincent van Goghs discovers sunshine as a gift of God. He can continue to pray his pictorial sermons. Now with colors and nature. He wanted more intensity and moved south to the Provence. He wrote that the future of painting will be in the tropics where you find maximum sunshine.
In Paris, Vincent van Gogh was confronted with Japanese woodblocks (Ukiyo'e) from masters such as Utamaro, Hokusai, Hiroshige, Eisen and many others. He could afford to collect some. Their solution to the "honest" representation of 3-dimensional space on a flat canvas without doing tricks and illusions appealed to him. Like all artists of French impressionism, he wanted to escape the academic pressure of 300 years of Renaissance-perspective image construction.
He "re-created" several woodblocks. On the left is a classic Oiran, a girl from the "Floating world" by Keisai Eisen (1791-48). On the right is van Goghs study.
It is funny that van Goghs Japanese faces are all really ugly. This is all the more remarkable, as faces were very important for van Gogh. When we see Asians for the first time, we cannot read their expressions and usually say that "they all look the same". This was probably van Goghs dilemma.
Van Gogh mirrored Eisens picture! Visipix.com today is the largest museum of Japanese art in the world, both real and virtual. Its mirror-function for "Western eyes" makes museum history.
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Late 1888-90: Fulfillment in the South of France, describing the glory of nature where the sun is shining
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Now its pure Jean-Jacques Rousseaus "back to nature".
God manifests himself to van Gogh in olive trees as he did to Mose in a bush on fire. Does it astonish you that in his paintings van Gogh puts half the Provence on his special sort of fire?
(Detail of Cornfields, Arles 1889)
Now he tells us about the feelings and souls of olive trees and cypresses. He identifies with cornfields under the sun and under clouds and wants us to share his and their emotions and ecstasy.
The outside experience works also at night ("The starry night") and in interiors.
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Vincent van Gogh becomes the prototype of the totally free artist
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Away from his friends in Paris he is like a freed slave without a salary-job, he pays for his freedom with poverty and lonelyness. No success, career, perspective, wife, family, buyers, enemies. Not even one single nasty critic. WHO PAID his full-time painting? His brother Theo did. Johanna, Theos wife had the big heart to accept this without any nagging (she merits our greatest admiration, indeed, if the pope would understand women, he would make her a saint).
The burden for Theo and Johanna was financial. The even bigger mental burden on Vincent became probably the cause of his suicide. It broke Theos heart.
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