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Vincent Willem Van Gogh
(Mar. 30,1853 Zundert, Nd.- Jul. 29,1890 Paris, Fr.) Dutch Oil Painting Artist Biography.
Vincent Willem Van Gogh is considered the greatest Dutch painter and draftsman after Rembrandt and with Paul Cezanne and Paul Gauguin the greatest of Impressionist artists. He powerfully influenced the current of Expressionism in modern art. His artwork, all of it produced during a period of only 10 years before his death, hauntingly conveys through its striking color, coarse brushwork and contoured forms the anguish of a mental illness that eventually resulted in suicide. Among his masterpieces are numerous self-portraits and the well-known The Starry Night.
His uncle was a partner in the international firm of art dealers Goupil and Co. and in 1869 Vincent van Gogh went to work in the branch at The Hague. In 1873 he was sent to the London branch and fell unsuccessfully in love with the daughter of the landlady. This was the first of several disastrous attempts to find happiness with a woman and his unrequited passion affected him so badly that he was dismissed from his job for that and antagonizing customers. He returned to England in 1876 as an unpaid assistant at a school and his experience of urban squalor awakened a religious zeal and a longing to serve his fellow men. His father was a Protestant pastor and Van Gogh first trained for the ministry, but he abandoned his studies in 1878 and went to work as a lay preacher among the impoverished miners of the grim Borinage district in Belgium. In his zeal he gave away his own worldly goods to the poor and was dismissed for his literal interpretation of Christ's teaching. He remained in Borinage, suffering acute poverty and a spiritual crisis until 1880, when he found that art was his vocation and the means by which he could bring consolation to humanity. From this time he worked at his new `mission' with single-minded frenzy and although he often suffered from extreme poverty and undernourishment, his output in the ten remaining years of his life was prodigious, about 800 oil paintings and a similar number of drawings.
From 1881 to 1885 van Gogh lived in the Netherlands, sometimes in lodgings, supported by his devoted younger brother Theo, who regularly sent him money from his own small salary. In keeping with his humanitarian outlook he painted peasants and workers, the most famous oil painting from this period being The Potato Eaters (1885,Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam). Of this he wrote to Theo: "I have tried to emphasize that those people, eating their potatoes in the lamp-light have dug the earth with those very hands they put in the dish and so it speaks of manual labor and how they have honestly earned their food". In 1885 van Gogh moved to Antwerp and studied for some months at the Academy there. Academic instruction had little to offer such an individualist and in February 1886 he moved to Paris, where he met Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, Gauguin and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. The foremost French painter of the Post-Impressionist period, the kindly Pissarro convinced him to adopt a colorful palette and thereby made a tremendously significant contribution to Van Gogh's art. At this time his oil painting underwent a violent metamorphosis under the combined influence of Impressionism and Japanese woodcuts, losing its moralistic flavor of social realism. Van Gogh became obsessed by the symbolic and expressive values of colors and began to use them for this purpose rather than, as did the Impressionists, for the reproduction of visual appearances, atmosphere, and light. "Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes," he wrote, "I use color more arbitrarily so as to express myself more forcibly".
In February 1888 van Gogh settled at Arles, where he painted more than 200 oil canvases in 15 months. During this time he sold no oil paintings, was in poverty and suffered recurrent nervous crisis with hallucinations and depression. At Arles he was joined by Gauguin for a brief period fraught with tension, during which he mutilated his left ear in the course of his first attack of dementia. His oil paintings from this period include the incomparable series of sunflowers Twelve Sunflowers in a Vase (1888, one version National Gallery, London) and The Night Cafe (Yale University). During his illness he was confined first to the Arles hospital.
In May 1889 he went at his own request into a sanitorium at St Rémy, near Arles. The year he spent there was a frenzied production of tumultuous oil paintings such as the Starry Night (1889, MOMA, New York). He did 150 paintings besides drawings in the course of that year. In 1889, his brother Theo married and in May 1890 van Gogh moved to Auvers-sur-Oise to be near him, lodging with the art patron and connoisseur Dr Paul Gachet. Vincent's consciousness of his financial burden upon Theo, by then a father, increased. His work tempo was pushed to the limit, during the last 70 days of his life he painted 70 oil paintings, one of his last paintings, Wheat Field With Crows (Van Gogh Foundation, Amsterdam), projected ominous overtones of distress.
Vincent despaired, walks to a wheat field and shoots himself in the chest. He stumbles back to his lodging, where he dies two days later in the arms of his brother at the age of 37. Vincent's coffin is covered with yellow flowers, his easel, camp stool and his brushes placed on the ground beside the coffin. Theo's own health suffers a precipitous decline and six months later, Theo dies.
He sold only one painting during his lifetime the Red Vineyard at Arles (Pushkin Museum, Moscow), Van Gogh's work was represented in two very small exhibitions and two larger ones and was little known to the art world at the time of his death, but his fame grew rapidly thereafter. His influence on Expressionism, Fauvism and early abstraction was enormous and his influence on 20th-century art, even greater. His stormy and dramatic life and his unswerving devotion to his ideals have made him one of the great cultural heroes of modern times as well as one of the great worlds artists.
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