The fame of Vincent van Gogh began to spread in France and Belgium during the last year of his life, and in the years after his death in the Netherlands and Germany. His friendship with his younger brother Theo was documented in numerous letters they exchanged from August 1872 onwards. The letters were published in three volumes in 1914 by Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, Theo's widow, who also generously supported most of the early Van Gogh exhibitions with loans from the artist's estate. Publication of the letters helped spread the compelling mystique of Vincent van Gogh, the intense and dedicated painter who died young, throughout Europe and the rest of the world.
His fame reached its first peak in Austria and Germany before World War I (influencing a whole generation of German artists[1]), and at the end of the war in Switzerland. Due to the economic crisis in Germany and France after 1918, pioneer collections of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art which included works by Van Gogh were dissolved. Thus, British and American collectors (private as well as public) had the opportunity to acquire first rate works relatively late. The American novelist Irving Stone published an account of Van Gogh's life in 1934 entitled Lust for Life that was largely based on the letters to Theo; this book and later the 1956 movie of the same name added to further the artist's fame.[2][3]
During his lifetime, Van Gogh contributed works of his own only on a few and minor occasions which mainly passed unnoted by critics and public. For example, in 1887, a display of Japanese woodcuts in the Restaurant Au Tambourin, 62 Boulevard de Clichy, in Montmartre, Paris, then run by Augustina Ségatori,[4] for which Van Gogh probably interpreted three famous ukiyo-e prints by Keisai Eisen and Hiroshige.
Towards the end of this year, he organized another exhibition in the Grand-Bouillon Restaurant du Chalet, 43 Avenue de Clichy, in Montmartre, to which his friends Émile Bernard, Louis Anquetin and evidently Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec contributed. Van Gogh considered the first one a disaster,[5] while he was prepared to take the second one as a success: Bernard and Anquetin sold paintings, and he himself had exchanged works with Paul Gauguin.[6] There are two short accounts of this exhibition, one based on information supplied by Georges Seurat, and the other one written by Émile Bernard:
- In 1890, Seurat recalled to have met Vincent there for the first time, "in one of these populaire soup kitchens in Avenue de Clichy, now closed. The hall was decorated with his canvases (1887)."[7]
- Already in 1889, at the time of the Volpini Exhibition, Émile Bernard had prepared a review of Van Gogh's work for Aurier'sModerniste, which was, as this modest paper ceased to appear suddenly, published for the first time a century later, in 1990.
In 1888, Van Gogh joined the "Société des Artistes Indépendants"; so this year three of his paintings were on show in their annual exhibition in Paris, and two in the year following (due to restrictions caused in 1889 by the Exposition Universelle). In 1890 and 1891, their annual exhibitions comprised ten paintings by Vincent; part of them had been shown before by the society "Les XX" in Brussels, in 1891 completed by a dozen of drawings (some of them only on view "by demand"). According to letters from his brother Theo, Vincent's contributions to these few exhibitions established his renown amongst French vanguard painters like Claude Monet and Paul Signac.
Early promoters
Probably it is little more than for curiosity that one of the first mentions of Van Gogh in newspapers was printed in Arles. September 30, 1888, L'Homme de Bronze told its readers
"Mr. Vincent, impressionist painter, works in the night, as we are assured, in the glow of the gas lanterns on one of our public places."[8]
Earlier this year, Van Gogh's contribution to the exhibition of the Artists Indépendants has been reviewed.
Notes on Van Gogh's exhibits were again published in 1889, amongst them a review by the Dutch painter Joseph Jacob Isaacson, a friend of Meyer de Haan and Theo van Gogh, printed in the 17 August 1889 issue of the Amsterdam weekly De Portefeuille. Vincent felt more troubled than honoured, and asked Isaacson to stop writing about him.
But there was no chance to turn the wheel back: January 1890 - in the first issue refounding the Mercure de France - Albert Aurier published his enthusiastic essay 'Les Isolés: Vincent van Gogh', on which Vincent's fame as an artist is based as well as Aurier's as a leading art critic.
Julius Meier-Graefe wrote influentially of Van Gogh, his publications including: Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst (Stuttgart, 1904 and later Munich 1927), Über Vincent van Gogh, Sozialistische Monatshefte (February 1906), Vincent van Gogh (Munich 1912), and Van Gogh der Zeichner (Berlin, 1928, published by Otto Wacker). Meier-Graefe also wrote an influential two-volume biography of Van Gogh, published in 1921.[1]
In the English-speaking world, the Bloomsbury art critics Roger Fry and Clive Bell were his first champions. Fry, in a 1924 essay, "Vincent van Gogh," reported that after Van Gogh's death, he "disappeared" and "scarcely any picture dealer in Bond Street gave him another thought" until the 1910 show titled "Post Impressionist Exhibition" in which "his works dazzled, astonished and infuriated all cultured England." Fry's essay canonized Van Gogh as "a saint" of art, "the victim of the terrible intensity of his convictions—his conviction that somewhere one might lay hold of spiritual values compared with which all other values were of no account." His works gave "an expression in paint for the desperate violence of his spiritual hunger....".[10] That set the agenda for many subsequent Van Gogh studies, which are predominantly biographical to this day. Van Gogh fits modern culture's attempt to find secular substitutes for a religion it no longer believed in, as M.H. Abrams describes in "Natural Supernaturalism" (1970).
Early exhibitions
There were retrospectives in Brussels and Paris in 1891.[11] During the 1890s, Van Gogh exhibitions were staged in several Dutch and Belgian towns. In 1893, Julien Leclercq brought together a first exhibition featuring Van Gogh, Gauguin and other "modernists" touring Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Berlin. In 1895 and in 1896 Ambroise Vollard mounted Van Gogh retrospectives in his galleries Rue Lafitte; other minor dealers in Paris had works by Van Gogh continuously on display. In 1901, Leclercq arranged a Van Gogh Exhibition at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris .
A little later in the year 1901, the Berlin Secessionists entered the scene, accompanied by the art dealers Bruno Cassirer and especially his cousin Paul, who set the pace for the years to come. In the last days of December, running through January 1902, Paul Cassirer organized the first van Gogh exhibition in Berlin, Germany.[12] Minor exhibitions of some recently found early works were held in Rotterdam and Amsterdam in 1903 and 1904. Dresden's Brücke group, founded in 1905 by artists Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, put on a series of exhibitions of Van Gogh's work in Germany in 1905 and 1908, having been introduced to his work by Paul Cassirer.[1] March 5–22, 1908 Paul Cassirer organized another expo in Berlin which included the painting Peach Blossoms in the Crau lent by Anna Boch.[13] Cassirer first established a market for Van Gogh, and then, with the assistance of Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, controlled market prices. In 1906 Bruno Cassirer published a small volume of selected letters of Vincent's to Theo, translated into German. However, Johanna was keen to maintain her independence, and contributed important loans to Roger Fry's 1910 London exhibition, as well as to the important Sonderbund exhibition of 1912 in Cologne, where Van Gogh was introduced to visitors as "the father to us all".[1] This was organized by an independent committee of artists, collectors and museum professionals, but was dependent on loans arranged by Cassirer, the Bernheim-Jeune gallery and other art dealers.[citation needed]
The first major exhibition from the artist's estate was held in 1892 at the Amsterdam 'Panorama' Building, the next in 1905 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, followed in 1914 by a display concentrating on Van Gogh's drawings.[citation needed]
During the 1890 "Les XX" expo in Brussels van Gogh sold one of his paintings, The Red Vineyard. It was purchased by Anna Boch, impressionist painter, heiress of a Ceramics fortune and sister of his friend Eugène Boch. Although The Red Vineyard is often said to be the only work of art van Gogh sold during his lifetime,[14] he actually managed to sell at least a couple of other paintings, as well as some drawings. He also exchanged works with other artists and sometimes used them as a payment for food or painting and drawing material.[15]
In 1903, the first works of Vincent van Gogh entered museum collections in Vienna and Rotterdam, as well as Folkwang Museum, then privately run by Karl-Ernst Osthaus in Hagen (later transferred to Essen).
Little attention was paid at this time to the considerable number of Van Gogh masterpieces already held by the Museum of Modern Art New York (established in 1929), along with the Tate Gallery in London and other British and American galleries.
Art historians
In 1928, Jacob Baart de la Faille published the first catalogue raisonné of Van Gogh's works, comprising paintings as well as drawings and prints (and illustrating almost all of them) – a landmark in art history.
There has been a reaction against the depiction of Van Gogh as a saint. John Rewald was one of the first to attempt an anti-hagiography; books pointing to Van Gogh's neuroticism have continued since. Counter-claims, particularly based on Van Gogh's three volumes of letters, support Roger Fry's praise.[16]
The Palette Of Vincent Van Gogh
Van Gogh was fascinated by color and spent much time experimenting with different pigments in creating his art. Eventhue the palette, used by van Gogh, was never constant some fragments stayed the same over the years. It has been the subject of extensive research to enviel, with great accuracy, what palette van Gogh used to create his paintings.[17]
Forgeries and reattribution
In winter 1927/1928, a problem began that has overshadowed Van Gogh research ever since—the emergence of forgeries. Otto Wacker staged an extensive exhibition of drawings by Van Gogh, catalogued and annotated by Julius Meier-Graefe. Then in January 1928, Paul Cassirer opened a large retrospective of paintings, from which two were removed just before the opening, as their authenticity had been questioned. The suspect paintings had been provided by Otto Wacker, and a scandal ensued.
In 2007, it was concluded by a team of specialists from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam that the painting Head of a Man, attributed to Van Gogh for over 70 years, was not by him, but was painted by one of his peers. The team determined that the style was inconsistent with Van Gogh's other works, and there was no mention of the painting in any of Van Gogh's known letters. There is no evidence to suggest that the painting was intentionally created as a fake Van Gogh.[18]
In February 2010, the Museum de Fundatie in the Dutch city of Zwolle discovered it owned a Van Gogh painting made in 1886, the Le Blute-fin windmill, authenticated “beyond any doubt” by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The museum's founder Dirk Hannema (1895–1984), who bought the anonymous painting from a Parisian art dealer in 1975 for 6,500 francs (less than 1,000 euros), was always convinced it was a Van Gogh and insured it for a sum equivalent to 35,000 euros. However, as managing director of Rotterdam’s Museum Boijmans in 1938, Hannema had purchased a number of paintings that were attributed to Johannes Vermeer, that turned out to be forgeries.[19][20]
Theft
Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen (1884), painted by van Gogh for his mother
Since 1937, when the Nazis confiscated his paintings in Germany, more than 40 of van Gogh's works have been stolen, in at least 15 separate incidents, at galleries across the world.[21]
On February 10, 2008, van Gogh's Blossoming Chestnut Branches, along with three other paintings, valued at more than $163 million, were stolen from the E.G. Buehrle Collection, a private museum in Zürich, Switzerland, by three armed men.[24][25]
New painting discovery
Sunset at Montmajour
On September 9, 2013, the Van Gogh Museum unveiled a long-lost painting that spent years in a Norwegian attic believed to be by another painter. It is the first full-size canvas by him discovered since 1928. Sunset at Montmajour depicts trees, bushes and sky, painted with Van Gogh's familiar thick brush strokes. It can be dated to the exact day it was painted because he described it in a letter to his brother, Theo, and said he painted it the previous day July 4, 1888.[26]
Van Gogh's life and depression is portrayed in the 1971 song "Vincent (Starry Starry Night)", written by Don McLean. McLean said that he wrote the song after being moved when reading a biography of van Gogh's hard life.[27]
At least four contemporary novelists have focused on the women Van Gogh knew and painted in his final days at Auvers-sur-Oise. Alyson Richman in The Last Van Gogh (2006) has Marguerite Gachet, daughter of the doctor, recount her love affair with the artist in his last three months. Three others use the fictional diary form. In French jurist and novelist Jean-Michel Guenassia's La valse des arbres et du soleil (2016), the aged Marguerite finally makes public her journal detailing her relationship with Van Gogh, The American poet and novelist Jerrine Wire gives a different version of the love story through Marguerite's daily diary entries in Vincent: The Secret Diary of Marguerite Gachet (2022, not yet released). A 2011 novel for young adults, Journal d'Adeline: un été avec Van Gogh by art historian Marie Sellier, is the imagined diary of Adeline Ravoux, daughter of the landlord at the inn where Van Gogh spent his last months.
In the British science fiction series Doctor Who, van Gogh is portrayed by Scottish actor Tony Curran. Upon release, "Vincent and the Doctor" (one of two episodes in which van Gogh appears) received positive reviews, with many praising Curran's portrayal of the artist.
In August 2018 the retail brand Vans produced, in partnership with the Van Gogh Museum of Art, a line of products centered around a handful of the artist's works. Proceeds of the sales were given to the museum to "preserve Van Gogh's legacy and collection of art... keeping it accessible for generations."[31] Within five minutes of the collection launching online, however, it was all sold out.[32]
↑ The date 1908 proposed in The posthumous fate of Vincent van Gogh 1890-1970, by John Rewald, (first published in Museumjournaal, August–September 1970), John Rewald, Studies in Post-Impressionism, p. 248, published by Abrams 1986, ISBN0-8109-1632-0
Vincent Willem van Gogh was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. In just over a decade, he created approximately 2100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of them in the last two years of his life. His oeuvre includes landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and self-portraits, most of which are characterized by bold colors and dramatic brushwork that contributed to the rise of expressionism in modern art. Van Gogh's work was beginning to gain critical attention before he died from a self-inflicted gunshot at age 37. During his lifetime, only one of Van Gogh's paintings, The Red Vineyard, was sold.
Post-Impressionism was a predominantly French art movement that developed roughly between 1886 and 1905, from the last Impressionist exhibition to the birth of Fauvism. Post-Impressionism emerged as a reaction against Impressionists' concern for the naturalistic depiction of light and colour. Its broad emphasis on abstract qualities or symbolic content means Post-Impressionism encompasses Les Nabis, Neo-Impressionism, Symbolism, Cloisonnism, the Pont-Aven School, and Synthetism, along with some later Impressionists' work. The movement's principal artists were Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh and Georges Seurat.
The Red Vineyards near Arles is an oil painting by the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh, executed on a privately primed Toile de 30 piece of burlap in early November 1888. It depicts workers in a vineyard, and it is the only painting known by name that Van Gogh sold in his lifetime.
The portraits of Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) include self-portraits, portraits of him by other artists, and photographs—one of which is dubious—of the Dutch artist. Van Gogh's dozens of self-portraits were an important part of his œuvre as a painter. Most probably, van Gogh's self-portraits are depicting the face as it appeared in the mirror he used to reproduce his face, i.e. his right side in the image is in reality the left side of his face.
Theodorus van Gogh was a Dutch art dealer and the younger brother of Vincent van Gogh. Known as Theo, his support of his older brother's artistic ambitions and well being allowed Vincent to devote himself entirely to painting. As an art dealer, Theo van Gogh played a crucial role in introducing contemporary French art to the public.
Émile Henri Bernard was a French Post-Impressionist painter and writer, who had artistic friendships with Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and Eugène Boch, and at a later time, Paul Cézanne. Most of his notable work was accomplished at a young age, in the years 1886 through 1897. He is also associated with Cloisonnism and Synthetism, two late 19th-century art movements. Less known is Bernard's literary work, comprising plays, poetry, and art criticism as well as art historical statements that contain first-hand information on the crucial period of modern art to which Bernard had contributed.
Bedroom in Arles is the title given to three similar paintings by 19th-century Dutch Post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh.
Anna-Rosalie Boch, known as Anna, was a Belgian painter, art collector, and the only female member of the artistic group, Les XX. Born in Saint-Vaast, Hainaut. Anna Boch died in Ixelles in 1936 and is interred there in the Ixelles Cemetery, Brussels, Belgium.
Vincent van Gogh lived during the Impressionist era. With the development of photography, painters and artists turned to conveying the feeling and ideas behind people, places, and things rather than trying to imitate their physical forms. Impressionist artists did this by emphasizing certain hues, using vigorous brushstrokes, and paying attention to highlighting. Vincent van Gogh implemented this ideology to pursue his goal of depicting his own feelings toward and involvement with his subjects. Van Gogh's portraiture focuses on color and brushstrokes to demonstrate their inner qualities and Van Gogh's own relationship with them.
This is a chronology of the artist Vincent van Gogh. It is based as far as possible on Van Gogh's correspondence. However, it has only been possible to construct the chronology by drawing on additional sources. Most of his letters are not dated and it was only in 1973 that a sufficient dating was established by Jan Hulsker, subsequently revised by Ronald Pickvance and marginally corrected by others. Many other relevant dates in the chronology derive from the biographies of his brother Theo, his uncle and godfather Cent, his friends Émile Bernard and Paul Gauguin, and others.
Eugène Boch was a Belgian painter, born in Saint-Vaast, La Louvière, Hainaut. He was the younger brother of Anna Boch, the only female member of Les XX.
Vincent Van Gogh was displayed at the 1890 Les XX exhibition—an invitation-only show exclusively for members—in Brussels, Belgium. This served to demonstrate the recognition Van Gogh received from his avant-garde peers during his life. The choices of his works and their arrangements illustrated his thinking about his years of work in Provence.
Johanna Gezina van Gogh-Bonger was a multilingual Dutch editor who translated the hundreds of letters of her first husband, art dealer Theo van Gogh, and Vincent van Gogh.
This is an Émile Bernard chronology of the life and career of French artist, art critic and writer Émile Bernard, based on documents hitherto published - however, most of the relevant sources remain unpublished. To a certain extent, these gaps can be filled by information derived from letters and biographies of e.g. Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and Émile Schuffenecker. Bernard and his work is associated with Post-Impressionism, Cloisonnism and Synthetism.
Japonaiserie was the term used by Dutch post-impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh to express the influence of Japanese art on his works.
A Woman Walking in a Garden is an oil-on-canvas painting by Dutch Post-Impressionist painter, Vincent van Gogh. This painting was created in 1887 during the two years van Gogh lived in the northern suburbs of Paris. There is a woman walking through a lush and green garden dotted with flowers and in the background there is a building concealed behind a thick row of trees. A red paint border along the edge of the canvas frames the scene.This painting is a part of the Riverbank in Clichy Triptych along with Fishing in Spring housed at the Art Institute of Chicago and River Bank in Springtime housed at the Dallas Museum of Art. All three pieces have red borders as to indicate their association to each other in a triptych.
Still life paintings by Vincent van Gogh (Paris) is the subject of many drawings, sketches and paintings by Vincent van Gogh in 1886 and 1887 after he moved to Montmartre in Paris from the Netherlands. While in Paris, Van Gogh transformed the subjects, color and techniques that he used in creating still life paintings.
The Letters of Vincent van Gogh is a collection of 903 surviving letters written (820) or received (83) by Vincent van Gogh. More than 650 of these were from Vincent to his brother Theo. The collection also includes letters van Gogh wrote to his sister Wil and other relatives, as well as between artists such as Paul Gauguin, Anthon van Rappard, and Émile Bernard.
Houses at Auvers is an oil painting by Vincent van Gogh. It was created towards the end of May or beginning of June 1890, shortly after he had moved to Auvers-sur-Oise, a small town northwest of Paris, France.
Arnold Hendrik Koning (1860-1945) was a Dutch painter. He painted in the style of the Hague School.
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