Van Gogh's Life Of Struggle: How Vincent Never Saw His Success | Great Artists

on the 27th of July 1890 a gunshot Was Heard near the French Village of over suwas it was the sound of suicide the last desperate Act of a sick man his name was Vincent van Gogh two days later a life of struggle was finally at an end when he died Van Gogh was 37 years old and almost completely unknown only one of his paintings had ever been sold he had experienced loneliness persecution and ultimately the madness that led to suicide but his death also marked the beginning of his Legend before long it became obvious that van Gogh had been an artist of Genius by the early 1900s his paintings were recognized as masterpieces and the story of his sad Earthly life became increasingly well known the story of how he once cut off his own ear is now amongst the best known Tales of art history but the life of Vincent Van Gogh would not be so compelling were it not for the greatness of his art all of it created in a handful of years prior to his death his works are now amongst the best known images of Western Art and their financial value runs into tens of Millions this is just one measure of the astonishing achievement of Vincent Van Gogh Fango blasted aside conceptions of Art with his huge brush Strokes sweeping patterns he used paint to express pure emotion in a way that no one else certainly was doing at that time and hasn't been able to do quite the same since he was concerned with people and the human being The Human Condition in other words human emotion and that that was something Richard in a sense in the Renaissance had rather got undervalued and to free just as others freed color Van Gogh himself read color as well because that was an essential part of what he was doing but for instance both go against his and in different ways freed Connor has had Monet and Sierra and people like that and so significant I think is that he brings this other dimension very violently into the foundations of Modern Art of emotion Van Gogh was born on the 30th of March 1853 in the Dutch Village of Groot zandirt he was the eldest son of the local Protestant Pastor a quiet withdrawn boy who enjoyed sketching the flat landscape of his homeland by the age of 16 he started a career in the artistic world not as an artist but as an apprentice to an art dealer though he hardly produced any creative work of his own the young Vincent's job brought him into contact with many great paintings in the Netherlands he admired the Dutch Masters rembrat and Hulls in London he developed a taste for John Constable and in Paris he became familiar with the work of Kamil Koro and Francois Miller whilst working in London he developed an infatuation for his landlady's daughter her eventual rejection hit him hard and Vincent would never be able to form a lasting relationship with any woman he also had problems at work in March 1876 he was sacked from the Paris branch of gupils his offense had been to tell his superiors what he thought of the art business over the following three years Van Gogh worked as a teacher in England he attempted to train as a priest and spent several months as an evangelist in Belgium's Grimm mining region the boronage but this too ended in dismissal it was said that he took the Christian message of Charity too literally and his superiors were unimpressed with a preacher who dressed in rags having given away his best clothes he tried very hard thinking he would follow in his Father's Footsteps in religious life and doing missionary work he got so involved in that that he worried his superiors who felt that he was in fact more of a danger than hell one of the reasons that he's superiors were upset was he got too involved to involve with the people he actually gave his own money away in clothing and everything else art had been in his family he turned a precocious Talent his brother Theo I think was the studying influence who guided him and introduced him to contemporary artists Vincent was Now 26 years old and unemployed in the summer of 1879 he made the decision to become an artist the result would be astonishing CEO had suggested that van Gogh become an artist in Van Gogh dismissed the idea and later on he became ill and in his convalescence he started to follow Theo's advice and he began sketching and painting and he went on from there really and he transferred his interest in the poor and the underprivileged not not to preaching at them but actually to drawing them and painting them Van Gogh's most famous paintings were a long way off when he first decided to be a full-time artist by 1879 Vincent had done little more than the occasional drawing he knew that there was much to learn if he was to make it as a professional so he began to study textbooks of anatomy and perspective and he copied the works of Mia but he soon realized that isolated study was not enough so in October 1880 he moved on again to Brussels here he was able to attend classes at the Art Academy and he established a friendship with a wealthy fellow student Anton van rapper he began to produce gloomy drawings inspired by his time in the borinage and he was able to devote himself full time to his studies thanks to the generous financial support of his brother Theo van Gogh was six years younger than Vincent and unlike his brother he was happy to work for goop heels [Music] when Vincent moved to Brussels Theo began to send him money it would be a continuing Arrangement documented in the brother's letters to each other hundreds of these survive and they remain vital documents for the student of Vincent Van Gogh his letters to Theo did not confine themselves to Everyday matters such as money they also revealed intricate details of his art and his artistic philosophy [Music] we get to know the man himself his hopes and fears his aspirations his disappointments but really is very deep and serious concern about his art and about The Human Condition in no superficial at all this is somebody who is awesome in his seriousness we here have a man of considerable intellectual and spiritual depths and I think that helps us to understand also to put in context the mythology they give us his thoughts and ideas and beliefs he was writing them to Theo so he expressed himself very directly and very honestly and we have enormous amounts of information about what he felt about painting and life in those letters the only gaps in the correspondence between Theo and Vincent date from the periods when they lived together [Music] in the spring of 1881 they both found themselves at the new family home in etern but personal problems soon return that summer Vincent fell in love with his cousin only to find himself rejected once more he was also losing his Christian faith a real problem in a pastor's household at the end of 1881 following an argument with his father the nomadic Vincent moved on again back to the Dutch capital The Hague there he made the bizarre decision to live with a homeless prostitute known as Xian whom he depicted in a canvas entitled sorrow his sense of Christian charity had not deserted him but Vincent eventually realized that the relationship was affecting his ability to work [Music] by the time of his 30th birthday in March 1883 Van Gogh knew he had potential at the Hague he worked alongside the landscape painter Anton morve and at last he began to work with oils girl in the forest is one of the earliest Van Gogh paintings which features the thick impasto brushwork that would be a feature of his mature work the loom is one of a number of early Van Gogh paintings depicting peasants at work it is a very different kind of image from Vincent's well-known masterpieces again the palette is dark and unlike his later campuses there is a sense of emotional involvement in the subject matter when this canvas was completed in May 1884 Vincent had left the Hague having grown frustrated with the emotional demands of Sian soon he was back with his family who had now moved to the Village of nunen at times his parents must have despaired of their eldest son he was difficult and anti-social he ate alone in the family home [Music] his emotional difficulties also continued in the summer of 1884 a local woman actually fell in love with the strange would-be artist this time it was Vincent who made the rejection and the unfortunate woman attempted suicide as a result worse was to come in March 1885 when Pastor Van Gogh died it was a major family loss but Vincent's reaction was surprisingly cool in a letter to Theo he described how his father's death had simply prevented him working for a few days [Music] art was now everything for Vincent van Gogh as he set about his most ambitious canvas to date The Potato Eaters it was his reaction to the the condition of the poor working classes it was almost like a 17th century Dutch work which is concerned with ordinary people like the early 19th century people like Corby and Manet who are concerned with the Contemporary in the ordinary when we think of the things for the Barbizon School Milner and either there's quite a few connections you can trace between The Barbers and school work of mini and Coro and so forth and those early works of Van Gogh the potato wedges but it's Van Gogh's personal interpretation and reaction to this conditions in which he found himself for instance working in the modern arches missionary it is there for about van Gogh it's about the potato it is but I think more than that it's about Vincent he was seeing his usual interest in the working people the underprivileged and trying to portray them as realistically as he could which was in the manner of previous Dutch painters so he used these very dark gloomy colors partly because they were traditional colors in art but also because they showed what it was like in the interior of one of those peasants houses and he was just trying to empathize with their situation and their poverty Potato Eaters can be seen as the culmination of Van Gogh's early development as a painter but he knew he had to explore further to expose himself to new influences new ideas New Visions it would be a short frenzy Journey that would lead to work of genius and a life of Torment by November 1885 Van Gogh already suspected that his time was running out that month he left his family and Holland for good over the following 56 months he created his Legend [Music] Vincent arrived in the Belgian Port of Antwerp to study at the Art Academy but he also sought out his own influences Antwerp was and remains home to many works by the Flemish Master Peter Paul Rubens Van Gogh was especially impressed with Ruben's bold handling of color and we can see the influence of Reubens in this portrait of a woman painted shortly after Van Gogh's arrival in Antwerp [Music] van goff's new enthusiasm for color was also inspired by a great artist from his own Century in his letters Vincent described his Fascination for a Frenchman whose color theories made a deep impression on him this was a giant figure of the Romantic age Eugene delacroix the 19th century produced a whole series of theories of color some of these would have very abstract and academic and indeed they really flowed the two mainstreams one which was Optical to do with light um which it to a certain extent was concerned with painting but then it merged in people like delacroix and others and for instance Surah and so on we can see in Practical terms in quantities and divisionism into new theories of color or experiments or explorations of color in terms of the painted color as opposed to light ideas about color were that you don't have solid color an area a surface of color is broken up into different sorts of greens if it's lawn for example or different blues if you're painting a blue fabric he also had some idea of complementary colors Reflections and so on color and paint were being freed from the constraints of the past and we see this developing again we need to look at the works to look at the way Starry Skies or or corn fields where the whole impression of the cornfield or the starry night was conveyed by color and its physical application and the contrast of one color against another and the use of streaks paint all of this was part and parcel of what Van Gogh took the color theories of delacroix influenced Van Gogh far more than anything he learned at the Antwerp Academy after just one term he failed his examinations having argued against the stuffy formalism of the curriculum but Vincent had other things on his mind he discovered Japanese art I think what Van Gogh liked about Japanese art was the formal aspects he also liked the exact draftsmanship and attention to detail he said this there's a painting by him of boats on the beach which is a fantastic painting and very Japanese not a Japanese subject but the style is Japanese he uses the diagonals he uses areas of color enclosed by not necessarily a clear outline one color is clearly differentiated from another so you have patches of color and the whole thing is very tightly pulled together with attention some attention to detail and he has the exact shape of the boats in the most incredibly decorative fashion and I think he just responded because of his sense of decoration combined with love of detail and an overall particular kind of tense taught composition and it's because of this that he responded so strongly to Japanese art van Gogh's passion for Japanese art would stay with him when he tired of life in Antwerp in March 1886 Theo van Gogh was surprised to receive a message at the Paris branch of gupils where he worked it was from his brother announcing that he was at the Louvre awaiting Theo's arrival Vincent van Gogh had come to Paris and it was here that his greatness as an artist began though his arrival was sudden Vincent had written to his brother explaining his desire to come to the center of European artistic life his plan was to study at the cheap Open studio of the academic painter Fernand Cuomo after moving in with Theo he began to pursue his intention but like Antwerp formal study did not Inspire his art it was a thrilling age for Parisian visual art amongst other events 1886 saw the eighth of the famous exhibitions of impressionist paintings the Revolutionary approach to color light and technique pioneered by Monet Renoir and others was now beginning to be appreciated Van Gogh liked the impressionist practice of quick open-air painting and before long he could be seen working around the Monmouth region where he lived with Theo when Van Gogh came to Paris in 86 he was painting in the Dutch fashion traditional fashion dark colors uh traditional subjects still lives and so on and during his two years in Paris at that time he came to know the Impressionists and Sarah and the divisionist his brush work loosened his color lightened and brightened and he started painting landscapes in the impressionist style more or less so it was a complete Revelation to him to be among the impressionist painters and he absorbed a lot of what they were doing the revolution of impressionism was now being taken a stage further the age of post-impressionism was already beginning with the work of artists like toulouse-lotrek Surah and sinyak Van Gogh got to know them all he became especially friendly with sinyak and took a great interest in his DOT technique of painting this was the so-called quantilism pioneered by Surah and which now included the great impressionist Camille pisaro amongst its practitioners pissarro also became an associate of Van Gogh and we can see the influence of the dot technique in much of his Parisian work the re-expiration and the rediscovery of color through color theories application of paint how do we see and divisionism or plantainism as seen yet particularly for Van Gogh but also siros with regard but it was a major one was where color began to speak in a peculiar way in its own way that is that it is the way that the Kana is seen by the eye and mixed in that that space in between the canvas and the eye which mattered I mean basically practicalism is sentiments painting and dots and divisionism is a theory of quantilism which is that again but it crudely instead of painting an orange area by mixing on your planet yellow and red what you do is you put dots of yellow and dots of red or intermingled and your eye then mixes that and it becomes orange in the space in between canvases like this 1887 still life reveal Van Gogh's enthusiasm for quantilism but unlike his friend Pizarro Vincent never allowed the technique to take over his work completely there were too many other sources of inspiration for him in Paris he became acquainted with Paul Goga an association that would ultimately lead to disaster but in 1886 and 1887 Van Gogh was content to learn from gogan's Bold use of flat solid color we can see this in his copies of Japanese prints another passion that remained with him during the Paris years by 1887 Vincent was soaking up influences from a bewildering number of sources but his personal life was still troubled he was Moody and temperamental even with his fellow artists he drank heavily and his health began to suffer his beloved brother also grew frustrated at having to share a house with such a difficult individual by the end of 1887 Vincent was tiring of Paris but his time in the French Capital had been of Paramount importance for his art if we look at the 1885 Potato Eaters and compare it with this 1887 portrait of the material supplier pear Tangi it's difficult to believe that they are the work of the same painter the same is true when we consider this self-portrait created shortly after Vincent's arrival in Paris if we jump forward less than two years the sense of artistic evolution is remarkable we get this really rather rapid trend from very dark paintings superb strong drawings continued but it was the actual use of color I think if I had to think of anything which was after his parents developed was his his the explosion of Connor it's as if he'd suddenly realize that Connor was important that Connor was in itself something through which he could convey emotion reaction impression by the time Van Gogh painted himself in early 1888 his two years in Paris had revolutionized his art but he was still not satisfied he was tired of City Life and now sought to work in a warmer lighter location where he could paint all day his choice was the sunlit region of Provence on the 20th of February 1888 he took a train from Paris and journeyed South its destination was the city of Al and it was in this provincial community that the genius of Vincent Van Gogh finally revealed itself with a continuing support of Theo he was able to work without distraction as soon as he arrived in Al he launched himself into a frenzied working schedule 16 hour days were not uncommon as he turned out Landscapes still lives and portraits his execution was quick but it was also deliberate and worked out in detail he had now evolved his own artistic philosophy which likened the art of painting to the art of music and for Van Gogh it was color that provided the key in one letter to Theo he spoke of absolutely piling on exaggerating the color his pigments were bold and intense but they were also harmonized across the canvas as we can see with this early old Masterpiece the langwa bridge he uses a fairly limited palette in this painting and again bright colors greens and yellows an unusual combination in fact and he applies his color with great confidence we can discern this whole business of color taking on its own force in these works there is no way which you could go and sit down by one of those Rivers and look at that bridge and say oh this is where Van Gogh sat and this is the this is the foliage this is the way this bridge was painted this was what the sky was like at the time because Kana has now taken off and the strength of that bridge is incredibly strong and that's part of the drawing the underlying drawing which is very strong and so it's Vincent's reaction to in a complicated and also to him you know he's a personal way reaction to the symbolism that's important it has links to with Japanese prints and its simplicity that extremely powerful work when Langlois Bridge was completed in March 1888 Vincent van Gogh had achieved full confidence in his art but his handling of color was about to become Bolder still a visit to the Mediterranean Coast at samay De La Mer inspired this stunning watercolor on his return to all the blue orange contrast is almost overwhelming and yet the image succeeds as a unified whole paintings like this had never been seen before and it's hardly surprising that van Gogh could not sell any of his work but by the summer of 1888 he was able to take Studio space in an all property and by September he was renting the entire building the so-called yellow house it was an appropriate name Van Gogh was almost obsessed with the color yellow when he was forced to write to Theo begging for paint it was always yellow at the top of the list for Van Gogh yellow had spiritual and symbolic meaning and he used the color with abandon in his portraits his sunlit Landscapes and his still lives these included one of the most famous and technically daring works of his whole career the sunflowers of August 1888. Vincent wrote to Theo that what he was after was the Sun and sunlight and we assume it's because of this that he was obsessed by yellow and different kinds of yellow such as appear in the National Gallery sunflowers he just loved the vibrancy of the color in the sunflowers this is a particular example in the sunflower series of which a major example is in National Gallery in London it goes against all the criteria of how a painting should be produced it's all yellow and yet what we've got is something which is strongly three-dimensional or the illusion of three-dimension there's no perspective here there's no sort of Illusion of depth in a traditional sense it's a use of color and varieties of tone of one color that is orange yellow plus a linear quality and we'll come back again to this drawing he's not afraid to use a dark and indication of a dark lion surrounding or separating and that gives a depth I remember thinking for a long time well I don't really look like sunflowers but I realized that what we were looking at was not the sunflower in its early sort of just opening stage but when the petals had died off and we've got all the sunflower seeds the texture of those seeds is very different than say the texture of the pot which you what must feel that it's colored slip you know with a nice shiny surface against a matte surface and then the wall Ben Goff created a number of sunflower studies and this version can now be seen in London's National Gallery but it was originally hung on the wall in the artist's own home it was intended as part of the decoration for a communal studio in the yellow house this was the so-called artist's Colony that Vincent longed to establish the studio of the South and his first fellow colonist would be Paul Goga [Music] at the time Gogan was working on the Brittany coast and was initially reluctant to join his old friend in the south but when the long-suffering Theo agreed to pay an allowance to Gogan in addition to that of his brother Vincent's fellow artist agreed to join him in all Van Gogh was overjoyed Vincent wanted artists to get together and cooperate like he said like the early Christians used to and he wanted anyone to come and stay with him in proverse actually and gogar was the only one who was interested and they had had quite a lot to do with each other previously and admired each other's work and he thought he could learn something from Goga he put go guy in the position of the master or the teacher which actually quite amazed Goga who thought that van Gogh was a powerful painter anyway if not always a good one Van Gogh started modifying the physical shape and color of his subject matter to communicate ideas with this canvas the night Cafe on the plus La Martin the artist's intention was to convey a sense of sleaze and criminal low-life in his own words to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green the night Cafe can also be seen as part of the artist's desire to capture the sublime nature of night itself shortly afterwards Vincent created his first great outdoor canvas at night the cafe Terrace according to Legend Van Gogh solved the physical problem of nocturnal painting by wearing a wide brimmed candle-lit hat in September 1888 he created Starry Night an image whose spiritual meaning is still considered today [Music] this Rich blue much much richer than in actual fact it would be therefore it's not real in the traditional sense interspersed with these extremely brilliant pinpoints of Whitey yellow and yet these swirls of color it's not static the whole thing is in movement and one feels that this is Vincent's reaction to the Knight is one of constant movement of his reaction to that this September 1888 canvas would not be the last fangoff painting to depict a starry night but by the time he returned to the subject in June 1889 the resulting work was startlingly different reflecting the traumatic events of the intervening months sadly the winter of 1888-89 marked the beginning of the end for Vincent van Gogh a time that would bring Madness persecution and a legendary Act of self-mutilation and yet in the Autumn of 1888 everything seemed to be going well despite Van Gogh's continuing inability to sell any work he had the arrival of gogun to look forward to and the artist's peace of mind is reflected in his painting of his bedroom in Vincent's room the artist said that he wanted to convey a sense of absolute restfulness to rest the brain or the imagination [Music] but it would all go horribly wrong Gogan duly arrived at Isle in October 1888 and quickly settled into the yellow house the two men began to work together as the winter dawned for a while Vincent's dream of a successful communal art seemed on the point of realization his sower was clearly influenced by gogan's extraordinary the vision after the sermon a painting that he had brought South with him differences in personality proved decisive In The End by December 1888 trouble was looming the two men argued bitterly and it became obvious that Gogan would have to leave Vincent's grand scheme was failing and this may have been enough to push him Over the Edge of Reason just before Christmas Van Gogh threatened Gogan with a razor Gogan fled leaving his fellow artist distraught that night Vincent van Gogh cut off a piece of his left ear precisely what happened I don't think is yet actually merged a number of theories have come forward one of them I suppose two of the main ones being one that his own sexual relationships were somewhat confused and it was after one encounter he cut off his ear and sent it off to a prostitute the one which I think is more logical is a result of his argument with Goga and the failure of his setting up the colony there uh again emphasized by the fact and underlined dramatically by painting his own self-portrait with his bandage deer the incident of the severed ear was a disaster for Van Gogh not so much for the mutilation itself but because it marked the end of his relationship with Gogan and the end of his hopes for an artist's colony he was now mentally Disturbed and suffered hallucinations during a brief stay in hospital his doctors blamed overwork but Vincent ignored them in a matter of days he was back at his easel creating two heartfelt still-life paintings one depicting his own chair with a pipe the other depicting the chair of his fellow artist Gogan although Vincent still kept a candle burning for Gogan the idea of the artist's colony had failed and he knew it in the early months of 1889 the unknown Dutch artist found himself alone in the south of France he had never made many friends in all the postman Joseph ruler was one of the few people whom he did know but by the spring of 1889 the friend he depicted in this portrait had been transferred to another town Vincent's life was now falling apart though he kept on working he continued to hallucinate he was also persecuted by his neighbors 80 of whom signed a petition demanding the confinement of the madman in their midst Vincent did have a mental disorder a fact he accepted himself in May 1889 he left Earle to enter the Asylum at the nearby town of sanwami there are various theories about Vincent's mental health at this time he certainly suffered from paranoia so schizophrenia might have been an element the doctor he saw at that time thought he hadn't been eating properly and this was probably true he also might have been imbibing poisoned from some of his paint especially the white it's possible in the most popular theory is that he suffered from some form of epilepsy and there is a particular kind of epilepsy which results in in between periods of perfect normality with periods of Great Depression paranoia and violence followed by periods of torpa and then a return to normality we may never know the precise nature of Van Gogh's Illness but he believed that as long as he was able to work his sanity was intact and so he insisted on being able to paint during his confinement at San Ramey hallucinations and breakdowns continued to plague him but in his Lucid moments he found the will to create a phenomenal 200 paintings in just 12 months subject matter was now forced upon him the Asylum itself the surrounding grounds fellow patients his own tormented features but his art was still evolving it was in the Asylum that began to incorporate a new technical feature into his paintings only now did the famous swirling brushwork reveal itself in Van Gogh's paintings like the cornfield from June 1889 it's difficult not to detect a sense of tortured personal expression in images like this this is a modern artistic concept perhaps best expressed when Vincent returned to the subject of The Starry Night completed in June 1889 it is a painting of the 20th century he doesn't see the world as static in any way whether you see it as the cornfield in which the whole swirling of the Corn the swirling of the clouds and they think a starry night with the swirling of the color and the different layers lines of color orbit in one of his last works for instance the the Trapper where you've got the road dividing and going either side of the chapel which itself is constantly in movement he's restless and this restlessness is there we are moving away from the adequacy of words to convey what is happening the adequacy is often and it certainly isn't got going more adequate expressed in new terms of music you could relate to uh pieces music and sections of music and areas of Music which more properly and adequately reflect what was happening today in starry night nobody did it quite as intensely somehow as Van Gogh did and using the paint in in this particularly Lavish Way that he used as well is something which showed an awareness of paint as a medium which is something that was also developed in the 20th century the expressionist movement for example there was a great desire to use brush stroke and paint to express emotions are faring intensity as real world says he wanted to liberate himself from overpowering emotions and Van Gogh in a letter to Theo said he was using exaggeration in order to convey feelings and he was also using the techniques of old wood cuts so it was quite a conscious departure from the sort of paintings he was used to painting and very successful as such in fact you the great swirling skies and flame night trees it's a very very intense painting and certainly gives you a feeling of the energy that that is can be seen sometimes in the sky at night not long after completing the starry night he broke down again at Salome through the rest of 1889 he endured breakdowns followed by periods of Sanity when he was able to paint images like this self-portrait here we can surely see a man finally cracking under the strain a man whose life had been nothing but a failure thankfully there was some good news to come in early 1890 an article appeared praising Van Gogh's work same month Theo was able to inform his brother of the sale of this painting The Red Vineyard for the sum of 400 Francs it would be the only Van Gogh purchased during the artist's lifetime in the end the salremme Asylum could do nothing for Vincent van Gogh increasingly lonely the artist decided to leave Provost altogether in May 1890 he arrived at all versawas a village near Paris under the supervision of Paul Ferdinand gashe a doctor who was also a friend of Vincent's old associate Pizarro for a while the move seemed to do him good works like the church at Orville revealed that the artist's work was still evolving though this would not be appreciated in his own lifetime the painting of Dr gashe provides a poignant example of Van Gogh's final works a hundred years later it was sold for the sum of 45 million pounds to become the most expensive painting ever and this is not the only Van Gogh canvas whose Financial value is measured in tens of Millions this value that is Artistic value or annual historically on the one hand and value in a monetary sense and art historians and those who claim to be um Arbiters of taste have have lauded Van Gogh so that if you are a collector you must have a van Gogh and if you've got enough of those vying against each other the prices are going to go up into their Millions as they are now the emotional power of Van Gogh's works maybe is what appeals to those buyers who are prepared to spend such enormous sums of money apart from fashion but in our society where so many feelings are not allowed or are oppressed works of art which show the feeling simply bursting out could be very releasing and I wonder if it's something to do with the sheer power of the feelings in his Works which have made them so universally popular it may be the ultimate tragedy of Vincent Van Gogh that he himself would never know the value that future Generations would Place upon his artistic achievement on July 27 1890 at over sir was the still unknown painter took a revolver and shot himself two days later with Theo at his side he died of his injuries after 37 years he was finally at peace but there was one more tragedy to come six months later Theo also died to be buried alongside the man he had supported so selflessly in life perhaps the greatest of all the post-impressionists Vincent van Gogh I think Vince was a very great artist he followed his own feelings his own intuitions which is what an artist is supposed to do and he followed them to the nth degree I see the impetus for the 20th century rooted in the three figures of Suzanne Goga and bengalov the enthusiasm the humanity the concern for the human condition of Van Gogh which of course led to it's a major work still continue as a strand through Monk and the expressionists foreign [Music]

Channel: Perspective

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Keywords: Vincent Van Gogh, art analysis, art appreciation, art discovery, art history, art impact, art interpretation, art masterpieces, art museum, art spotlight, art storytelling, artist profile, artistic development, artistic expression, artistic visionaries, creative genius, creative journey, fine arts, modern art, oil paintings

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Length: 47min 27sec (2847 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 27 2023