Van Gogh spent a little more than two years in Arles and its environs, painting the burning light and indelible shadows of Arles…
The city languished under the Provencal sun, adding to its collection of interesting buildings during the Renaissance and the Baroque, but somehow lacking heart. The Rhone, no longer considered divine, became diabolical. When Dante considered the river at Arles, the word “stagnate” occurred to him. The monks of Montmajour made some headway in the drainage projects which the Romans left unfinished, but many large brackish lagoons remained. At last the Dutch engineer Van Ens drained them in the seventeenth-century, creating fertile fields and a less miasmic atmosphere….
---After the exhibit ended, the famous pieces of art were either destroyed or sold at auctions. A large amount of “degenerate art” by Picasso, Dalí, Ernst, Klee, Léger and Miró was destroyed in a bonfire on the night of July 27, 1942 in Paris. In 1939, a stolen self-portrait by Vincent van Gogh was auctioned at Gallerie Fisher, Lucerne, for $US 40.000. One of the most famous paintings to be burned during World War II is the Painter on the Road to Tarascon by Vincent van Gogh. It is not known for sure how the painting was burned, but it is thought to have perished when the Allied forces bombed Magdeburg, setting fire to the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum, which contained stolen art. Today The Painter on the Road to Tarascon was lost forever when it became a causality of the Second World War, but the portrait has left a lasting impression. It remains one of the most cherished pieces of art that was lost in the war. The painting shows a lonely portrait of Vincent van Gogh traveling. The painting was a heavy influence on artist Francis Bacon, who described it as a haunting image of van Gogh, showing him as an alienated outsider. Vincent van Gogh was quoted as saying “Real painters do not paint things as they are…They paint them as they themselves feel them to be.” Read more: http://www.toptenz.net/10-famous-pieces-of-art-stolen-by-the-nazis.php#ixzz1sEvLgzQq
…Whereas modern art consisted of revolutionary experiments motivated by a desire to express aspects of the newly-discovered “unconscious mind,” Kuspit argues, postart is shallow, unreflective banality motivated by the desire to become institutionalized; that is, part of the mainstream (along with the commercial reward that such co-opted acceptability brings). In this regard, the messianic zeal with which Van Gogh approached his work represents an ideal because it demonstrates the kind of authentic and individualistic commitment to artistic expression that today’s commercialized postartists lack. The crucifixion has become a cabaret. Read More:http://www.themodernword.com/reviews/kuspit.html
Van Gogh came south to find the sun. Within a few weeks it had warmed up his colors and set his canvas ablaze, and even in nocturnal scenes such as the Cafe Terrace at night he made the stars and gas lamps burn with the intensity of little suns in the engulfing blue. image: Wiki
…Then in February 1888, during a snowstorm, came another Dutchaman who saw Arles as the city had been waiting to be seen: a miracle of color beneath the golden sun. Vincent adored, ” the sun pouring down bright yellow rays on the shrubs and the earth- an absolute shower of gold.” He painted in the mistral, fixing his easel to the ground with stakes, and squinting at the blowing corn. He listened to the summer song of the cicada.
And as Van Gogh walked, across the burning fields to Montmajour, past houses touched with white and heavy orange, through the yellow grain fields, he turned and saw Arles on its hill in the golden light, a city completely gold now, and of all its works of art, a total work of art in itself.
Image:http://clairdefemme.blog.ca/2006/09/03/gauguin_et_van_gogh_en_arles~1094238/ ---On an early excursion into the countryside Vincent found one of his most grateful subjects: the little rustic drawbridge known as Pont de L'anglois. He made one drawing of it with a reed, one with a pencil, a water color, and five different versions of it in oil.
Van Gogh may have been a sick Dutchman, but his work turns the inner light of Rembrandt’s paintings inside out — paintings made during the Golden Age of Dutch painting, when the Netherlands was the greatest seafaring and commercial power in the world. The inner light is the auratic expression of Dutch power. It may be “the inner light, mysteriously potent, Rothko believed had originated with Rembrandt, which is why when he taught a course on ‘Contemporary Artists’ at Brooklyn College it was with Rembrandt that he began,”
) but it is also the glaring klieg light in which Rembrandt’s Dutchmen theatrically posed, the picture of glorious prosperity and worldly success. Read More:http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/books/kuspit/simon-schama-power-of-art11-23-09.asp
ADDENDUM:
Collins (1989) stated that John Gedo, Donald Kuspit, Albert Lubin, Ziva Amishai-Maisels, Gilbert Rose and Aaron Sheon studied Van Gogh’s and Gauguin’s troubled psyches to determine whether psychobiography can analyze formal issues as well as subject matter. The panel dwelled at length on the homoerotic aspects of van Gogh’s and Gauguin’s relationship. Gauguin was a strong father figure in Vincent’s subconscious, yet he believed that he could live peacefully with Gauguin under one roof. Vincent grew nervous when Gauguin wanted his companionship and feverishly he started to paint. He planned for the arrival of Gauguin and prepared a room specific for the newcomer. “If someone comes visiting, he should receive the prettiest room and I will decorate it like a ladies room … big pictures with twelve or fourteen sunflowers and a cozy bed.” ( van Gogh, letter 534) Read More:http://www.heikestucke.com/vangogh.htm
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