|
Amsterdam Art Museums: The arts flourish in the city. More than 40 museums display
the work of Dutch artists, old and new. The Rijksmuseum, or State Museum, contains paintings by such masters as Rembrandt
(who lived in Amsterdam), Vermeer, and Frans Hals. The Vincent van Gogh Museum features more than 500 paintings and
drawings by Van Gogh. Contemporary artists and artisans display their products in shops and galleries.
Museums and Art Galleries of Paris: Storehouses of many priceless art treasures. The works of
painters and sculptors of the late 1800's and the 1900's are displayed in the National Museum of Modern Art in the
Georges Pompidou National Center of Art and Culture. The famous Louvre museum displays works considered to be of lasting
greatness. It houses such masterpieces as Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa and the Greek statue Venus de Milo. The Picasso
Museum, originally a mansion built in the 1600's, exhibits many of Pablo Picasso's works and paintings that the Spanish
artist collected. The houses works of art from the 1800's, especially impressionist
paintings. The museum is a converted railroad station built in 1900.
VAN GOGH, Vincent (1853-90). One of the four great Post-impressionists
(along with Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, and Paul Cézanne), Vincent
van Gogh is generally considered the greatest Dutch painter after Rembrandt. His reputation is based largely on the works
of the last three years of his short ten-year painting career, and he had a powerful influence on expressionism in modern
art. He produced more than 800 oil paintings and 700 drawings, but he sold only one during his lifetime. His striking
colours, coarse brushwork, and contoured forms display the anguish of the mental illness that drove him to
suicide.
Vincent Willem van Gogh was born on March 30, 1853, in Zundert in the Brabant region of The Netherlands. He was the
eldest son of a Protestant clergyman. At the age of 16 Van Gogh was apprenticed to art dealers in The Hague, and he
worked for them there and in London and Paris until 1876.
Van Gogh disliked art dealing, and, rejected in love, he became increasingly solitary. He began to prepare for the
ministry, but he failed the entrance examinations for seminary and became a lay preacher. In 1878 he went to the
impoverished Borinage district in southwestern Belgium to do missionary work. He was dismissed in 1880 over a
disagreement with his superiors. Penniless and with his faith broken, he sank into despair and began to draw. He soon
realized the limitations of being self-taught and went to Brussels to study drawing. In 1881 he moved to The Hague to
work with the Dutch landscape painter Anton Mauve, and the next summer Van Gogh began to experiment with oil paints. His
urge to be "alone with nature" took him to Dutch villages, and his subjects--still life, landscape, and figure--all
related to the peasants' daily hardships and surroundings. In 1885 he produced his first masterpiece, 'The Potato Eaters'.
Feeling too isolated, he left for Antwerp, Belgium, and enrolled in the academy there. He did not respond well to the
school's rigid discipline, but while in Antwerp he was inspired by the paintings of Peter Paul Rubens and discovered
Japanese prints. He was soon off to Paris, where he met Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Gauguin
and discovered the impressionists Camille Pissarro, Seurat, and others. Van Gogh's two
years in Paris shaped his personal style of painting--more colourful, less traditional, with lighter tonalities and
distinctive brushwork.
Tired of city life, Van Gogh left Paris in 1888 for Arles in the south of France. He rented and decorated a yellow
house in which he hoped to found a community of "impressionists of the South." Gauguin joined him in October, but their
relations deteriorated, and in a quarrel on Christmas Eve Van Gogh cut off part of his own left ear. Gauguin left, and
Van Gogh was hospitalized. Exhibiting repeated signs of mental disturbance, Van Gogh asked to be sent to an asylum at
St-Remy-de-Province. After a year of confinement he moved to the home of a physician-artist Doctor Gachet in Auvers-sur-Oise for two months. On July 27, 1890, Van Gogh shot himself;
he died two days later.
Despite his deteriorating mental condition, Van Gogh's time at Arles, in the asylum, and at Auvers proved to be his
greatest productive periods. At Arles he painted with great energy the sun-drenched fields and flowers; at St-Remy the
colours of his paintings were more muted, but the lines were bolder and the whole more visionary; in the northern light
of Auvers he adopted pale, fresh tonalities, a broader and more expressive brushwork, and a lyrical vision of nature. The
sale of Van Gogh's 'Irises' in 1987 brought the highest price ever paid for a work of art up to
that time--53.9 million dollars. Courtesy Compton's Reference Collection
 * Irises, 1889, 71 x 93 Sotheby's Auction, New York 1987 $54 million
|
