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66 Art Works
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by: Vincent Van Gogh
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Vincent Van Gogh
(Dutch, 1853-1890)
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Montmartre.
1886
Art Institute of Chicago.
One of the numerous paintings of Montmartre, then still a countrified suburb where Van Gogh shared living
quarters with his brother, this picture illustrates both his interest in his new surroundings and also his
change of style from dark and heavy tones to light and tender color. From the terrace and observation post of
the Moulin de la Galette he suggests not so much a view of the city as the prospect of infinite space. It
is surprising to think that only the year before this, back in Nuenen, he had painted in an entirely different
key and mood his dusky, lamp-lit peasant genre-scene, The Potato Eaters.
His style was not yet finalized (though he could give even the row of lamp-posts a unique individuality).
He did not venture to challenge comparison with Monet, Sisley, Renoir and
Degas whose work was shown by Theo
van Gogh on the Boulevard Montmartre and whom Vincent referred to as `the great impressionists of the
Grand Boulevard'. He styled himself one of the "painters of the Petit Boulevard", exhibiting with Bernard, Anquetin,
Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec at a café on the Boulevard Clichy. Yet in this period of two years before the craving for
sunlight and warmth drove him southwards to Arles, it is evident that he was absorbing influences and ideas at a
feverish rate. In 1886 the Neo-Impressionism of Seurat and Signac in the last Impressionist exhibition was to be
absorbed into his consciousness with extraordinary results.
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The Starry Night.
June 1889
Oil on Canvas, 72 x 92 cm (29 x 36 1/4 in)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
The Starry Night was completed near the mental asylum of Saint-Remy, 13 months before Van Gogh's death at the age of 37.
Vincent's mental instability is legend. He attempted to take Paul Gauguin's life and later committed himself
to several asylums in hopes of an unrealized cure.
Van Gogh painted furiously and The Starry Night vibrates with rockets of burning yellow while planets gyrate
like cartwheels. The hills quake and heave, yet the cosmic gold fireworks that swirl against the blue sky are
somehow restful.
This painting is probably the most popular of Vincent's works.
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The White House at Night.
June 1890 (Auvers)
Oil on canvas, 59 x 72.5 cm (23 1/4 x 28 1/2")
Formerly collection Otto Krebs, Holzdorf; Last exhibited 1924.
At the end of WWII, as the Soviets pulled back from Germany, they took with them many German-owned works of art.
These masterpieces were stored in the basement of the Hermitage in Leningrad, a Soviet state secret for nearly a
half century. They have now been put on public exhibition.
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The Potato Eaters.
1885
Oil on canvas, 81.5 x 114.5 cm
Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh, Amsterdam.
From 1881 to 1885 van Gogh lived in the Netherlands, sometimes in lodgings, supported by his devoted 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 picture from this period being The Potato Eaters (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; 1885). 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 labour, and how they have honestly
earned their food'. In 1885 van Gogh moved to Antwerp on the advice of Antoine Mauve (a cousin by marriage), and
studied for some months at the Academy there. Academic instruction had little to offer such an individualist, however,
and in February 1886 he moved to Paris, where he met Pissarro, Degas, Gauguin, Seurat,
and Toulouse-Lautrec. At this
time his painting underwent a violent metamorphosis under the combined influence of Impressionism and Japanese woodcuts,
losing its moralistic flavour 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'.
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The night café.
1888
Yale University Art Gallery.
Of his Night Café, he said: "I have tried to express with red and green the terrible passions of human nature."
For a time he was influenced by Seurat's delicate pointillist manner, but he abandoned this for broad, vigorous,
and swirling brush-strokes.
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