Vincent van Gogh: life and artistic legacy

Van Gogh was born in the Netherlands to a preacher and his early life had inauspicious surroundings. He was well into maturity when he realized his true vocation was painting, and though he developed his talent in isolation at first, his later experiences in Paris had a profound affect on his painting. Van Gogh is extremely famous for his insanity and mental difficulties, but these conditions also provided the basis for his genius. Van Gogh's unique vision of the world, a vision that he portrayed in rich but unusual colors and swirling brushstrokes, is extremely idiosyncratic and it is this vision that is most notable to viewers of his works. By viewing paintings from his period in Belgium, his time in Paris, and his time in Arles, we can see how this unique vision of the world pervaded his works even as his technique developed.

Vincent Van Gogh was born in 1853 to Theodorus van Gogh and Anna Cornelia Carbentus. He was born in the town of Zundert, which was in the south of the Netherlands, and his father worked as a preacher. In 1869, he began his association with the world of professional art working at an art dealer's firm as well as several other small jobs. After carrying on in this occupation, he began to follow his father's footsteps in studying religious studies in preparation for the vocation of preacher. In 1878, while beginning his study of religion, Van Gogh moved to a mining town in Belgium called Borinage. It is while here that Van Gogh discovered that it was his second vocation that would become his true passion: he found the calling to become an artist. His early work was largely influenced by two artists that he greatly admired, Jean Francois Millet and Honore Daumier, and in following their example his early work tended to use dark colors extensively. He moved around throughout the Netherlands and Brussels before his art career eventually reached a second stage when he moved to Paris.

Van Gogh moved to Paris in 1886, living with his brother Theo, who was four years his junior. In Paris, Van Gogh encountered a vibrant and exciting art scene.

Paris in the late 1890s was increasingly radical and these ideas were reflected throughout the world of arts and letters. In literature, the French symbolists, such as Baudelaire, Rimabud, Verlaine, and Mallerme, were all exploring new poetic forms, such as vers libre, and were discussing controversial themes throughout their work. Political and social reforms were the hot topic of the day and these reforms permeated everything. Life was increasingly bohemian and radical behavior was fashionable as one day's political cause was quickly replaced with another. Excess was the rule of the day rather than the exception:

In the theatre...it was not uncommon to see bare breasts on the stage...Barney and Vivien were lovers, and two of the leading proponents of the "lesbian chic" that swept across Paris in the 1890's. Drug addiction was considered an artistic trait, and prostitution was romanticized by many male writers. Sewer rats became the trendiest pets to own.

The art world, too, after the initial barriers had been broken down by the impressionists, was embracing artistic innovation, the use of modern subjects instead of classical or religious icons, the use of "vulgar" or even "crude" images, the idea of artistic coteries of painters, and other avant-garde devices. To this largest city of Paris, already brimming with excitement, was added the additional intensity of a legitimate cultural revolution as the new tenets of modernism were ushered into being with an unabashed fury to a public that was simultaneously confused, excited, outraged, thrilled, and inflamed.

Van Gogh found much to be excited about in this environment. He worked briefly at Fernand Cormon's atelier, and it was here that he met Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Latrec was not the only famous painter of Paris famous fin de siecle period with whom Van Gogh was in contact. At different points he met other painters destined for greatness, including Emile Bernard, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Camille Pissarro, and Paul Signac. The Paris scene affected his paintings and here he began employing a brighter pallet and using different subjects, including portraits, still-lifes, and street scenes.

Early in the next year, Van Gogh moved yet again. In this move, he went far away from the excitement of the Paris art scene to a place where he worked almost in complete and total isolation. In Arles, the area to which Van Gogh moved, he was totally alone, and his painting changed again, as he focused on the people and scenes that he saw around him. In the Fall of the next year, Paul Gauguin joined Van Gogh at Arles and the two painters worked together, generating some of the most interesting work of both artists' careers. Unfortunately, despite the increasing complication, delicacy, and quality of Van Gogh's masterworks, he became increasingly mentally unstable and off-balanced. Van Gogh had a terrible nervous breakdown in late 1888 and was forced to enter a hospital in order to recuperate from its debilitating effects. Subsequently, he was struck by terrible seizures and continuing mental difficulties. This was not to be the only time he was interred for his increasing psychological and physical problems, and he was placed in hospitals in Arles, Saint-Remy, and Auvers-sur-Oise. He was in and out of these hospitals until his death. Van Gogh continued to paint throughout his mental difficulties, however, and in 1890 he had a show in which he sold his first painting. That such a great master sold so little of his work during his own lifetime is one of the greatest tragedies in the history of the arts. Unfortunately, Van Gogh was not able to triumph over his own psychological problems, and on July 29, 1890, Van Gogh died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Certainly, Van Gogh's biography makes for an interesting read, and the torturous ups and downs of his life, although painful for him, have not hurt his position in the eyes of his posterity. Indeed, Van Gogh's very madness seems inextricably linked to his deeply idiosyncratic and unique vision, and it is for this vision that he is ultimately is famous. Many have noted that the Van Gogh scholars tend to discuss the link between his genius and his madness when discussion his work:

The artist Van Gogh has become like a site where discourses on Madness and creativity converge. Madness and creative genius, both sadly constructed as extreme, alienated, and aberrant kinds of behavior, are mapped onto Van Gogh, rendering him the 'mad artist' and the subject of a study of creativity as a kind of abnormal psychological phenomenon. Van Gogh himself referred to the "artist's madness' (LTR 574) eliding his illness and professional identity into a cultural construction.

At the risk of merely adding to the discourse on the connection between Van Gogh's and creative vision, it appears that the much discussed connection here is much-discussed for a reason. Van Gogh's uniqueness lays not so much in a purely technical innovation like Seurat's pointillism or Kandinsky's abstraction. Neither is it simply his brushwork, color, or subject matter. While all of these are important elements and are intriguing to discuss in their own right, the pervading sense that a viewer receives of a Van Gogh is that his painting make the world somehow "strange." It is his artistic vision, his ability to "see" colors, textures, and shapes that seem to call into question the validity and reality of the surrounding world that makes his voice so unique and strong. Considering his well-documented mental troubles, his epilepsy, and his possible hallucination, it is difficult not to tie this radical, unique, and strange vision of reality in with his madness. Certainly, the concept of the artists as an almost insane visionary is not a new, nor was it a new one at the time of Van Gogh. Since the romantics the idea that a true and deep artistic vision might have a spiritual otherworldly aura had circulated as a popular myth and as a common literary device. For Van Gogh, however, this sense of an almost ethereal vision seems central to his work, and though it evolved, it remains a constant influence throughout.

Even in Neuen, Van Gogh's unique painterly vision became clear. In this impoverished town, Van Gogh used the landscape and the people as subjects, but beneath them lay a vision that seemed to tell of a reality beyond their physical hardships. Van Gogh's painting from this era The Potato Eaters, displays the ability of his vision to render a scene truly unique. In his description of the painting's history, Louis van Tilborgh discusses the painting essential aim:

His overriding aim was to express the human spirit.... The Potato Eaters was the first painting in which he sought to achieve this... his portrayal of a peasant meal was designed to evoke the same type of emotional response to the human condition. To his way of thinking, the artistic value of the canvas lay not in its technical quality, but in the sincerity and fervor of his commitment.

This idea of social critique becomes most clear, not only through the scene depicted and the title, which suggests poverty, but also by the very technique Van Gogh applied and the overall vision that often strays from reality. The faces are almost grotesque in their strange extension. The blandness of the brown tones feels almost oppressive in sending out a message of the stark staleness of these peasant's lives. Here, it is Van Gogh's vision -- the way in which he shows the viewer the world -- that stands out as the most intriguing facet of the work. Even in this early work, when Van Gogh was largely working completely in isolation, his immense vision, his penetrating genius, is apparent.

Soon after this painting, Van Gogh moved to Paris and shared an apartment with his brother Theo. This move had an immense impact on Van Gogh as he finally experienced the realities of the professional art scene in Paris. The innovations that Parisian painting had undergone in the last decade all had a profound affect upon Van Gogh and his painting:

It was a giant leap, however, from Hal's work to Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist paintings, and it took months before Van Gogh came to terms with recent French modes. One can imagine the immediate effects of impressionism's high-keyed palettes and loose brushwork (72) upon an artists who considered Hals 'a colorist among colorists' and regarded draughtsmenship as 'the backbone that supports all the rest.'

The Parisian art scene, especially the work of Impressionists and coterie, had a significant effect on Van Gogh's painting style. He now employed a series of new techniques, including pointillism, and a brighter and bolder palette. His brush strokes had grown into the ones we would come to see as more characteristic of his style. Despite all of these new innovations, however, his singular and strange vision lay beneath the basic elements of the painting.

In considering his Self-Portrait from the Spring of 1887, we can view the ways in which Van Gogh's styled had evolved, but still very remained true to his inner vision. His painting technique had evolved considerably since The Potato Eaters, due, in no small part, to the influence of modernist Parisian painting. He layered colors in a manner that resembled Impressionist work as much as it did his own earlier work:

one is struck by the profusion of red and blue dots swarming over the dark green background and by the manner in which the reddish brown of the jacket is rendered in a kind of mosaic of dark blue-green, orange-red, and yellow dots. The bright red beard and yellow-brown hair have been built up from separate brushstrokes in forceful colors, and Vincent has left touches of unmixed complementary green in the eyebrows, hair and beard.

Even though his brushwork was bolder and new, however, the same unique vision still lay beneath the brighter more intense technique. Here, colors almost dance, light appears if its in motion, and vision is almost rendered to a blur, suggesting that a deeper reality lies beneath the shimmering, momentary perceptual reality that we so often encounter. Thus, like in The Potato Eaters, Van Gogh uses his technique to display a perceptual world that has certain similarities, but is ultimately strangely different than our own.

When Van Gogh moved to Arles, he did so after a sense of exhaustion with the Parisian art scene had overwhelmed him. He was exhausted and desired top get back to the country. He hoped that a change of scenery, the ability to work extensively in isolation, and the subject matter of the country might help his creative powers. In Arles, Van Gogh found immense inspiration for painting, once again using his idiosyncratic vision to discover beauty within the landscape -- a beauty he then extracted through the medium of his paintbrush:

He saw 'landscapes in the snow, with the summits white against a sky luminous as snow," and he immediately painted the scenes he saw for the were 'landscapes that the Japanese have painted."

Thus, the landscape in Arles dramatically appealed to Van Gogh's visionary nature and paintings and entire landscapes jumped out at him from the edges of his vision. In this way, we see that his unique vision was his primary impetus for painting, and it is this unique muse that we see in his works themselves.

In his painting, The Cafe Terrace on the Place du Forum, Arles, at Night, we can once again see both how Van Gogh's style developed even as the visionary character of his works remained essentially the same. Van Gogh himself described the basic qualities of his work in a letter to his sister: