The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh (Penguin Classics)

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Edited by Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten and Nienke Bakker The letters are the window to Van Gogh's universe. To the contrary, he was friends with many of the major artists in Paris—Seurat, Signac, Gauguin—and aware of the work of other prominent painters, such as Monet and Cézanne.

In fact, his fits (most likely due to epilepsy) were debilitating, and often kept him out of commission for weeks at a time. The letters in this superb selection help account for this massive and lasting outpouring of affection. After years of anxiety and frequent bouts of mental illness he died aged 37 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.His gorgeous use of colors, stunning textures and haunting self-portraits have captured my heart for most of my life, and, after seeing endless quotes from his letters written to his brother on Tumblr, I decided to pick up this collection, and this has quickly become some of my favorite pieces of writing that I have ever had the pleasure of reading. In 1906 Bruno Cassirer published a small volume of selected letters of Vincent's to Theo van Gogh, translated into German.

because I have walked this earth for 30 years, and out of gratitude would like to leave some memento in the form of drawings and paintings— not made to please this school or that, but to express a genuine human feeling. For great things do not just happen by impulse but are a succession of small things linked together. Với van Gogh, nhân vật trong tranh chẳng cần là ngài bá tước, cô công chúa, hay những điển tích Thánh kinh nào hết, mà chỉ đơn giản là nông phu đào khoai, chở than, là người đưa thư, là cây hạnh trổ bông trắng ngần, là cây bách dưới bầu trời sao.Make no mistake, he was indeed a tortured individual, but he was highly read and hyper-aware of the world of art.

He was a highly intelligent, sensitive man who read deeply and poured all his emotions into the letters. And this personal meaning to his painting is what explains that even if it was after his arrival in Paris in 1886, where he fell under the spell of Impressionism, when he changed his palette from the earth tones to the bright and primary colours, he pursued something very different from the French painters. Beginning in 1888 and ending a year later, van Gogh wrote 22 letters to Émile Bernard in which the tone is different from those to Theo.Hughes closes and essay saying that Van Gogh was a great painter in spite of his madness, not because of it - and having read his letters, I'm inclined to agree. The obscure genius ahead of his time, toiling in solitude, tortured by personal demons, driven by a creativity that sometimes spilled over into madness—and so on. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. So instead of giving in to despair I chose active melancholy, in so far as I was capable of activity, in other words I chose the kind of melancholy that hopes, that strives and that seeks, in preference to the melancholy that despairs numbly and in distress. He signed his paintings with ‘Vincent’, because French people had difficulty pronouncing ‘Van Gogh’.

Margot thankfully survived, but it did mean the end of their relationship: she moved to live with a doctor she knew in Utrecht, and Vincent eventually moved to Antwerp. Van Gogh never really had any money, which meant that he rarely, if ever, had the opportunity to paint people (you needed money, and friends, to paint portraits). Van Gogh then began to alternate between fits of madness and lucidity and was sent to the asylum in Saint-Remy for treatment.

The biggest disappointment was that they failed to provide as much insight into Van Gogh's working process and aesthetic ideas than I hoped. Stopniowo, prośby i problemy finansowe przewijające się przez całą, ponad 10-letnią korespondencję między braćmi, zaczynają ustępować miejsca spowiedzi bezpośredniej, nagiej, reanimującej dozgonne (dosłownie) zaufanie, jakie van Gogh pokładał w malarstwie. It's a story of a man driven by internal conviction, who gets knocked down time and time again but gets up, no matter how hard it is, until he can get up no more.