Did Clement Greenberg Give Vincent Van Gogh Is First Art Show

Auvers as Culture

A Disquisitional Roundup

A s everyone knows, Vincent van Gogh is the most popular creative person in history. He may even exist the most pop human being catamenia, if you don't count Christ and the prophet Muhammad. The decease cult for no other lay figure has ever been so persistent or so evolutionary or then global. Eat your hearts out, Elvis and Marilyn.

He's simply everywhere in our world. His face sells food, beverage and marijuana. In Europe, his proper noun is on streets, squares, restaurants, cafes, coffee houses, hotels, ships, planes, buses, and investment banks (as in Van Gogh Preferred Banking, "where wealth direction is raised to an art form"). Commonwealth of australia has a Van Gogh oil field.

His goal as an creative person was to connect with people who knew nothing about art, and at this he succeeded magnificently. Auto salesmen and schoolgirls weep when they encounter his paintings, and have no idea why. In the sale of posters -- the real test of mass popularity for a painter -- he's the undisputed king. Van Gogh reproductions outsell Kleenex tissues.

And he's simply every bit popular with the critics as he is with Joe Public. The bossy arbiters of every artistic "ism" claim him as a favorite son. When, in the '50s, the critic Clement Greenberg dared to question his "craft competence" ("Did Van Gogh have a professional command of his art?"), a ton of bricks fell on him. He was spitting in the wind.

But if Van Gogh is honey to the great unwashed and to the cultural elite, he is even more popular with another demographic group: his boyfriend artists. Picasso spotted this trait very early in the Vincent phenomenon and predicted that Van Gogh'southward "tragic and solitary adventure" would get "the prototypical artist'due south saga of our time."

Well, that certainly happened, and on a scale Picasso could not accept dreamed possible. Artists of all stripes love Vincent madly. The enigma of his personality, the pain of his struggle, the magic of his accomplishment, the bittersweet mystery of his death and the irony of his posthumous fame is opium to them.

The first purchaser of a Van Gogh painting was Anna Boch, some other painter, and his first collectors were, for the most part, other artists. Movie people, for some reason, take been specially susceptible to his gravity and the listing of long-fourth dimension Van Gogh owners includes Errol Flynn, Edward G. Robinson and Elizabeth Taylor.

As a picture critic, I saw this confirmed every time I brought up his proper name in an interview. From Madonna to Meryl Streep, Jack Nicholson to Daniel Day-Lewis, The Stone to Robert Redford, they all seemed to feel a personal connexion with him. And while the nature of this connection varied, it always seemed to be fueled by the pathos of his decease.

No less an authority than Tony Curtis one time said to me, "We're attracted, above all, to his death: Was his suicide an act of the despair that goes mitt-in-mitt with existence an artist or was information technology an human activity of cosmos?" A bow to failure or, as Sartre put it, "the final brushstroke" to a life "so mythic in its dimension" that it was itself a witting piece of work of art?

Either way, the Death in Auvers has had well-nigh supernatural pull on the artists of the past century and they accept responded to it with a deluge of paintings, sculptures, symphonies, songs, operas, plays, novels, poetry, films and television shows -- all of which, to some degree, have the shadow of the wheatfield hanging over them.

Every bit you might expect, this outpouring of "Vincentiana" ranges wildly in style, ambition and quality, from the throwaway lyrics of a Bob Dylan ballad to the libretto of a iii-hour Finnish opera, from a Woody Allen parody to the rap poetry of Tupac Shakur, from a Van Gogh Vodka commercial to films by Vincent Minnelli, Robert Altman and Akira Kurosawa.

How does ane deal with it all? Not easily. But for those who want a vague handle on the state of affairs, the following rundown has been prepared, based on my three decades of sampling the waters. It's opinionated, and by no means definitive, merely it'south at least an endeavor to sort out the vast cultural legacy of Auvers in one bearable sitting.

Lust FOR LIFE: The movies are the all-time identify to start and this palatial 1956 biopic is the best of the movies, and the merely work of whatever kind that deserves its own category. Because, more than just derivative of Vincent, it was one of the greatest factors in the creation of the Van Gogh myth that seized the world in the 1950s and has never let it get.

VINCENT MINNELLI'S Lust For Life (1956)

Yes, there are nasty things to say about it in terms of biographical accuracy. Information technology falsely depicts Vincent succumbing to his "malady of the Due south" while in Auvers and it grossly misrepresents all the aspects of his death. To explicate the incomprehensible suicide information technology even goes to the trouble to invent a bogus suicide note.

Yet, somehow, it doesn't matter. Sixty-two years later, the movie all the same plays like a Stradivarius and information technology's abundantly obvious that what information technology does so brilliantly "right" is to view Vincent's life as one of history'southward dandy personal epics: epic in the scope of his graphic symbol, the journey of his art and the ten-year odyssey he took through Holland, Kingdom of belgium and three various regions of France.

To recreate this odyssey, the filmmakers not but traveled to all of those (then) nevertheless-largely unspoiled actual locations, they too went around the world to photograph actual Van Gogh paintings in their total radiance to display in the moving-picture show's many inserts and montages, and create a thrilling cinemascope gallery of the artist's development.

I of the movie theatre's all-time most innovative colorists, director Vincent Minnelli -- working with legendary cameraman F. A. Young (Lawrence of Arabia) -- never rose to a claiming more resplendently as he did in the feat of contrasting the fine art to its locations and making virtually every frame of the motion picture an Impressionist painting unto itself.

And, of class, the jewel in this archetype's crown is Kirk Douglas's towering star functioning. His physical resemblance to Vincent is and so uncanny he could be one of the cocky-portraits come eerily live, and he backs that blow of nature with all the inner burn down and riveting charisma of an iconic moving-picture show star at his volcanic peak. He "is" Vincent.

The operation received an barrage of acclamation in its time (including a New York Flick Critics award), and its touch on has snowballed over the years. As critic Judy Sund noted in 2002, "The hostage, impulsive genius that Douglas... brought to life continues to inform popular notions of the artistic personality and to haunt modernistic painting."

Lust for Life captures both the visual sweep of Vincent'southward life and the spirit of his personality. It is quite just Hollywood'southward almost successful biopic of a famous artist, and also its most influential: Indeed, it'south easy to contend that no motion-picture show has ever had a greater influence on the world'southward perception of a major cultural figure.

OTHER BIOPICS: 30-four years later, when Robert Altman fabricated the second highest-profile Van Gogh biopic, Vincent & Theo , (one of four released to necktie-in with the centenary of Vincent's death in 1990), he decided the best way to compete with the memory of Lust for Life was to add Theo equally an equal hero and work against the earlier pic's epic tradition.

So while LFL saw Vincent'south life equally a screen-filling odyssey, Altman goes over the same territory with almost no establishing shots or cinematic panache, and trivial in the manner of evocative locations. He crosscuts between the brothers' lives from interior to interior. The Borinage gets ane scene in 1 cramped room.

While LFL punctuated its narrative with a running gallery of Van Gogh art, V&T gives

ROBERT ALTMAN'S

Vincent & Theo (1990)

us no real sense of how that mode evolved from the earth tones of Brabant to the sublime gaudiness of Provence to the chromatic serenity of Auvers. And the paintings we do glimpse in the moving-picture show are obvious fakes, oft presented in the wrong menstruation.

While LFL portrayed its Theo equally a paragon of solidity and Vincent equally a troubled but essentially noble idealist, V&T portrays Theo every bit an effete snob and Vincent every bit a mean-spirited low-brow with little trace of a cute soul and the dirtiest teeth in the history of movie theatre. You lot tin can't imagine this Vincent reading a volume or dispensing much Emersonian wisdom.

Still, V&T has its pluses. It's delineation of the brothers' stormy human relationship is more honest than LFL, it has a handful of virtuoso (and uniquely Altman) scenes, Roth'due south gritty performance has earned its own cult following and its wheatfield finale has some punch. (It's the simply picture biopic that actually shows Vincent pulling the trigger on himself.)

But the movie relies on something historically false or absurdly heightened in almost every scene (such every bit having Vincent osculation Gauguin passionately on the lips), and information technology generates trivial awe or magic: Framed with scenes of a frantic modern auction of a Van Gogh painting, the lasting emotion information technology conveys is an well-nigh comical sense of irony.

Also produced to tie-in with the death-year centennial (but released in 1991, a yr late), Maurice Pialat'due south French-language Van Gogh was a huge critical hit in its day, with a near-record twelve César nominations and a all-time-actor César win for Jacques Dutronc as Vincent. Withal, to my mind, information technology'south a travesty that's very hard to sit through.

To its credit, this is the get-go

MAURICE PIALAT'South Van Gogh (1991)

Van Gogh motion-picture show that plays directly to the Mystery of Auvers. Information technology doesn't show the shooting in the wheatfield, information technology implies (only doesn't directly state) that someone else might take pulled the trigger and, without offering much in the way of a motive, it fifty-fifty hints that Dr. Gachet may accept been the hit-man.

It also defies Van Gogh mythology to depict its Theo as an insensitive, money-grubbing huckster (who doesn't actually like his brother's work and feels no sorrow for his expiry); and to have its Vincent flatly admit what and then many of his revisionist biographers have suspected: that he was faking his madness in St-Rémy then he could hibernate in his work.

However, this is in no way an interesting movie, and its Vincent is simply preposterous: a tall, lanky, Clint Eastwood of a Post-Impressionist who saunters into Auvers-sur-Oise with a perfectly intact left ear, never seems to take much interest in painting and spends most of his terminal summer rolling in the hay with an insatiable Marguerite Gachet.

This movie's Vincent is more irresistible to women than Warren Beatty. Adeline Ravoux, his sister-in-police force Jo, a whole wagonload of nude prostitutes -- they're and so all over him he has to literally fight them off. And nothing else here bears the slightest human relationship to any reality either. The dialogue and situations are a ludicrous fantasy.

Moreover, while LFL told its epic story in a compact two hours (to a glorious Miklós Rózsa score), and V&T upped its running time to a trying but still-endurable two-and-a-one-half hours (with a spooky electronic score by Gabriel Yared), the subtitled scenes of Pialat'southward Van Gogh grind on for an agonizing three hours -- without benefit of any music.

The great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa's fascinating 1990 psychological memoir, Dreams , was besides originally sold every bit a tie-in with the Van Gogh centenary decease-year, but it's not a biography and the Van Gogh office of it, "Crows," is but i of 8 sections depicting the "landscape and texture" of the filmmaker'southward dreams.

AKIRA KUROSAWA'S Dreams (1990)

In this only English-linguistic communication segment, Kurosawa sees himself as a immature fine art pupil who wanders from a Van Gogh exhibition into a Van Gogh-wonderland where he meets Vincent (played by director Martin Scorsese) and follows him through a serial of Van Gogh sketches and paintings until he reaches the apocalyptic vision of Wheatfield with Crows.

Scorsese sounds too much like Scorsese for us to suspend much disbelief but he looks a chip like Vincent in several shots and, since he's not actually required to give a performance, his intelligence and famously compulsive personality makes him a non-bad emblematic option. He's certainly more believable in the role than Dutronc.

And with ravishing and ground-breaking colour-effects by George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic that suck us right into the paintings, the sequence stands as a sumptuous monument to Japan'southward legendary national Vincent-obsession and a fulfillment of Vincent'southward own vision of his work (in Letter V487) as "a Japanese dream."

The Van Gogh film rush of 1990 also includes a fourth entry, the sweet-spirited French-Canadian family unit film, Vincent et Moi , which tells the tale of a immature girl creative person who goes back in time to meet her hero. Later that, however, the cinema of Vincent would take a lengthy hiatus, with most of the action moving to the small screen, especially in Europe.

Over the next xx-seven years, during which Van Gogh scholarship would be revolutionized past its recognition of the Mystery of Auvers and the likelihood he didn't commit suicide, the just Vincent feature would be Alexander Barnett's low-budget 2005 American indie, The Eyes of Van Gogh , chronicling Vincent'southward stay in the asylum at St-Rémy.

But the mystery would exist front and eye in two more than recent Oscar-nominated films released within a year of one other: the 2017 animated characteristic, Loving Vincent (discussed below under blitheness) and 2018's At Eternity'southward Gate , directed by Julian Schnabel and co-written by France's most celebrated screenwriter, Jean-Claude Carrière.

JULIAN SCHNABEL'S

At Eternity's Gate (2018)

Given its filmmakers' track record and a best-actor Oscar nomination for star Willem Dafoe as Vincent, this final one should accept been something special: a biopic to finally rival Lust For Life. Just it'southward amazingly and sadly non. In fact, as a biography of a well-documented icon of history, you but don't go much worse than this.

It'due south a relate of Vincent'due south final days that somehow manages to reduce Dr. Gachet to an extra and omit Adeline Ravoux entirely. When Theo arrives at the Ravoux Inn for the death sentry, Vincent is already dead! It's one apocryphal scene after another, with Vincent doing things he never did, saying things he never said, painting works that don't exist.

If Altman and Pialat'south visions were cramped and anti-ballsy, Schnabel'southward is positively clasutrophobic, with no major set up pieces and

nearly all shut shots. It's also painfully slow-moving and often downright annoying in its obvious pretention to be the almost "high-sounding" of VG biopics. (Not surprisingly, it's too the biggest box-part flop of the bunch.)

The script is incredibly threadbare but information technology strains to exist upward-to-engagement with sequences depicting both the famous lost Arles sketchbook (plant in 2016 and now considered a fraud past the Van Gogh Museum) and the theory that Vincent was killed by a gang of teenagers (while, at the same time, an stop title card seems to question that very theory.)

At Eternity'due south Gate is a mess in every way but 1: Willem Dafoe's performance. Devoid of whatever craziness, nastiness or lust for life, it may be equally biographically bogus equally the rest of the movie (and, at 63, Dafoe is way also onetime for the part) but his Vincent is likewise the genre's well-nigh totally sympathetic always -- truly heartbreaking in his naiveté and desolation.

Animation: The Oscar-nominated 2017 Polish-United kingdom Loving Vincent is probable to be the last word in Vincent-animation for years to come up and it's also the first feature film to confront the Mystery of Auvers caput-on in its plotline.

With each frame (some 65,000 of them) mitt-painted in a Van Gogh style by a team of 125 animators, it bills itself as "the world'southward get-go fully oil-painted feature film;" and it delivers on its advertising with a 95-minute, nearly-total immersion in a Van Gogh world. The paintings come up dazzlingly to life. On this level, the movie is a considerable cinematic feat and a one-of-a-kind experience that all true Vincent fans will want to relish more than once in their lives.

THE MYSTERY COMES Alive:

Loving Vincent

(2017)

On the other hand, some viewers have been put off by the endlessly pulsating images and often clumsy rotoscoping of the actors (near of whom have exaggerated British accents); and others have complained about the animation of paintings out of sequence to their place in Vincent'southward life (Arles paintings appear in Auvers, etc.) and out of character to the subject field affair (the erstwhile human of "On the Threshold of Eternity" becomes the mysterious Dr. Mazery at the death scene).

As a Citizen Kane-way semi-biopic, it as well gets several important facts of Van Gogh's life completely incorrect, and as an exploration of the mystery of Vincent's death it's a very tepid whodunit indeed: halfheartedly terminal (just non depicting) that the teenager René Secrétan probably shot Vincent merely, in his own unique way, Vincent also probably committed suicide. It's out to please both sides of that controversy.

Information technology's all very confusing and not a fleck convincing and, thus, dramatically unsatisfying. The New York Times flick critic A.O. Scott said the story "limps and drags," which is a kind fashion of putting information technology.

VINCENT IN IMAX: Brush with Genius (2009)

DOCUMENTARIES: Four theatrical Van Gogh documentaries accept played U.S. screens over the past six decades and each is good in its way... Australian director Paul Cox's moving, feature-length 1987 Vincent walks us through many of the locations of the Van Gogh trek through Europe, with the camera as his optics and the vocalism of John Hurt reading appropriate excerpts from his letters... The 2009 forty-infinitesimal Van Gogh: Castor with Genius uses the 70mm IMAX camera to enjoyably overwhelm united states of america with the earth of Vincent, not only in staggering panoramas of the locations but in microscopic dives into his brushstrokes and the chicken-scratch of his correspondence... The legendary French director Alain Resnais won an Oscar in 1948 for his twenty-minute short, Van Gogh , an acute (but, unfortunately black & white) mini-biography that uses Claude Dauphin's narration and Vincent's paintings and drawings to tell his life story in one long montage... To help promote its Animalism for Life movie in 1956, MGM produced the twenty-one-minute companion motion-picture show, Van Gogh: Darkness into Light , narrated by studio boss Dore Schary and total of rare (and now historically valuable) behind-the-scenes footage of the company filming in Brabant, the Borinage, Paris, Arles, St-Rémy and Auvers-sur-Oise.

Tv: More than two hundred TV-movies, documentaries or series-episodes have centered on Van Gogh, many of them in the 1950s, when Vincent-mania was inspiring everything from a 1952 episode of Our Miss Brooks ( Van Gogh, Man Gogh ) to a 1958 episode of the feminist cop evidence Decoy, ( The Shadow of Van Gogh , most a painter criminally obsessed with the artist). The more than ambitious of the subsequently Telly offerings are mostly from the U.K.: Vincent the Dutchman, a 1972 episode of the BBC

THE BBC'S Power of Fine art (2006)

serial, Passenger vehicle, directed by Sweden's Mai Zetterling and employing Michael Gough as Vincent; Aqueduct 4's perhaps prematurely titled 2004 Van Gogh: The Full Story ; also from Channel 4, Van Gogh , an installment of Simon Schama'southward 2006 BBC series, The Power of Art, focusing on the painting of Wheatfield with Crows; The Yellow Business firm , a 2007 TV-movie dramatizing the turbulent weeks Van Gogh and Gauguin were roommates in 1888 Arles; and the BBC's 2010 Tv-movie Van Gogh: Painted with Words , with Benedict Cumberbatch equally Vincent. From Holland, there'southward the ballsy, ongoing 2013 Dutch mini-series, Van Gogh: een huis voor Vincent , with Barry Atsma in the championship role and (in wink-forwarded sequences) Jeroen Krabbé every bit his nephew and heir, Dr. Willem Vincent van Gogh. Another intriguing Boob tube-vehicle I've heard of but never been able to track down is France's Van Gogh ou la Revanche Ambiguë (Van Gogh or the Double-edged Triumph), which documents, among other things, the miracle of unbridled Vincent-obsession among and then many noted artists and writers.

MYTHMAKER SUPREME:

IRVING STONE'South

Animalism for Life (1934)

NOVELS: Information technology tin can be argued that the two most influential books in the Van Gogh canon are both bestselling novels: Julius Meier-Graefe's 1921 Vincent and Irving Stone's 1934 Lust for Life . The first coined much of the martyr-for-art mythology and the second made Van Gogh a Depression folk hero in America and was almost as big a factor in his posthumous enshrinement as its 1956 movie version. Herr Meier-Graefe'due south quasi-biography has since disappeared merely Stone'due south volume (still a good read, if often irritating in its many sloppy historical inaccuracies) has never been out of print. A steady stream of other novels have appeared down through the years trying to go far Van Gogh's caput every bit its fundamental character or using his life and art equally the touchstone of its premise. The offset two of these, both roman à clefs, were In the Heaven , by French author (and early Van Gogh collector) Octave Mirbeau, serialized between 1892-93; and The Initiated , penned past Countess Eugénie de la

Rochefoucauld, the wife of some other early Van Gogh collector, which appeared in 1902. The first novel I can observe that actually uses his name for its protagonist is the extremely rare 1917 Van Gogh: Journey of a Soul , a 2d German bio-novel which actually pre-dates Meier-Graefe's more famous one by several years. And speaking of German language novels, Vincent (as if to evidence he is truly a man for all seasons) is an admired spiritual presence in both Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels' 1929 Michael and Erich Maria Remarque's staunchly anti-Nazi 1945 Arch of Triumph. More recently, you tin observe him in children'south books (1994's Camille and the Sunflowers: A Story well-nigh Vincent van Gogh ), young developed novels (2012's Tokyo Heist , with a sixteen-yr-one-time Seattle girl sleuthing a Van Gogh theft in the Far East), historical romance (2006'due south The Last Van Gogh ), more biographical fiction (1995'due south Johanna , with Vincent'southward sister-in-police equally the main character, and 2007's self-explanatory Van Gogh in Paris: A Novel), psychological mystery (2011's Leaving Van Gogh ), novellas (Stanley Elkin's 1993 Van Gogh'southward Room at Arles: Three Novellas ), and gimmicky thrillers (J. Madison Davis' 2005 The Van Gogh Conspiracy and Jeffrey Archer's 2006 False Impression ). Also in contempo years, Van Gogh has become the hero of a number of Dutch graphic novels, one of which presumes to picture show his dearest-life in soft-cadre explicitness: the first Vincent-porn. Some other is a Mad Mag-style fantasy that has him collaborating with Alfred Hitchcock on a Van Gogh biopic..

PLAYS: The almost acclaimed of many Vincent stage pieces is probably Vincent in Brixton , a 2003 drama by Nicolas Wright which imagines the year Van Gogh lived in that London suburb with a massive beat out on his landlady's daughter (and perchance his landlady). It originated in London's National Theatre and went on to a Broadway run and many regional revivals in the U.S... Leonard Nimoy wrote, directed and played Theo in the 1981 one-man play, Vincent , which was based on Phillip Stevens' 1979 drama, Van Gogh . The product, which was videotaped at Minneapolis' Guthrie Theater and is available on DVD, is frequently revived in regional theater.

LEONARD NIMOY'Due south Vincent (1981)

Verse: The school of Vincent-poets includes gangsta-rapper Tupac Shakur, who eulogized the artist in Starry Night , ("So on that starry night, you gave to us and yous took away from usa/ The one matter we never acknowledged, your life"); the much-respected American classicist Robert Fagles, whose 1978 volume I, Vincent , is a brilliant album of poems that are each inspired by a specific Van Gogh painting and collectively form what critic Richard Howard justifiably calls "the richest and fullest Van Gogh I have seen in print, except for Vincent'south letters;" the great English language poet Due west.H. Auden, who toasted Vincent in several of his

ROBERT FAGLES' I, Vincent (1978)

poems and edited a 1961 book of the letters; and Paul Celan, the acclaimed postwar Romanian-German poet and Holocaust-survivor who dedicated his poem Nether a Movie to Van Gogh, pondered the meaning of the severed ear in his poem Powers, Dominions and may have committed suicide (by leaping in the Seine in 1970) with an eye on Auvers.

Pecker NIGHY IN Doctor Who: Vincent and the Md (2010)

One-act: So far, we oasis't seen a Van Gogh Television receiver sit-com or a Van Gogh stand-up act, but he's represented in several other one-act formats. Paul Davids' 1999 feature flick Starry Nighttime has him brought back to life by a magic potion and on a farcical spree of stealing back his paintings (winding up in the centre of the Rose Bowl Parade). Vincent and the Doctor , a 2010 episode of the BBC series, Doctor Who, sends the doctor fourth dimension-traveling back to 1890 Auvers to assist the artist boxing an alien monster in what must be the but Van Gogh sci-fi comedy. Christopher Moore'south 2012 novel Sacré Bleu: A Comedy d'Fine art gets laughs from a plot that has Toulouse-Lautrec and friends investigating Van Gogh's mysterious decease in Auvers. And Woody Allen's 1975 drove of humorous essays, Without Feathers , includes a parody of the Van Gogh letters: ten brief epistles that re-imagine Vincent as a temperamental dentist whose aspirations to artistically express himself in the mouths of his patients are then frustrated and misunderstood that he finally wishes he'd taken his father's communication to become a painter. ("Information technology'due south not exciting but the life is regular.")

EINOJUHANI RAUTAVAARA'S Vincentiana (1992)

MUSIC: Among the many serious-music compositions inspired by Van Gogh are German composer Bertold Hummel'southward 1985 Eight Fragments from Letters of Vincent van Gogh ; American composer Gloria Coates' 1993 Homage to Van Gogh ; French composer Henri Dutilleux' 1978 Timbre, Space, Motion , subtitled La nuit etoilée and aimed at translating what the composer calls the "almost catholic whirling outcome" of the Starry Night painting; and, perhaps grandest of all, Miklós Rózsa's stirring score for the Lust for Life soundtrack, which is now bachelor in a limited edition CD... The Vincent-operas include Turkish composer Nevit Kodallis' 1956 Vincent (an operatic

version of Lust for Life); Russian composer Grigori Frid's 1976 Letters of Van Gogh ; and, near notably, Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara'due south 1990 Vincent , with themes he subsequently re-used in his 1992 symphony Vincentiana ... Van Gogh has been immortalized in dozens of pop songs, everything from the land stone of Georgia's Vigilantes of Love to the Cantopop rap of Hong Kong's Ivana Wong. But the three best-known Vincent-songs are undoubtedly Bob Dylan's late-'60s Vincent van Gogh ("Now where did Vincent van Go?"), a ditty which, in half-dozen curt stanzas, manages to include 5 big factual errors almost Van Gogh'southward life; Joni Mitchell's 1994 Grammy-winning merely also oddly inaccurate mood piece, Turbulent Indigo , which has Vincent dying of a shotgun blast; and Don McLean's hauntingly beautiful, enduringly popular 1971 carol, Vincent , which, for me, captures the special magic of Vincent van Gogh more than exquisitely than any other piece of Vincent-music.

PAINTING & SCULPTURE: The listing of visual artists who have been inspired to re-create or pay tribute to the famous Van Gogh fashion over the by hundred years is probably longer than the Tacoma phone book and includes such masters as Picasso, Matisse, Maurice de Vlaminck, Francis Bacon, Rainer Fetting and Anselm Kiefer. The Van Gogh Firm bout in Zundert concludes with a room jubilant this influence on other artists, and you tin notice whole galleries around the world dedicated to naught only Van Gogh-like art, such as St-Remy's Centre d'Art Présence Van Gogh or

MAURICE DE VLAMINCK's

The Harvest (1945)

Arles' Foundation Van Gogh . Just perhaps the most spectacular of these Vincent imitations was painted not in oil but in flowers and "other organic fabric." This was the humongous Van Gogh Mega Portrait, a floral reproduction of one of the Paris self-portraits planted in 2012 by the boondocks of Nuenen in a field beyond the road from ane of the artist's motifs, the Roosdonck Windmill. The botanical spectacle was best viewed from an airplane ... Statues honoring Van Gogh are all over the netherlands and France (the town of Etten, where Vincent lived for only six months, has two of them) but the nigh notable are a trio of surreal statues by the Russian sculptor Ossip Zadkine that were placed in Vincent'southward birthplace in Zundert, the death place in Auvers-sur-Oise and the asylum of St-Rémy -- the last of which was trucked abroad by vandals on the night of January 30, 1989 and still has not been recovered...

FORGERY & THEFT: If crime is an art, Vincent has indeed been much honored by the tribute of artists of the criminal persuasion. Two of the twentieth century's most publicized forgery scandals -- the Wacker Scandal of late-'20s Berlin and the Gachet Collection Scandal of mid-'50s Paris -- have had forged Van Gogh art at their focus. And, since his style in each of its periods is and so distinctive and easy to imitate, more than a few art historians have argued that a significant percentage

STEALING VINCENT (1991)

of the Van Gogh catalog is made up of skilled fakes: especially from his earliest period, which is made nebulous by the famous "Breda Boxes" (a vast stash of never-catalogued juvenilia sold en masse to a junk dealer past his mother); and his concluding Auvers summer, when then few of his seventy paintings were described in his letters... Van Gogh fine art thieves have also been busy, especially in contempo decades. In Dec, 1988, one of the Weavers-series paintings, the first version of The Spud Eaters and Dried Sunflowers were lifted from the Kröller-Müller Museum, though all three were recovered the next year... Though the details were never publicized, Landscape in the Neighborhood of St-Rémy was stolen from a private collection in 1989 and is notwithstanding missing... In April, 1991, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam was robbed of no less than 20 paintings, including the final version of The Irish potato Eaters and the museum's marquee allure, Wheatfield with Crows. All were recovered less than an hour afterward in a nearby parked car, but three -- among them Wheatfield -- were damaged during the theft. Four men, including ii museum guards, were convicted for their parts in this daring inside chore that's merely begging to be a moving-picture show... In Dec, 2002, thieves got inside the Van Gogh Museum again, this time from its roof, making off with Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church building in Nuenen and View of the Ocean at Scheveningen. They were defenseless and convicted a year later just the paintings were non recovered until fourteen-years later, when anti-Mafia police in Italy plant them in the home of a mobster's mother. The whole story, which has many twists and turns, was told in a fascinating 2017 Dutch television documentary... And during these aforementioned contempo decades, Van Gogh drawings, watercolors or paintings accept also been burgled in Cairo, Manchester, Rome, Zurich, Brussels and Den Bosch -- though, except for the Cairo chore (a still-life from the Paris menses), all the works have since been recovered.

WEARING THE COLORS

KITSCH: Few are likely to dispute the fact that Vincent is history'south almost merchandized cultural icon. Whatever item that tin agree an prototype is for sale with a Vincent theme. Non only the usual souvenir tee shirts but hats, pants, dresses, scarves, neckties, suspenders, socks, underwear, thongs, shoes, buttons, swim suits and umbrellas. Not just the usual gift key chains and pens but teapots, clocks, watches, seat belts, lighters, flasks, compacts, lunch boxes, magnets, dishes, place settings, coasters, belt buckles, cufflinks, jewelry, chairs, lamps, room dividers, pillows, sheets, door knobs, stationary, guitar

picks and dolls. And non just 1 each of these items only more frequently a diverseness of them, some featuring practically every famous Van Gogh painting. It adds upwards to a staggering 4 hundred pages on Amazon. You lot can find a Vincent mug with an ear that disappears to hot liquid. A Vincent action figure with tiny interchangeable paintings for its tiny easel. A Halloween costume that puts you lot inside Self-portrait with Bandaged Ear (the frame goes around your head).

THE NEW Applied science: No one has nevertheless produced a blockbuster Vincent video game merely Van Gogh Brabant, a Dutch organization that promotes Vincent tourism in his homeland, has vi games on its Explore Vincent app. The Van Gogh Museum also offers a number of Vincent-themed apps, including a Bear on Van Gogh guide to its paintings, a Yours, Vincent guide to the Van Gogh Letters and a Van Gogh Mile walking

THE INSTITUT VAN GOGH'S

Vincent's Dream APP

tour through cardinal Amsterdam. Another app-guide to his work, Vincent'southward Dream , is offered past France's Institut Van Gogh, with proceeds going towards its goal of obtaining a prime Van Gogh painting for Vincent's expiry-room museum in Auvers' Auberge Ravoux. Y'all tin as well find the letters, a complete catalogue raisonné and info on most everything else in the Van Gogh world on David Brooks' masterfully conceived and assiduously maintained Van Gogh Gallery (www.vggallery.com). Also in the style of Vincent-tech, the newer Van Gogh museums in Zundert and Nuenen accept gone all out to utilize every imaginable digital innovation; and, though its at present history, the four nations and thirty cultural organizations that remembered the special ceremony of Vincent's death with a yr-long commemoration, Van Gogh 2015: 125 Years of Inspiration , supported this unprecedented consequence with a dazzling assortment of cutting edge digital applications..."

Faith: The thought of Van Gogh every bit a quasi-religious hero, even a secular Christ, has been pervasive among his followers from the beginning, and Vincent himself seemed to play with the notion as early every bit his Borinage years. All his biographers have toyed with the concept, not sure what to make of it, and it'southward explored more fully in several books, including Kathleen Powers Erickson's 1998 At Eternity's Gate: The Spiritual Vision of Vincent van Gogh . Simply this strange manifestation of the Van Gogh phenomenon has never earlier been realized quite so extravagantly as it is in Van Gogh Alive , a "multi-sensory experience" that'southward been touring the globe'southward major cities for the past few years. In this last give-and-take in Vincentiana, the devotee walks through a series of audio stage-sized rooms in which he's dwarfed past more than than three thousand H.D. images of Van Gogh paintings (including a Wheatfield with Crows that breaks into animation at the sound of a gunshot), projected "at enormous scale" on screens, walls, columns, ceilings and fifty-fifty the flooring, a "total sensual immersion" in Vincent to the accompaniment of Hayden, Handel and Mozart. The consequence is humbling, thrilling, monumental and a bit frightening in its rapturous evocation of the creative person as God.

Van Gogh Alive (2015)

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Source: https://www.vangoghdeath.com/culture