Reading Vincent van Gogh Grant, Patrick
Reading Vincent van Gogh,
2016, 2016, 2016-10-25, 2016-10-31
eBook
Odprti dostop
Soon after his death, Vincent van Gogh's reputation grew and developed through the remarkably symbiotic relationship evident between his paintings and letters. However, the sheer bulk and complexity ...of Van Gogh's complete surviving correspondence presents a formidable challenge to those who wish to read and analyze the whole text as a literary work. Reading Vincent van Gogh is at once an interpretive guide to Van Gogh's letters and a distillation of the key themes that reoccur throughout his collected letters--foremost among them the motifs of suffering, love, imagination, and the ineffable. In this indispensable, synoptic view of the letters, Patrick Grant makes the main lines of Vincent van Gogh's thinking accessible and displays the arresting vividness of the well-known artist's writing.
Art historians, biographers, and other researchers have long drawn on Van Gogh’s voluminous correspondence—more than eight hundred letters—for insights into both his personal struggles and his art. ...But the letters, while often admired for their literary quality, have rarely been approached as literature. In this volume, Patrick Grant sets out to explore the question, “By what criteria do we judge Van Gogh's letters to be, specifically, literary?” Drawing, especially, on Mikhail Bakhtin’s conceptualization of self-awareness as an ongoing dialogue between “self” and “other,” Grant examines the ways in which Van Gogh’s letters raise, from within themselves, questions and issues to which they also respond. Their literary quality, he argues, derives in part from this “double-voiced discourse”—from the power of the letters to thematize, through their own internal dialogues, the very structure of self-fashioning itself. Far from merely reproducing the narrative of the artist’s personal progress, “the letters enable readers to recognize how necessary yet open-ended, constrained yet liberating, confined yet unpredictable, are the means by which people seek to shape a place for themselves in the world.” This volume builds on Grant’s earlier analysis of Van Gogh’s correspondence, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh: A Critical Study (AU Press, 2014), a study in which he approached the letters from a literary critical standpoint, delving into key patterns of metaphors and concepts. In the present volume, he provides instead a literary theoretical analysis of the letters, one that draws them more fully into the domain of modern literary studies. In his deft and keenly perceptive reading, Grant deconstructs the binaries that surface in both Van Gogh’s writing and painting, discusses the narrative dimensions of the letter-sketches and the recurring themes of fantasy, belief, and self-surrender, and draws attention to Van Gogh’s own understanding of the permeable boundary between words and visual art. Viewing the letters as an integrated body of discourse, “My Own Portrait in Writing” offers a theoretically informed interpretation of Van Gogh’s literary achievement that is, quite literally, without precedent.
Vincent van Gogh’s paintings and drawings are fabulously expensive. Millions of people admire his work, but are those masterpieces all genuine? To this day, the international art world struggles to ...separate the real Van Goghs from the fake ones, and the key question addressed in this book is what may happen to art experts when they publicly voice their opinions on a particular Van Gogh (or not). The story starts with art expert J.B. de la Faille who discovered to his own bewilderment that he had included dozens of fake Van Goghs in his 1928 catalogue raisonné. He wanted to set the record straight, but met with strong resistance from art dealers, collectors, critics, politicians and others, marking the beginning of a fierce clash of interests that had seized the art world for many decades of the twentieth century.
When he died at the age of thirty-seven, Vincent van Gogh left a legacy of over two thousand artworks, for which he is now justly famous. But van Gogh was also a prodigious writer of letters - more ...than eight hundred of them, addressed to his parents, to friends such as Paul Gauguin, and, above all, to his brother Theo. His letters have long been admired for their exceptional literary quality, and art historians have sometimes drawn on the letters in their analysis of the paintings. And yet, to date, no one has undertaken a critical assessment of this remarkable body of writing - not as a footnote to the paintings but as a highly sophisticated literary achievement in its own right. Patrick Grant?s long-awaited study provides such an assessment and, as such, redresses a significant omission in the field of van Gogh studies. As Grant demonstrates, quite apart from furnishing a highly revealing self-portrait of their author, the letters are compelling for their imaginative and expressive power, as well as for the perceptive commentary they offer on universal human themes. Through a subtle exploration of van Gogh's contrastive style of thinking and his fascination with the notion of imperfection, Grant illuminates gradual shifts in van Gogh's ideas on religion, ethics, and the meaning of art. He also analyzes the metaphorical significance of a number of key images in the letters, which prove to yield unexpected psychological and conceptual connections, and probes the relationships that surface when the letters are viewed as a cohesive literary product. The result is a wealth of new insights into van Gogh's inner landscape.
Solar Dance Eksteins, Modris
2012, 2012-05-01
eBook
Art dealer Otto Wacker's 1932 sensational trial in Berlin for selling fake Van Goghs leads Eksteins to a unique narrative of a collapsing Weimar Germany, the rise of another misfit, Adolf Hitler, and ...the replacement of nineteenth-century certitude with twentieth-century doubt.
A few weeks before van Gogh admitted himself into a mental hospital in Saint-Rémy in spring 1889 he had written to Gauguin that he wanted to create a “consolatory art for distressed hearts”. From his ...bedroom in the clinic he overlooked an enclosed wheat field. Over the course of a year the seasonal changes inspired Van Gogh to paint a cycle of this wheat field, thereby seeing it as an allegorical representation of the fate of human life, which comforted him.
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