Van Gogh Bulletin [antikvár]

Vincent van Gogh Retrospective ExhibitionOn 29 July it will be 100 years since Vincent van Gogh died. Highlight of this centenary year is a major retrospective exhibition of his work. In the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, 130 works provide a survey of his paintings, while the Kroller-Mtiller Museum in Otterlo is showing about 250 of his drawings. Both exhibitions will be open to the public from 31 March to 29 July.The artist Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) was a man possessed. In a period of about ten years he developed from a somewhat overwrought, awkward sketcher into a master-painter, whose oeuvre remains unsurpassed. Ten years - that was about as long as no less important artists than Degas, Monet and Manet took to produce their first masterpieces. The difference is a mark of Van Gogh's talent, but it also reveals his haste to secure a place in the contemporary art world.Van Gogh regarded being an artist as the fulfilment of his personality and he therefore wanted to profile himself in the art world with a distinctive and coherent oeuvre By this we do not mean his total production - oeuvre in the sense of all his works - but only that striking collection of paintings and drawings in which the artist best expressed his own vision. Van Gogh apparently attached a higher value to this totality than to the individual masterpiece which reflected only one facet of his personality.An oeuvre as an expression of the artistic personality was in fact a Romantic notion, though it had lost none of its appeal in Van Gogh's time. Its commercial potential had been recognised by art dealers, and retrospective exhibitions of work by modern masters young and old were gaining popularity precisely during Van Gogh's early years. The concept of an oeuvre features, for example, in Zola's famous defence of Edouard Manet, in which the French writer and critic maintained that the value of an artistic oeuvre was not related to its accuracy in imitating nature, but to its ability to express the artist's temperament. 'The artist [Manet] was thus able to accomplish an oeuvre of his own flesh and blood. That oeuvre certainly had a place in the great family of human achievements; it had sisters among the thousands of oeuvres already created; it resembled some of them to a greater or lesser extent. But it was beautiful with a beauty of its own, in that it was alive with an individual vitality.'Vincent van Gogh espoused such opinions right from the start of his career. He even felt that only by knowing an artist personally could one fully appreciate his work. Appraising the work of the painter Van Rappard, he wrote: 'in general and more specifically for artists, I am as much interested in the man who produces the work as in the work itself' [R 6]. This attitude was most clearly apparent in his life-long admiration for the French painter of peasant life, Jean-François Millet, whose 'work is especially sublime when seen as a whole', as he wrote in 1889 [600].While the aspiration to achieve a personal oeuvre was not unusual at the time, Van Gogh distinguished himself by devoting his life to that aim, inspired as much by his own nature as by a Christian desire to serve mankind. One indication of the strength of his commitment is contained in a letter dating from 1883 in which the artist speculated with remarkable foresight about how long he would live. 'Forty years, at most', he wrote, 'but I don't care much whether I live longer or shorter. [ ] So I continue as an ignoramus, but one who does know this: within a few years I must complete a certain work; [ ] the world only concerns me in that I have a certain obligation and duty, because I have walked this earth for 30 years and out of gratitude I want to leave a token of remembrance in the form of drawings or paintings - not made to please a certain taste in art, but to express a genuine human emotion. [ ] And you may also be able to understand that I do not consider my study to be for its own sake, but have in mind always my work as a whole' [309].The Potato Eaters, 1885Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)