Post-Impressionism, Cubism, And Futurism

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

From Paris Van Gogh went to Arles in the South of France, where he exposed himself to the risks of sunstroke by frequently painting in blazing sunshine without any headcovering. A curious incident made public the fact that he was becoming abnormal. Teasing him for a present, a girl in a café once playfully said to him, ‘Well, if you can’t give me anything else, give me one of your big ears.’ Shortly before Christmas this little waitress, whom the artist admired, was horrified to receive a parcel which was found to contain a freshly severed human ear. Van Gogh was found in bed with his head bleeding and with raging brain fever. Subsequently he was taken to an asylum, but his portrait of himself with a cap on his head and a pipe in his mouth, painted after this breakdown, proves that his hand had not lost its steadiness nor his eye its power to see essentials with brilliant intensity.

In the summer of 1889 he was well enough to leave Arles, and after a short stay in Paris, his brother arranged for him to live in the house of a doctor at Auvers-sur-Oise. Van Gogh appeared to be in the best of health and spirits, and there is no doubt that he fough bravely against the clouds which threatened his keen intellect. But the day came when he felt himself to be a doomed man, with nothing but mental darkness ahead, and on July 28, 1890, in a fit of depression he shot himself fatally. The fact that his mind eventually became unhinged, so that some of the pictures of his last years betray an abnormal vision, does not invalidate the splendid sanity of the bulk of Van Gogh’s productions. Technically Van Gogh got his modelling by sweeping contours, instead of by a series of petty planes, and so gave weight to objects, while cleanly preserving their silhouettes as co-ordinated parts of a decorative design. We are impressed by his strength, as we are by that of Cézanne; but it is not physical strength alone, but also moral force. His color is of a high order and pitch, showing a fine sensibility for the splendor of pigment, but Van Gogh was too seriously absorbed in life and humanity for his paintings ever to degenerate into mere decorations. One of the pictures in which he most completely expressed himself was ‘The Prison Yard’, in which he conjures up wtih forcible economy the tragic aspect of these prisoners pacing their monotonous round, makes the high walls eloquent of the impossibility of escape, and without a touch of sentimentality contrives to express his compassionate pity for these dregs of humanity who are yet ‘men and brothers.’

Post-Impressionism, Cubism, And Futurism (continued)