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Amsterdam Art
Museums: The arts flourish in the city. More than
40 museums display the work of Dutch artists, old and
new. The Rijksmuseum, or State Museum, contains
paintings by such masters as Rembrandt (who lived in
Amsterdam), Vermeer, and Frans Hals. The Vincent van
Gogh Museum features more than 500 paintings and
drawings by Van Gogh. Contemporary artists and
artisans display their products in shops and
galleries.
Museums and Art Galleries of Paris:
Storehouses of many priceless art treasures. The works
of painters and sculptors of the late 1800's and the
1900's are displayed in the National Museum of Modern
Art in the Georges Pompidou National Center of Art and
Culture. The famous Louvre museum displays works
considered to be of lasting greatness. It houses such
masterpieces as Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa and the
Greek statue Venus de Milo. The Picasso Museum,
originally a mansion built in the 1600's, exhibits
many of Pablo Picasso's works and paintings that the
Spanish artist collected. The
Musée d'Orsay houses works of art from the 1800's,
especially impressionist paintings. The museum is a
converted railroad station built in 1900.
VAN GOGH, Vincent
(1853-90). One of the four great Post-impressionists
(along with Paul Gauguin,
Georges Seurat, and Paul
Cézanne), Vincent van Gogh is generally considered
the greatest Dutch painter after Rembrandt. His
reputation is based largely on the works of the last
three years of his short ten-year painting career, and
he had a powerful influence on expressionism in modern
art. He produced more than 800 oil paintings and 700
drawings, but he sold only one during his lifetime.
His striking colors, coarse brushwork, and contoured
forms display the anguish of the mental illness that
drove him to suicide.
Vincent Willem van Gogh was born on March 30, 1853,
in Zundert in the Brabant region of The Netherlands.
He was the eldest son of a Protestant clergyman. At
the age of 16 Van Gogh was apprenticed to art dealers
in The Hague, and he worked for them there and in
London and Paris until 1876.
Van Gogh disliked art dealing, and, rejected in
love, he became increasingly solitary. He began to
prepare for the ministry, but he failed the entrance
examinations for seminary and became a lay preacher.
In 1878 he went to the impoverished Borinage district
in southwestern Belgium to do missionary work. He was
dismissed in 1880 over a disagreement with his
superiors. Penniless and with his faith broken, he
sank into despair and began to draw. He soon realized
the limitations of being self-taught and went to
Brussels to study drawing. In 1881 he moved to The
Hague to work with the Dutch landscape painter Anton
Mauve, and the next summer Van Gogh began to
experiment with oil paints. His urge to be "alone with
nature" took him to Dutch villages, and his
subjects--still life, landscape, and figure--all
related to the peasants' daily hardships and
surroundings. In 1885 he produced his first
masterpiece, 'The Potato
Eaters'.
Feeling too isolated, he left for Antwerp, Belgium,
and enrolled in the academy there. He did not respond
well to the school's rigid discipline, but while in
Antwerp he was inspired by the paintings of Peter Paul
Rubens and discovered Japanese prints. He was soon off
to Paris, where he met Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and
Gauguin and discovered the
impressionists Camille
Pissarro, Seurat, and others. Van Gogh's two years
in Paris shaped his personal style of painting--more
colorful, less traditional, with lighter tonalities
and distinctive brushwork.
Tired of city life, Van Gogh left Paris in 1888 for
Arles in the south of France. He rented and decorated
a yellow house in which he hoped to found a community
of "impressionists of the South." Gauguin joined him
in October, but their relations deteriorated, and in a
quarrel on Christmas Eve Van Gogh cut off part of his
own left ear. Gauguin left, and Van Gogh was
hospitalized. Exhibiting repeated signs of mental
disturbance, Van Gogh asked to be sent to an asylum at
St-Remy-de-Province. After a year of confinement he
moved to the home of a physician-artist
Doctor Gachet
in Auvers-sur-Oise for two months. On July 27, 1890,
Van Gogh shot himself; he died two days later.
Despite his deteriorating mental condition, Van
Gogh's time at Arles, in the asylum, and at Auvers
proved to be his greatest productive periods. At Arles
he painted with great energy the sun-drenched fields
and flowers; at St-Remy the colors of his paintings
were more muted, but the lines were bolder and the
whole more visionary; in the northern light of Auvers
he adopted pale, fresh tonalities, a broader and more
expressive brushwork, and a lyrical vision of nature.
The sale of Van Gogh's 'Irises'
in 1987 brought the highest price ever paid for a work
of art up to that time--53.9 million dollars.
Courtesy Compton's Reference Collection
* Irises, 1889, 71 x 93
Sotheby's Auction, New York 1987 $54 million |
