Above image: Artist Vincent van Gogh, Self-portrait, 1887-1888, oil, Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam
Vincent van Gogh's art fascinates fans and scholars alike. We try to decipher and understand the artist behind the art. Much of our knowledge of Vincent van Gogh comes from the collection of letters that his brother Theo had kept. Vincent corresponded regularly with Theo, who was Vincent's confidant as well as his art dealer and provided the constant financial and emotional support that Vincent needed.
Left image: Photo of Vincent van Gogh, at age 18, taken c. 1871-72.The Van Gogh Letters Project, started in 1995, between the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the Huygens Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in The Hague took 15 years to edit all of Van Gogh's known correspondence, 902 letters - 819 letters written by Van Gogh and 83 written to Van Gogh from Paul Gauguin, Theo van Gogh, Paul Signac and others - of which more than 800 are held in the Van Gogh Museum. The letters form the foundation for most of what is known about Vincent van Gogh. The letters chronicle the story of Van Gogh's eventful short life, the close bond with his brother Theo, and the development of his creative work.
Right image: Photo of Theo van Gogh, at age 16, taken c. 1872.Vincent wrote about his ideas, his planned and ongoing projects, next to sketches showing Theo and his other correspondents what the paintings or drawings looked like. The letters bring the viewers closer to the paintings. We are given glimpses of Vincent's beliefs and insight, as well as his loneliness, his health and emotional state. The letters allow us today, 120 years after his death, to follow Van Gogh in the creation of his work.
The Van Gogh Museum says, "The reader is witness to his dreams and disappointments, his passions and tribulations, friendships and quarrels, the battle with his illness and his all-encompassing desire to create art that would live on."
In a letter to Theo dated October 16, 1888, Vincent includes a sketch of one of his most famous paintings, The Bedroom (in Arles), which he completed that year.
Image: Vincent's bedroom in Arles, an ink sketch from Vincent van Gogh's letter dated October 16, 1888 to his brother Theo.
Vincent informs his brother Theo that the chairs are "fresh butter yellow" and the sheet and pillows "very bright lemon green." "In short, looking at the painting should rest the mind, or rather, the imagination," Van Gogh wrote.
Image: Artist Vincent van Gogh,The Bedroom (in Arles), October 1888, oil on canvas, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
Van Gogh has long been regarded as a mad and unbalanced genius whose artistic brilliance could not be separated from his mental illness. One could not think of his art without thinking of his mental state. However, Van Gogh's letters show that the artist was not crazy. Instead, what emerges is a disciplined artist, careful and deliberate in his every move and every brush stroke in his paintings. Van Gogh was an artist far ahead of his time.
His artistic life was a short 10 years from start to finish. Van Gogh had produced more than 200 pictures during his two-year stay in Paris from early 1886 to February 1888. Yet Van Gogh managed to create a revolution in art in less than three years from the time he left Paris in February 1888, went on to live in Arles until May 1889, then he committed himself to an asylum at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole near Saint-Rémy-de-Provence from May 1889 to May 1890. At the mental hospital, Theo paid for two rooms for Vincent, one room served as a studio with a view of the garden. Vincent was allowed to paint outdoors under supervision, where he painted mostly landscapes. Van Gogh painted some of his best work during this period at Saint-Rémy: paintings of irises, cypresses, olive orchards, wheat fields, almond tree blossoms, the famous The Starry Night.
Above image: Artist Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, June 1889, oil on canvas, Museum of Modern Art, New York.Van Gogh's correspondence end with an articulate last letter addressed to his brother Theo which was written on July 23, 1890, and found in Vincent's pocket after his death on July 29, 1890. Vincent van Gogh, who was just 37, died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest. Van Gogh's last written sentence to Theo was: "Ah well, I risk my life for my own work and my reason has half foundered in it – very well – but you're not one of the dealers in men; as far as I know and can judge I think you really act with humanity, but what can you do ." After Vincent's death, Theo's sorrow increases. Theo, 33, dies on January 25, 1891, in Utrecht, just six months after Vincent's death. In 1914, Theo's body was exhumed and buried next to Vincent's grave in Auvers-sur-Oise, near Paris.
Viewers and readers can now see the results of the Van Gogh Letters Project. There is a special exhibition - "Van Gogh's letters: The artist speaks," the launch of a website with free access to Van Gogh's letters, and the publication of a six-volume book in three languages. In this first edition, around 600 Dutch and some 300 French letters are published in the original language alongside a parallel English translation based on a new examination of the original manuscripts.
The exhibition: "Van Gogh's letters: the artist speaks"
9 October 2009 - 3 January 2010 at Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Van Gogh's letters take centre stage with more than 120 original letters on show alongside the works that Van Gogh was writing about. These important documents have seldom or have never been shown to the public due to their extreme fragility and sensitivity to light.
The combination of more than 300 works from the museum's own rich collection, including paintings, drawings, letters and letter sketches, offers a penetrating and comprehensive insight into Van Gogh as letter writer and as artist." [...] More info at Van Gogh Museum. The exhibition, "Van Gogh's Letters: The Artist Speaks", is displayed in Amsterdam until January 3 next year. It will then transfer to the Royal Academy on January 27, 2010.
Web edition: vangoghletters.org
Accessible free, the English-language web edition www.vangoghletters.org contains all 902 letters to and from Van Gogh in their original languages (Dutch and French) with new English translations and images of the authentic manuscripts. The letters are furnished with extensive annotations and illustrations of all works of art mentioned in the correspondence.
Book edition: Vincent van Gogh- The letters
The six-volume publication Vincent van Gogh- The letters. The complete illustrated and annotated edition contains all the letters, complete with new translations, explanatory notes and illustrations of the more than 2,000 works of art mentioned in the correspondence. The letters have been included exactly as Van Gogh actually wrote them; in their original form without embellishment, rephrasing, adaptation or excision of passages. Compiled by Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten and Nienke Bakker. Design: Wim Crouwel. Published by the Van Gogh Museum, the Huygens Institute-KNAW and the Mercator Fonds. International co-editions with Thames & Hudson, Actes Sud and Amsterdam University Press. Six volumes, boxed, hardcover, 2,180 pages, circa 4,300 illustrations, available in Dutch, French and English.
Price € 395 (special offer price until 3 January 2010: € 325).
Excerpts of two book reviews from the Daily Telegraph at telegraph.co.uk.
Vincent van Gogh - The Complete Letters: review by Martin Gayford: "This monumental new edition of his correspondence includes high-quality reproductions of all the pictures relevant to each letter. So after reading Van Gogh’s picture in words, one turns the page and there are his paintings of that ever mutable sea. Its other strength lies in the thoroughness with which every person mentioned, every book, exhibition, painting, magazine, newspaper article (Van Gogh was a voracious reader) has been identified and annotated. Fifteen years of work by a team of scholars at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, has gone into these volumes, and it shows.
Together, the illustrations and the footnotes make it easier to grasp at all times what Van Gogh is talking about. The downside, as is frequently the case with definitive editions, is a steep decrease in portability. This six-volume set is not an item to pop into one’s luggage to read on a trip to Provence, or dip into in bed. There is still plenty of room for an abridged selection – of which there have been plenty in the past and will doubtless be more in the future. " [...] Read more of Martin Gayford's review at telegraph.co.uk
The Letters of Vincent van Gogh: review by Richard Dorment: "... it supersedes all others. It is the art publishing event of the decade.
[...] At every stage of its development, his art was consciously crafted, and it was only because those last, astonishing years in Arles ended in self-mutilation and suicide that he is still seen as an inspired madman. These letters reveal a different man: driven, difficult and uncouth, certainly; but also cultivated, thoughtful and articulate – he spoke three languages fluently. His mental illness, far from driving his career forward, was what stopped him from painting.
Van Gogh moved in Paris’s sophisticated artistic circles, and the range of his artistic references is vast. He refers constantly to Delacroix, J F Millet and Rembrandt, and speaks too of his admiration for contemporaries such as Anton Mauve, Paul Gauguin and Hubert Von Herkomer. This edition includes a list of all the art works (other than Van Gogh’s) referred to in the letters; it runs to 29 pages of small print. You can learn a lot about Van Gogh by reading it: Degas, for instance, is mentioned once, but the English illustrator George du Maurier 10 times.
More surprising is the range and depth of Van Gogh’s reading. The letters are littered with quotations, often unacknowledged, from the Bible to Francis Bacon’s Descriptio globi intellectualis (“Art is man added to nature”). [...]"[...] For this reason, Van Gogh’s letters take us to a place where even the most detailed biography can’t go. Read in sequence they tell us what he was thinking, who he was seeing, what he was reading, and how he was feeling day by day, week by week. We come as close here as anyone can to looking inside the mind of another person." [...] Read more of Richard Dorment's review at telegraph.co.uk
Read my earlier post of Vincent van Gogh's Biography.
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