Vincent van Gogh [antikvár]

1 study of a TreeCollection Stale Museum Kroller-Muller, Otterlo. Ttie NetherlandsThe singularity of van Gogh's life lies in the fact that art was for him a personal destiny in Ihe fullest sense: first as a heritage in his family of art dealers, which brought him early into touch with art and determined his unsuccessful profession as picture salesmanthe more successful profession ol his younger brother, Theo, who was to play so crucial a role in Vincent s life as his only support; then as a choice made for personal salvation, after he had failed in another hope, a religious mission as an evangelist among the poor miners of the Borinage. This choice on which he staked his life sent him back to Holland among the peasants, pushed him on to Paris for maturation, to Aries for release from the conflicts with Parisian artistic life, to the asylum of Saint-Remy for recovery from a crisis in Aries (set off, perhaps, by his troubled relation to his friend Gauguin), and to Auvers. in preparation for the return to his Paris world and there to suicide, which was due, in part at least, to guilt for his brother's support.What IS most important is that van Gogh converted allthis aspiration and anguish into his art, which thus became the first example of a truly personal art, art as a deeply lived means of spiritual deliverance or transformation of the self; and he did this by a most radical handling of the substance of his art.In doing this he responded, as others did in his time, to the new function of art in the West, as an alternative to older moral-religious means. But failing in this heroic effort to save himself, as his suicide shows, he nevertheless sealed this function by his great example and the authenticity of his work; he showed that art could reach that intimacy and intensity of the striving, loving, anguished self.His career as an artist is a high religious-moral drama and not only a rapid development of a style and new possibilities of art. Every stage of his art has a profound personal meaning, it engages him completely, and could only have been produced in the place where he lived and worked; his Holland art is possible only therea life-space, a full milieu, is evident in it.