Ear all about it
A NEW interactive exhibition launching later this week will commemorate painter Vincent van Gogh.
Van Gogh Alive has toured 65 cities worldwide and from this Friday it will be located in London’s Kensington Gardens until late September.
The exhibition, also showing in Birmingham, sees more than 3,000 of the artist’s images transform every surface in what is described as an “unforgettable multi-sensory experience”.
But what do you know about van Gogh? WYNARCZYK brushes up on the old master...
There were three other Vincent van
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Goghs. The Dutch artist was named after his stillborn older brother, who was in turn named after their grandfather. And the artist’s brother, Theo, also named his son Vincent.
He was born into an upper-middle
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class family and worked as an art dealer as a young man. Before becoming a painter, he worked as a lay preacher and a teacher, as well as in galleries.
In 1880, aged 27, van Gogh decided
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to become a full-time artist, financially supported by Theo. Over the next decade he created an incredible body of work, with almost 900 paintings and 1,100 works on paper – an average of a new piece every 36 hours.
Van Gogh lived with
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mental illness throughout his life and suffered from hallucinations, depression episodes and severe seizures. Modernday doctors say these may have been caused by schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or temporal lobe epilepsy.
He is known for cutting off his
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left ear – but the real truth behind this is unknown. The most popular version of the story is that he was having a fight with fellow painter Paul Gauguin in 1888 when van Gogh threatened to harm him before cutting off part of his own ear. But some historians believe Gauguin, an accomplished fencer, was responsible for the injury.
His most famous artwork, Starry
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Night, worth £70million, was painted after van Gogh checked into an asylum in Saint-rémy, France. But although it is recognised as a masterpiece, the artist believed it to be a failure.
Despite coming from a
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privileged background, he spent his adult life in poverty, mostly surviving on bread and coffee. He also drank alcohol excessively and was rarely seen without his pipe.
Van Gogh was just 37
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when he died in 1890. He is believed to have shot himself. Having sold only one painting in his lifetime he had no idea what his legacy would become.
His posthumous fame can be
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credited to Theo’s widow Jo van Gogh-bonger. After Theo died in 1891, she inherited van Gogh’s works and promoted them, loaning them to exhibitions around the world and publishing letters written between the pair.
Van Gogh has been portrayed on
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screen by Kirk Douglas in the 1956 film Lust for Life, Benedict Cumberbatch in 2010’s Van Gogh: Painted with Words and in a 2010 episode of Doctor Who by Tony Curran.
●Van Gogh Alive is coming to Kensington Gardens on Friday. It is also at Birmingham’s Hippodrome until July 11.