His special kind of genius helps us see our world with fresh eyes
During his short lifetime, Vincent Van Gogh couldn’t give his artwork away. Selling just a single painting when he was alive, the Dutchborn artist lived on the brink of poverty, not to mention madness, taking his own life at the age of 37, in 1890.
As Don Mclean sang in his classic 1971 song, Vincent (Starry Starry Night)
“This world was never meant for one as beautiful as you.”
But, 132 years after his death, Van Gogh has never been more alive. Today, his paintings sell for millions when they come up at auction. On Tuesday, a tiny painting, less than 13 inches high, A Pair Of Lovers, is up for sale at Sotheby’s in London, with an estimated price of up to £10 million. It will almost certainly sell for much more.
So what is it about Van Gogh’s work which enthrals generation after generation? His story is compelling, of course, but there’s so much more to him than his tortured soul.
His was painting at the tail end of Impressionism which, at its height in the 1870s and 1880s, broke all the established tenets of classical painting as the art world knew it. The impressionists were all about capturing the moment in terms of light, colour and shade. Artists such as Monet, Renoir and Cezanne painted “en plein air” as opposed to inside a studio, looking to photography and science for inspiration, tearing up the rule book as they went.
Van Gogh followed in their footsteps, heading into the streets and fields of Provence or inside houses when the weather was bad, taking arbitrary colour, shapes, textures and imbuing them with his own, highly personal painterly vision. This later came to be known as expressionism – and Van Gogh was its principle player.
“I paint the infinite,” he once wrote to his younger brother Theo. The siblings were close and Theo helped Vincent both emotionally and financially. Their letters, now available to read online, would make you weep.
Like all geniuses, Vincent and his work was misunderstood during his lifetime, but when he painted, he pushed our boundaries and made people see the world with fresh eyes.
Now, using modern technology, The Van Gogh Alive multi-sensory experience, is mesmerising a new audience on its travels around the world. And when it rolls into Edinburgh later this month, I will be in the queue, ready to virtually enter into Vincent’s paintings as never before, complete with digital surround sound and the smells of Provence in the late 19th Century.