Posthumous Fame Of Vincent Van Gogh
The fame of Vincent van Gogh began to spread in France and Belgium during the last year of his life, and in the years after his death in the Netherlands and Germany. His friendship with his younger brother Theo was documented in numerous letters they exchanged from August 1872 onwards. The letters were published in three volumes in 1914 by Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, Theo's widow, who also generously supported most of the early Van Gogh exhibitions with loans from the artist's estate. Publication of the letters helped spread the compelling mystique of Vincent van Gogh the intense and dedicated painter who suffered for his art, and died young, throughout Europe and the rest of the world.
His fame reached its first peak in Austria and Germany before World War I, and at the end of World War I in Switzerland. Due to the economic crisis in Germany and France after 1918, pioneer collections of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art which included works by Van Gogh were dissolved. Thus, British and American collectors (private as well as public) had the opportunity to acquire first rate works relatively late. The American novelist Irving Stone published an account of Vincent van Gogh's life in 1934 entitled Lust for Life that was largely based on the letters to Theo; this book and later the movie of the same name added further the artist's fame.
Read more about Posthumous Fame Of Vincent Van Gogh: Lifetime Exhibits, Early Promoters, Early Exhibitions, Early Private and Public Collectors, Art Historians, Forgeries and Reattribution, Theft
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“One could love reason like an Encyclopaedist and still be favorably inclined toward mysticism. Throughout the ages, up to the eyes of van Gogh, when he looked at a coffee pot or a garden path, mysticism has expanded the human realm by all sorts of threshold experiences.”
—Robert Musil (1880–1942)
“One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.”
—Jean Cocteau (1889–1963)
“Celebrity-worship and hero-worship should not be confused. Yet we confuse them every day, and by doing so we come dangerously close to depriving ourselves of all real models. We lose sight of the men and women who do not simply seem great because they are famous but are famous because they are great. We come closer and closer to degrading all fame into notoriety.”
—Daniel J. Boorstin (b. 1914)
“Earth does not understand her child,
Who from the loud gregarious town
Returns, depleted and defiled,
To the still woods, to fling him down.”
—Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)
“There’s no law against taking off a spaceship. It’s never been done so they haven’t gotten around to prohibiting it.”
—Rip Van Ronkel, and Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988)
“An artist needn’t be a clergyman or a churchwarden, but he certainly must have a warm heart for his fellow men.”
—Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890)