Posthumous Fame of Vincent Van Gogh

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

Famous quotes containing the words vincent van gogh, van gogh, posthumous, fame, vincent, van and/or gogh:

    It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to.... The feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.
    Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890)

    It is not a certain conformity of manners that the painting of Van Gogh attacks, but rather the conformity of institutions themselves. And even external nature, with her climates, her tides, and her equinoctial storms, cannot, after van Gogh’s stay upon earth, maintain the same gravitation.
    Antonin Artaud (1896–1948)

    One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.
    Jean Cocteau (1889–1963)

    Paper is cheap, and authors need not now erase one book before they write another. Instead of cultivating the earth for wheat and potatoes, they cultivate literature, and fill a place in the Republic of Letters. Or they would fain write for fame merely, as others actually raise crops of grain to be distilled into brandy.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    Lincoln, six feet one in his stocking feet,
    The lank man, knotty and tough as a hickory rail,
    Whose hands were always too big for white-kid gloves,
    Whose wit was a coonskin sack of dry, tall tales,
    Whose weathered face was homely as a plowed field.
    —Stephen Vincent BenĂ©t (1898–1943)

    English general and singular terms, identity, quantification, and the whole bag of ontological tricks may be correlated with elements of the native language in any of various mutually incompatible ways, each compatible with all possible linguistic data, and none preferable to another save as favored by a rationalization of the native language that is simple and natural to us.
    —Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)

    It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to.... The feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.
    —Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890)