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 van gogh, posthumous, fame, vincent, van and/or gogh:
“If ... boyhood and youth are but vanity, must it not be our ambition to become men?”
—Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890)
“Fashion, though in a strange way, represents all manly virtue. It is virtue gone to seed: it is a kind of posthumous honor. It does not often caress the great, but the children of the great: it is a hall of the Past.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Those poor farmers who came up, that day, to defend their native soil, acted from the simplest of instincts. They did not know it was a deed of fame they were doing. These men did not babble of glory. They never dreamed their children would contend who had done the most. They supposed they had a right to their corn and their cattle, without paying tribute to any but their governors. And as they had no fear of man, they yet did have a fear of God.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“It mattering not how beautiful you were,
Or how beloved above all else that dies.”
—Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)
“I am not an adventurer by choice but by fate.”
—Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890)
“Those Dutchmen had hardly any imagination or fantasy, but their good taste and their scientific knowledge of composition were enormous.”
—Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890)