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 van gogh, posthumous, fame, vincent, van and/or gogh:

    There is but one Paris and however hard living may be here, and if it became worse and harder even—the French air clears up the brain and does good—a world of good.
    —Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890)

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

    Certainly fame is like a river, that beareth up things light and swoln, and drowns things weighty and solid.
    Francis Bacon (1561–1626)

    Country of hunchbacks!—where the strong, straight spine
    Jeered at by crooked children, makes his way
    Through by-streets at the kindest hour of day,
    —Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)

    The line that I am urging as today’s conventional wisdom is not a denial of consciousness. It is often called, with more reason, a repudiation of mind. It is indeed a repudiation of mind as a second substance, over and above body. It can be described less harshly as an identification of mind with some of the faculties, states, and activities of the body. Mental states and events are a special subclass of the states and events of the human or animal body.
    —Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)

    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)