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

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    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)

    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)

    Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
    Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
    Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
    I know, But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
    —Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)

    The legend of Felix is ended, the toiling of Felix is done;
    The Master has paid him his wages, the goal of his journey is won;
    He rests, but he never is idle; a thousand years pass like a day,
    In the glad surprise of Paradise where work is sweeter than play.
    —Henry Van Dyke (1852–1933)

    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)