Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol.original_ [93]
Van Gogh, “Crows over Cornfield,” 1890, Notional Museum of Van Gogh, Amsterdam. Shortly before he died, van Gogh pointed this lost picture, describing it as “vast shetches of corn under troubled skies ... I did not need to go out of my way to express sadness and the extreme of loneliness. ” The dark, lowering sky and menacing crows forcefully embody his looming troubles.
In van Gogh’s last seventy days, he painted seventy canvases. Although under constant strain, he was at the peak of his powers technically, in full control of his simplified forms, zones of bright color without shadow, and expressive brushwork. “Every time I look at his pictures I find something new,” his physician, Dr. Gachet, said. “He’s more than a great painter, he’s a philosopher.”
Yet van Gogh was often despondent at his lack of prospects and dependence on his brother for financial support. “Until my pictures sell I am powerless to help,” he wrote, “but the day will come when it will be seen that they are worth more than the price of the colors they are painted with, and of my life which in general is pretty barren.” In 1990 van Gogh’s “Portrait of Dr. Gachet” sold at auction for $82.5 million, a record price for a work of art.
After receiving a letter from his brother complaining of financial worries, and fearful of being a burden, van Gogh ended his last letter with the words, “What’s the use?” walked into a field with a pistol, and shot himself. He died two days later. Briefly conscious before dying, he uttered his final thought, “Who would believe that life could be so sad?”
At his funeral, between sobs, Dr. Gachet eulogized van Gogh: “He was an honest man and a great artist. He had only two aims: humanity and art. It was the art that will ensure his survival.” Van Gogh had said, “I would rather die of passion than boredom.” He had speculated on the prospects of immortality : “A painter must paint. Perhaps there will be something else after that.”
EARLY EXPRESSIONISM
MUNCH: THE MIND CRACKING. The greatest Norwegian painter and an important inspiration for the German Expressionist movement was Edvard Munch (pronounced Moonk; 1863-1944). Although he spent time in Paris where he learned from Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art, Munch’s most productive period was 1892-1908 in Berlin. There he produced paintings, etchings, lithographs, and woodcuts that expressed modern anguish with unequaled power.
Munch was always an outsider, brooding and melancholy, who called his paintings his “children” (“I have nobody else,” he said). His neuroses sprang from a traumatic childhood: his mother and eldest sister died of consumption when he was young, leaving him to be raised by a fanatically religious father. Even as an adult, Munch was so afraid of his father that he ordered “Puberty,” his first nude painting, to be covered at an Oslo exhibit his father attended.
“Illness, madness, and death were the black angels that kept watch over my cradle,” Munch wrote of his painful youth. Treated for depression at a sanatorium, Munch realized his psychological problems were a catalyst for his art. “I would not cast off my illness,” he said, “for there is much in my art that I owe to it.”
Munch specialized in portraying extreme emotions like jealousy, sexual desire, and loneliness. He aimed to induce a strong reaction in his viewers, saying, “I want to paint pictures that will make people take off their hats in awe, the way they do in church.”
His most famous work, “The Scream,” represents the intolerable fear of losing one’s mind. Every line in the painting heaves with agitation, setting up turbulent rhythms with no relief for the eye. “Above the blue-black fjord,” Munch wrote of “The Scream,” “hung the clouds, red as blood, red as tongues of fire.” Today the painting has become so famous it is practically a cliché for high anxiety, but when Munch first exhibited the painting, it caused