Van Gogh, Vincent

VAN GOGH, VINCENT. - Dutch painter, b. at Groot-Zundert on 30 March 1853, d. by suicide at Auvers-sur-Oise on 29 July 1890.

His painting sums up the different aspects of half a century of artistic experience: inspired, in the Dutch period (1880-85), by the realist-social subjects of Millet and Israels (The Potato Eaters), it opens, in the brief Parisian period (1886-88), to the frankly pictorial influences of Impressionism (La Guinguette, View of Montmartre), of Pointillism (Interior of a Restaurant) and of Japanese prints, but asserts itself, in the Provençal period (1880-90), with disconcerting originality. With V. G. Expressionism announces itself and asserts itself through the emotional power of color and the deforming impetuosity of line; he is bound to the earth by more than earthly ties, he wished to be the interpreter of the sense of being (The Wheatfield, The Harvest, The Sower), of the cosmic infinite (Starry Night), of the vital impulse and the elements (Field of Poppies, Cypresses, Sunflowers), of man's sad destiny (A Ward in the Hospital at Arles, The Stone Breakers, Night Café; and in many portraits). His vision not infrequently becomes gloomy and hallucinatory (Huts of Monticelli); yet, in the face of the formal excesses of later Expressionists, he remains a classic. His letters to his brother Théo (Amsterdam 1914-25) and to Bernard (Paris 1911) are famous.