(Vincent Willem Van Gogh) was born on March 30, 1853 in the village of Groot Zundert in the province of North Brabant in the south of the Netherlands in the family of a Protestant pastor.

In 1868, Van Gogh dropped out of school, after which he went to work at a branch of the large Parisian art company Goupil & Cie. He successfully worked in the gallery, first in The Hague, then in branches in London and Paris.

By 1876, Vincent had completely lost interest in the painting trade and decided to follow in the footsteps of his father. In Great Britain, he found work as a teacher at a boarding school in a small town in the suburbs of London, where he also served as an assistant pastor. On October 29, 1876, he preached his first sermon. In 1877 he moved to Amsterdam, where he began studying theology at the university.

Van Gogh "Poppies"

In 1879, Van Gogh received a position as a secular preacher in Wham, a mining center in the Borinage, in southern Belgium. He then continued his preaching mission in the nearby village of Kem.

During the same period Van Gogh there was a desire to draw.

In 1880, in Brussels, he entered the Royal Academy of Arts (Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles). However, due to his unbalanced character, he soon abandoned the course and continued art education yourself, using reproductions.

In 1881, in Holland, under the guidance of his relative, landscape artist Anton Mauwe, Van Gogh created his first paintings: "Still life with cabbage and wooden shoes" and "Still life with a beer glass and fruit."

In the Dutch period, starting with the painting “Harvesting Potatoes” (1883), the main motif of the artist’s paintings became the theme ordinary people and their work, the emphasis was on the expressiveness of scenes and figures, the palette was dominated by dark, gloomy colors and shades, sharp changes in light and shadow. The canvas “The Potato Eaters” (April-May 1885) is considered a masterpiece of this period.

In 1885, Van Gogh continued his studies in Belgium. In Antwerp he entered the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. In 1886, Vincent moved to Paris to join his younger brother Theo, who by then had taken over as leading manager of the Goupil gallery in Montmartre. Here Van Gogh took lessons from the French realist artist Fernand Cormon for about four months, met the impressionists Camille Pizarro, Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin, from whom he adopted their style of painting.

In Paris, Van Gogh developed an interest in creating images human faces. Without the funds to pay for the work of models, he turned to self-portraiture, creating about 20 paintings in this genre in two years.

The Parisian period (1886-1888) became one of the artist's most productive creative periods.

In February 1888, Van Gogh traveled to the south of France to Arles, where he dreamed of creating a creative community of artists.

In December, Vincent's mental health took a turn for the worse. During one of his uncontrollable outbursts of aggression, he threatened Paul Gauguin, who came to see him in the open air, with an open razor, and then cut off a piece of his earlobe, sending it as a gift to one of his female acquaintances. After this incident, Van Gogh was first placed in a psychiatric hospital in Arles, and then voluntarily went for treatment at the specialized clinic of St. Paul of the Mausoleum near Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. The hospital's chief physician, Théophile Peyron, diagnosed his patient with "acute manic disorder." However, the artist was given a certain freedom: he could paint in the open air under the supervision of staff.

In Saint-Rémy, Vincent alternated between periods of vigorous activity and long breaks caused by deep depression. In just one year of his stay at the clinic, Van Gogh painted about 150 paintings. Some of the most outstanding paintings of this period were: " Starlight Night", "Irises", "Road with cypresses and a star", "Olive trees, blue sky and white cloud", "Pieta".

In September 1889, with the active assistance of his brother Theo, Van Gogh's paintings took part in the Salon des Indépendants, an exhibition of modern art organized by the Society of Independent Artists in Paris.

In January 1890, Van Gogh's paintings were exhibited at the eighth Group of Twenty exhibition in Brussels, where they were enthusiastically received by critics.

In May 1890 in mental state Van Gogh improved, he left the hospital and settled in the town of Auvers-sur-Oise in the suburbs of Paris under the supervision of Dr. Paul Gachet.

Vincent actively took up painting; almost every day he completed a painting. During this period, he painted several outstanding portraits of Dr. Gachet and 13-year-old Adeline Ravou, the daughter of the owner of the hotel where he stayed.

On July 27, 1890, Van Gogh left his house at the usual time and went to paint. Upon his return, after persistent questioning by the couple, Ravu admitted that he had shot himself with a pistol. All attempts by Dr. Gachet to save the wounded were in vain; Vincent fell into a coma and died on the night of July 29 at the age of thirty-seven. He was buried in the Auvers cemetery.

American biographers of the artist Steven Nayfeh and Gregory White Smith in their study “The Life of Van Gogh” (Van Gogh: The Life) of Vincent’s death, according to which he died not from his own bullet, but from an accidental shot committed by two drunken young men.

Over the course of ten years creative activity Van Gogh managed to paint 864 paintings and almost 1200 drawings and engravings. During his lifetime, only one painting by the artist was sold - the landscape "Red Vineyards in Arles". The cost of the painting was 400 francs.

The material was prepared based on information from open sources

Van Gogh Vincent (Vincent Willem) (1853-1890), Dutch painter.

In 1869-1876. served as a commission agent for an art and trading company in The Hague, Brussels, London and Paris, and in 1876 worked as a teacher in England.

In 1878-1879 was a preacher in Borinage (Belgium), where he learned hard life miners; protecting their interests brought Van Gogh into conflict with church authorities.

In the 80s XIX century he turned to art, visiting the art academy in Brussels (1880-1881) and Antwerp (1885-1886). Van Gogh enthusiastically paints disadvantaged working people - miners of the Borinage, and later - peasants, artisans, fishermen, whose life he observed in Holland in 1881-1885.

Already at the age of thirty, Van Gogh decided to devote himself to painting. He created a series of paintings depicting ordinary people and done in dark, gloomy colors (“Peasant Woman”, “Potato Eaters”, both 1885). In the initial period of creativity, the artist also made many drawings in which human figures appear and landscapes (swamps, ponds, trees, winter roads, etc.). They are influenced French painter and graphics by J. F. Millet.

Since 1886, Van Gogh has lived in Paris, where he joined the quests of A. de Toulouse-Lautrec, P. Gauguin, and C. Pizarro. Thanks to these first contacts, light colors appeared in his palette, light and color began to play a more important role in his paintings.

Under the influence of the painting of J. Seurat, the artist paints for some time in separate strokes of complementary colors, but soon moves on to a simple and bright expression of color. In this, Van Gogh follows the example of E. Bernard and L. Anquetin, who draw inspiration from stained glass, where clear planes of color are delimited by lead partitions, as well as in “amazing clarity” and “confident drawing” Japanese prints(“Bridge over the Seine”, “Portrait of Father Tanguy”, both 1887).

In February 1888, Van Gogh left for the south of France, to Arles. Here he creates landscapes shining with the joyful, sunny colors of the south (“The Harvest”, “La Croe Valley”, “Fishing Boats in Sainte-Marie”, “Red Vineyards in Arles”, all. 1888, etc.), spiritualizes ordinary objects with his temperament (“Van Gogh’s Bedroom in Arles,” 1888), sometimes succumbing to attacks of loneliness and melancholy (“Night Cafe in Arles,” 1888).

In October, Gauguin comes to the artist. Under his short-lived influence, Van Gogh wrote "The Dance Hall". The two artists argue frequently and furiously; one such scene ends with Van Gogh, in madness, mutilating himself by cutting off his ear. Friends disperse.

The color in Van Gogh’s works becomes even brighter, the impressionistic shimmer gives way to almost monochrome paintings, which show either endless beaches or wide furrows of fields - both color and object form. Van Gogh turns to light, which cannot be called simply daylight - it has an undoubted shade of the supernatural, the artist seeks an ever more truthful expression of the mystery of the human being and stands out from the general trend of impressionism with a painful thirst for spirituality.

The strain of strength and long studies under the scorching Arlesian sun led to the fact that the last years of Van Gogh’s life were complicated by attacks of mental illness. 1889-1890 he spends time in a hospital in Arles, then in Saint-Rémy and Auvers-sur-Oise, where on July 29, 1890 he commits suicide.

The works of the last two years breathe a dark, heavy mood (“At the Gates of Eternity”, “Road with Cypresses and Stars”, “Landscape at Auvers after the Rain”, all 1890).

The artist's creative life did not last long - about ten years, but during this time approximately 2,200 works were created.

(Vincent Willem Van Gogh) was born on March 30, 1853 in the village of Groot Zundert in the province of North Brabant in the south of the Netherlands in the family of a Protestant pastor.

Van Gogh "Poppies"

In 1879, Van Gogh received a position as a secular preacher in Wham, a mining center in the Borinage, in southern Belgium. He then continued his preaching mission in the nearby village of Kem.

During this same period, Van Gogh developed a desire to paint.

In 1880, in Brussels, he entered the Royal Academy of Arts (Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles). However, due to his unbalanced character, he soon dropped out of the course and continued his art education on his own, using reproductions.

In 1881, in Holland, under the guidance of his relative, landscape artist Anton Mauwe, Van Gogh created his first paintings: “Still Life with Cabbage and Wooden Shoes” and “Still Life with Beer Glass and Fruit.”

In the Dutch period, starting with the painting “Harvesting Potatoes” (1883), the main motif of the artist’s paintings was the theme of ordinary people and their work, the emphasis was on the expressiveness of scenes and figures, the palette was dominated by dark, gloomy colors and shades, sharp changes in light and shadow . The canvas “The Potato Eaters” (April-May 1885) is considered a masterpiece of this period.

In Paris, Van Gogh developed an interest in creating images of human faces. Without the funds to pay for the work of models, he turned to self-portraiture, creating about 20 paintings in this genre in two years.

The Parisian period (1886-1888) became one of the artist's most productive creative periods.

In February 1888, Van Gogh traveled to the south of France to Arles, where he dreamed of creating a creative community of artists.

In Saint-Rémy, Vincent alternated between periods of vigorous activity and long breaks caused by deep depression. In just one year of his stay at the clinic, Van Gogh painted about 150 paintings. Some of the most outstanding paintings of this period were: “Starry Night”, “Irises”, “Road with Cypress Trees and a Star”, “Olive Trees, Blue Sky and White Cloud”, “Pieta”.

In January 1890, Van Gogh's paintings were exhibited at the eighth Group of Twenty exhibition in Brussels, where they were enthusiastically received by critics.

In May 1890, Van Gogh's mental condition improved, he left the hospital and settled in the town of Auvers-sur-Oise in the suburbs of Paris under the supervision of Dr. Paul Gachet.

During his ten-year creative career, Van Gogh managed to paint 864 paintings and almost 1,200 drawings and engravings. During his lifetime, only one painting by the artist was sold - the landscape "Red Vineyards in Arles". The cost of the painting was 400 francs.

The material was prepared based on information from open sources

Tumanova E.E.

Vincent van Gogh

Self-Portrait in front of an Easel 1888

Great Dutch artist

Vincent Van Gogh, like Rembrandt, was Dutch. Here is the first external fact, the accident of biography, which, however, immediately acquires random value and gives us the key to the doors of his life. Even Hippolyte Taine, and after him other sociologists, pointed out the causal dependence of art on the surrounding material environment. But one amendment must be made to their somewhat mechanical explanation of art: there is not always a causal connection between the human spirit and external environment sometimes it can be direct, sometimes it can be reversed. There are brilliant artists who embody the dictates of their time and their people - such were the masters of Greece and the Renaissance; but there are other geniuses who can only be understood as deniers of this environment. Their life and creativity stem from this environment in the sense that they are a reaction against it. Such a protest against the common sense of his time was the appearance of Rembrandt, especially the second half of his work, starting with The Night Watch, when the gap grew between him and his burgher customers. The same personified protest against the philistine spirit of Holland is the life and work of Van Gogh.

For the Impressionists, one of the main objects of display was man. His image was interpreted in such a way that he asserted himself in the struggle with his environment and himself painfully, heavily, straining his inner strength to the limit. This side of Post-Impressionist art is best seen in the work of Vincent Van Gogh.

Vincent Van Gogh (1853 - 1890) is considered a great Dutch artist who had a very strong influence on impressionism in art. His works, created over a ten-year period, are striking in their color, carelessness and roughness of strokes, and images of a mentally ill person, exhausted by suffering, who committed suicide.

Vincent van Gogh was born in 1853 in Holland. He was named after his deceased brother, who was born a year before him on the same day. Therefore, it always seemed to him that he was replacing someone else. Timidity, shyness, and an overly sensitive nature alienated him from his classmates, and his only friend was his older brother Theo, with whom they vowed not to part ways as children. Vincent was 27 when he finally realized that he yearned to become an artist. “I can’t express how happy I am that I started drawing again. I often thought about it, but I thought that drawing was beyond my capabilities.” This is what Vincent wrote to his brother.

Van Gogh was practically self-taught, although he used the advice of A. Mauve. But to an even greater extent than the recommendations of the modern Dutch painter, acquaintance with the works and reproductions of Rembrandt, Delacour, Daumier and Millet played a role in the formation of Van Gogh. The painting itself, which he turned to after trying different professions(a salesman in a salon, a teacher, a preacher), he understood it as something that brought to the people no longer the word of a sermon, but an artistic image.

One of Van Gogh's famous paintings is “The Potato Eaters”.

“Potato Eaters”, 1885

In a dark, gloomy room, five people are sitting at a table: two men, two women and a girl visible from the back. A kerosene lamp hanging from above illuminates thin, tired faces and large, tired hands. The peasants' meager meal was a plate of boiled potatoes and liquid coffee. The images of people combine monumental grandeur and compassion, living in wide open eyes, intensely raised triangles of eyebrows, wrinkles that are clearly visible even on young faces.

Life and work in France

In 1886, Vincent arrived in Paris and from now on never returned to his homeland... Van Gogh, a Dutchman by nationality, came to France as an established artist who depicted the people and nature of his homeland.

Arrival in Paris makes significant adjustments to Van Gogh’s work without changing its basic essence. The artist is still full of sympathy and love for little man, but this person is already different - a resident of the French capital, an artist himself.

The change in Van Gogh's style was to a certain extent dictated by a change in his ideological position. In the very general view his view of the world at that time can be considered more joyful and bright than in Holland. This side of his work is especially well revealed in landscapes and still lifes. Having become a passionate follower of plein air, he wanders around Paris, depicts the corners of Montmartre, the banks and bridges of the Seine, folk theaters and feels like a real Frenchman. “We are working, all together, on the French Renaissance - here I am, as it were, in my homeland,” writes Van Gogh. And indeed, from now on his work belongs to France and humanity; he becomes a comrade-in-arms of the Impressionists, shares their misfortunes, contributes to their success...

But Van Gogh’s fiery nature was alien to the middle; in everything he undertook, he went to the end. The search for light and air, a passion for Seurat's technique (divisionism) could not help but ignite in him a desire to leave gray Paris and go south. He felt cramped in the capital, and the south seemed to him like that promised land, where only it was possible “from now on to organize an atelier of the future,” where only the artist’s talent could unfold. And so in 1888 he moved to Arles, a town in Provence.

A new period of creativity - the town of Provence.

Here begins a new period of Van Gogh's work. The first impression did not deceive him. Provence seemed to him “in its joyful measure of colors, a country as beautiful as Japan,” and he only regrets that he did not come here in his youth... “A joyful play of colors” - how unexpected these words are in the language of Van Gogh, a recent an ascetic - their whole new attitude to the world, the attitude of a painter, poured out in them. New and at the same time old, for he loved nature since childhood. But in Holland he loved only its quiet sadness; here, among the southern splendor, he first admired the brightness of the colors, the glare of the sun. Here for the first time he felt that there could not be a difference between him and his great teacher, Rembrandt. “Rembrandt painted with chiaroscuro, we paint with paints,” he says in one letter, formulating this revolution that happened to him in the south. Rembrandt saw in the world, first of all, the contrast of light and shadow, for Van Gogh the world is, first of all, a celebration of color, a play of colors.

Painting technique in general plays a much greater role in our era, big role than before. When we look at a painting by an old master, we, in essence, forget about technique, about the style of brushstroke - to such an extent are form and content, feeling and intellect, objective and subjective balanced in it. But - alas! - modern man is far from this classical balance of spirit, and that is why in a modern painting we, first of all, notice the artist’s subjective approach to this or that object. And technique, as Puvis de Chavannes rightly noted, is nothing more than the artist’s temperament, the degree of intensity of his worldview. There are realist artists who perceive the world with such submissive passivity that we forget about them human personality and we just say: “How vividly this samovar or red chest of drawers is written - it’s just like the real thing.” But there are other artists, with irrepressible and rebellious souls, who cannot hide the very pace of their experience behind the matter of the object they depict. Looking at their picture, we see, first of all, not what is depicted, but how it is depicted; we seem to participate in the very process of their creativity, we worry and rush along with them. For such individualist artists, technology occupies a huge place, but at the same time it ceases to be technology in the usual sense of the word, that is, something external and artisanal.

This is exactly what Van Gogh is like. An “orderly stroke” seems to him “as impossible as fencing during an assault.” He is truly an impressionist, in the very in a deep sense of this word, an impressionist more than everyone else whom we are accustomed to call that, for he changes his technique several times even within the same picture, according to each given impression. Each object impresses him differently, and each time the strings of his soul vibrate differently, and his hand rushes to write down these inner notes. He works now with a brush, now with a knife, now, liquidly writing this, thickly sculpting with paints, throwing strokes now along and across. He always works right away, on the first impression, in some kind of instant ecstasy, and it seems that the picture breaks out from under his brush, like a cry of admiration for nature or pity for man. In the very tempo of his strokes you always feel the rhythmic rise or fall of this cry, you feel the burning of his soul.

He himself is eternally ebullient, irrepressible, he sees in the world, first of all, an eternally effective principle. His world is in constant circulation, growth, formation. He perceives objects not as bodies, but as phenomena. This does not mean that he depicts some one moment of nature captured on the fly, like Claude Monet. No, he depicts not one moment, but the continuity of moments, the leitmotif of each object is its dynamic existence. That is why each of his sketches from life surpasses casual observation, rising to the contemplation of the abstract, to a cosmic spectacle. He is an artist of world rhythms. He paints not the given effect of the setting sun, but the way the sun sets in general, sending arrows of rays scattering around the canvas, or how it emerges from a golden mist thickening in concentric circles.

He depicted not the effect of a tree accidentally bent by the wind, but the very growth of a tree from the ground, the growth of branches from a tree. Its cypress trees seem like Gothic temples, lancet visions rushing towards the sky. Crouched from the southern heat, they rise, writhing, like huge swirling tongues of green flame themselves, and if they are bushes, they burn on the ground like bonfires. Its mountain ranges really bend, as if formed before our eyes from the original geological chaos... Its roads, beds and furrows of fields really run into the distance, and its strokes really spread like a carpet of grass, or go up the hills. All this, which sounds only like a verbal turn of phrase among you and me, lives, and moves, and goes away in Van Gogh. And his space, his landscapes are engulfed in an eternal fire, like himself, and clouds swirl in them like smoke.

Van Gogh portrait painter.

Van Gogh's dynamic style is revealed even more clearly in his amazing drawings made with a reed pen, which he sketched with Japanese virtuosity and generously scattered in his letters, illustrating his thoughts. He wanted to draw as quickly as he wrote, and indeed, in these strokes and dots the autograph of his genius. I don’t know of any of the modern graphic artists who would have such confidence of line, such power of suggestion, such laconicism of drawing. His pen sketches are some kind of pulsograms of the world, graphic symbols of world life. Here is a tree running upward in curlicues of lines, haystacks formed from spirals, and grass growing vertically, and roofs tiles going up, or tattered branches growing here and there...

Here is a portrait of a postman from Arles. How smugly his sideburns are combed with strokes, how joyfully the wallpaper flowers glow against the background!

"Portrait of a postman from Arly", 1889

In one of his letters, Van Gogh writes about him that this gentleman is very pleased and proud, since he has just become a happy father.

Here is “Berceuse” - a fisherman’s nanny, who, according to fishermen’s beliefs, you often see in front of a boat at night, in times of bad weather - she then entertains with fairy tales.

"The Fisherman's Nanny", 1888

And indeed, how many strong fairy tales, rough and bright, this woman should know, like these popular prints blooming in the background! Van Gogh was going to give this painting to Sainte-Marie - a shelter for sailors...

And here again is something opposite: a self-portrait of Van Gogh himself, whose brushstrokes are like exposed nerves. Here it is no longer an external resemblance, not a facial mask, but the tense and revealed soul itself...

"Self-Portrait", September 1889

But an even greater fact of Van Gogh’s expressiveness than his technique is color. He reveals what is characteristic in a person not only by exaggerating the drawing, but also by the symbolism of colors. “I want to make a portrait of my friend, an artist who dreams wonderful dreams,” he writes in a letter to his brother. “I would like to put all my love for him into this portrait and I choose colors completely arbitrarily. I exaggerate the light tone of his hair to an extent orange. Then, as a background, instead of depicting a banal wall of a squalid apartment, I will paint infinity, the most intense blue tone that I have on my palette. Thanks to this combination, a golden head on a blue background will appear as a star in the deep blue of the sky.

I do exactly the same thing in the portrait of a peasant, imagining this man in the midday sun, in the midst of the harvest. Hence these orange reflections, sparkling like red-hot iron; hence this tone of old gold, burning in the darkness... Ah, my dear, many will see a caricature in this exaggeration, but what do I care about that! ”

Thus, in contrast to most portrait painters who think that the resemblance is limited to the face, the colors of the background were not an accidental decoration for Van Gogh, but the same factor of expressiveness as the drawing. His “Fisherman's Nanny” is all written in sonorous popular-flowery colors. One of his Arlesian girls, probably a malicious provincial gossip, is dressed in black and blue, like a raven's wing, and therefore looks even more like a croaking bird. Thus, each color had its own specific, laconic meaning in Van Gogh’s eyes, was for him a symbol of emotional experience, and evoked analogies in him. He not only loved the colorfulness of the world, but also read in it the words of an entire secret language.

But of all the word colors he was most fascinated by two: yellow and blue. The yellow major scale, from soft lemon to ringing orange, was for him a symbol of the sun, an ear of rye, the good news of Christian love. He loved her.

The human soul..., not cathedrals.

Let's turn to Van Gogh: “I prefer to paint people’s eyes rather than cathedrals... human soul, even if the soul of an unfortunate beggar or a street girl, in my opinion, is much more interesting.” “Whoever writes peasant life will stand the test of time better than the makers of cardinal receptions and harems written in Paris.” “I will remain myself, and even in crude works I will say strict, rude, but truthful things.” “The worker against the bourgeoisie is as ill-founded as a hundred years ago the third estate was against the other two.”

Could a person who, in these and a thousand similar statements, explain the meaning of life and art, count on success with “ powerful of the world this? " The bourgeois environment rejected Van Gogh. Van Gogh had the only weapon against rejection - confidence in the correctness of his chosen path and work. “Art is a struggle... it’s better to do nothing than to express yourself weakly.” “You have to work like several blacks.” He turns even a half-starved existence into an incentive for creativity: “In the harsh trials of poverty, you learn to look at things with completely different eyes.”

The bourgeois public does not forgive innovation, and Van Gogh was an innovator in the most direct and genuine sense of the word. His reading of the sublime and beautiful came through an understanding of the inner essence of objects and phenomena: from insignificant ones like torn shoes to crushing cosmic hurricanes. The ability to present these seemingly disparate values on an equally enormous artistic scale put Van Gogh not only outside the official aesthetic concept of academic artists, but also forced him to go beyond the boundaries of impressionistic painting.

Van Gogh is a post-impessionist.

At the beginning of the 20th century. the too straightforward opposition of the art of Van Gogh (as well as Cezanne, Gauguin and Toulous-Lottrec) with impressionistic practice led to the creation of a new term - “post-impressionism”. Its convention is obvious. The relationship between the two generations of artists was much more complex and broader than the usual polemics of successive directions. Despite all the apparent incomparability of works created from the Renaissance to Impressionism inclusive, European painting was based on a system based on the principle of “seeing and depicting.”

In impressionism he achieved particularly complete development, expressed in the amazing naturalness and diversity of significant impressions recorded by the artist. In the endless change of light and air attire of nature, the impressionists saw the beautiful face of its eternal renewal.

But the cult of direct impression also concealed something that made the system of visual perception rigid and limited. In the unbridled pursuit of an elusive and disobedient moment, the object of observation itself imperceptibly moved into the background, as a result of which the artistic image as a whole turned out to be irreparably impoverished.

The Post-Impressionists and Van Gogh, in particular, proposed a fundamentally different method, a method of synthesizing observations and knowledge, analyzing the internal structure of things and phenomena, which opened the way to enlarging the scale of images and expanding the cognitive capabilities of art. “I see in all nature, for example in trees, expression and, so to speak, soul.” These words are the key to reading Vangogh's interpretation artistic image. It is based on the fusion of two principles: the first of which relates to everything related to working on nature, and the second is determined by the creative impulse of the artist himself, which allows him to see reality in a brighter and more transformed form.

Van Gogh once compared academic painting to a ruinous mistress who “... freezes you, sucks your blood, turns you into stone... Send this mistress to hell,” he says, “and fall madly in love with your true beloved - Lady Nature or Reality.” He loved this “Lady” touchingly all his life, sweeping away any encroachment on his feelings. Gauguin, who encouraged him to work with his imagination, wasted his time. No force could force Van Gogh to tear art away from life. But love for the “Lady of Reality” was not at all alien, blind. Van Gogh despised naturalists, even more “dreamers.” In Van Gogh's eyes, working from life is “the taming of the shrew.” Once upon a time, people believed in the earth’s firmament, but later it turned out that the earth was round... It is possible, however, that life is also round and many times exceeds in its extent and properties the curve that we now know.” In order to understand this extent, Van Gogh tore away from it the tinsel of banal everyday life and revealed the truth in all its nakedness. But the extraction of truth is inconceivable without the transformative creative impulse of the artist himself, who concentrates all his mind and feeling in it. Without this, it is impossible to turn “potato eaters” into those who testify for all the “humiliated and insulted”, to make worn out, torn shoes cry out about martyrs of poverty. The organic fusion of the “visible world” and the “real world” is “... something new, ... the highest in art, where art often stands above nature.” Higher in the sense in which Van Gogh's paintings are higher and truer than the visible truth.

The most important link figurative system Vangogov's art is animated and humanized. Any element of the universe in his eyes is significant and beautiful only when it acquires the ability to feel: even stones suffer from Van Gogh. Human perception- a prism that refracts everything that exists. “I would like to do everything the way ... a railway guard sees and feels it all.” In the mutilated old willows near the road, Van Gogh sees something in common with a procession of old people from an almshouse, and an open book, a burning candle and a shabby chair are transformed into a “portrait” of their abandoned owner. (“Gauguin’s Chair”).

Van Gogh forces any component of nature to be a tuning fork for his emotions and intellect. Nature gives him not only motives, but also becomes for him a moral support, a source of moral strength. Millet also said: “Patience can be learned from the sprouting grain.” Van Gogh understands this in his own way: “In every healthy and a normal person the same desire to ripen lives as in the grain, therefore, life is a process of ripening. What the desire to ripen is for grain, love is for us.” This is what it's all about main nerve Vangogh's understanding of the world and aesthetics: to be in love with humanity! In Van Gogh this is above family feelings and social prejudices. Without hesitation, he tears his last shirt into lint, because he needs to bandage the wounds of an injured miner, shares shelter and bread with the children of a prostitute, from dawn to dusk, in the sun and rain, he bends his back over the paper, like a plowman over a plow, giving up his blood drop by drop. his paintings and drawings, never demanding anything for himself.

How tragically his idea of beauty did not coincide with the concept of a prosperous tradesman! “There is nothing more artistic than loving children!” This is Van Gogh’s motto, hard-won “under the severe trials of poverty,” for the average man of all times, and can only squeeze out a wry smile. Van Gogh's aesthetics are a product of another world. His “beautiful” smells of the earth, ripe bread, the sweat of a peasant, the wind from fields stretched under the sky “immense like the sea”; it swirls with human warmth and kindness in the rudest and ugliest faces.

Van Gogh's aesthetic idea does not tolerate abstraction. He sees beauty as a woman: “what are her aspirations.” “To love and be loved, to live and give life, to renew it, to nurture, to support, to work, responding with ardor to ardor, and, most importantly, to be kind, useful, good for something, at least, for example, to light a fire in the hearth, give a piece of bread to the child and a glass of water to the sick person. But all this is also very beautiful and sublime! Yes, but she doesn't know these words. Her reasoning...is not too brilliant, not too refined, but her feelings are always genuine.” The embodiment of this “authenticity” urgently required a pictorial system that was adequate in strength and expressiveness. For anyone who has something to say, finding the means to do it is a matter of life. The problem of plein air would never have been solved if the Impressionists had not moved their studio directly to the street, to a field, to a forest or a boat, if they had not thrown it out of their painting gray, brown and black paints, if they had not dotted the surface of their canvases with a vibrating network of small colorful strokes, that is, if they had not fundamentally created new system visual arts. For Van Gogh, everything was different: “I want beauty to come not from the material, but from myself.” Any of the impressionists is, first of all, an observer, vigilant, subtle, sensitive, but always perceiving the object as if from the outside. For Van Gogh, “fighting chest to chest, fighting with things in nature” is an urgent necessity. Hence the peculiar uniqueness of his vision and manner.

Bright colors Van Gogh.

Dreaming of a brotherhood of artists and collective creativity, he completely forgot that he himself was an incorrigible individualist, irreconcilable to the point of restraint in matters of life and art. But this was also his strength. You need to have a sufficiently trained eye to distinguish Monet's paintings from paintings by, for example, Sisley. But only once having seen “Red Vineyards”, you will never confuse Van Gogh’s works with anyone else. Every line and stroke is an expression of his personality.

“Red Vineyards”, 1888

The dominant feature of the impressionistic system is color. In Van Gogh’s painting system, everything is equal and crushed into one inimitable bright ensemble: rhythm, color, texture, line, form.

At first glance, this seems like a bit of a stretch. Are the “red vineyards” pushing around with a color unheard of in intensity, isn’t the ringing chord of cobalt blue active in “The Sea at Sainte-Marie”, aren’t the colors of “Landscape at Auvers after the Rain” dazzlingly pure and sonorous, next to which any impressionistic painting looks hopelessly faded?

Exaggeratedly bright, these colors have the ability to sound in any intonation throughout the entire emotional range - from burning pain to the most delicate shades of joy. The sounding colors alternately intertwine into a softly and subtly harmonized melody, and then rear up in ear-piercing dissonance. Just as in music there are minor and major scales, so the colors of Van Gogh’s palette are divided in two. For Van Gogh, cold and warm are like life and death. At the head of the opposing camps are yellow and blue, both colors are deeply symbolic. However, this “symbolism” has the same living flesh as Vangogh’s ideal of beauty.

IN yellow paint from gently lemon to intense orange, Van Gogh saw some kind of bright beginning. The color of the sun and ripened bread in his understanding was the color of joy, solar warmth, human kindness, benevolence, love and happiness - all that in his understanding was included in the concept of “life”. The opposite in meaning is blue, from blue to almost black-lead - the color of sadness, infinity, melancholy, despair, mental anguish, fatal inevitability and, ultimately, death. Van Gogh's late paintings are an arena for the collision of precisely these two colors. They are like the struggle between good and evil, daylight and darkness, hope and despair. The emotional and psychological possibilities of color are the subject of constant reflection by Van Gogh: “I hope to make a discovery in this area, for example, to express the feelings of two lovers by a combination of two complementary colors, their mixing and contrast, the mysterious vibration of related tones. Or express the thought that has arisen in the brain with the radiance of a light tone on a dark background...”

Speaking about Van Gogh, Tugendhold noted: “...the notes of his experiences are the graphic rhythms of things and the response of the heartbeats.” The concept of peace is unknown to Van Gogh's art. His element is movement.

In the eyes of Van Gogh, it is the same life, which means the ability to think, feel, empathize. Take a closer look at the painting of the “red vineyards”. The brushstrokes, thrown onto the canvas by a swift hand, run, rush, collide, scatter again. Similar to dashes, dots, blots, commas, they are a transcript of Vangogh’s vision. From their cascades and whirlpools, simplified and expressive forms are born. They are a line that is composed into a drawing. Their relief - sometimes barely outlined, sometimes piled up in massive clumps - like plowed earth, forms a delightful, picturesque texture. And from all this a huge image emerges: in the scorching heat of the sun, like sinners on fire, the grapevines are writhing, trying to tear themselves away from the rich purple earth, to escape from the hands of the winegrowers, and now the peaceful bustle of the harvest looks like a fight between man and nature.

So, does that mean color still dominates? But aren’t these colors at the same time rhythm, line, form, and texture? This is precisely the most important feature of Van Gogh’s pictorial language, in which he speaks to us through his paintings.

It is often believed that Van Gogh's painting is a kind of uncontrollable emotional element, whipped up by unbridled insight. This misconception is “helped” by the originality artistic manner Van Gogh, indeed, seemingly spontaneous, but in fact subtly calculated, thoughtful: “Work and sober calculation, the mind is extremely tense, like an actor playing a difficult role, when you have to think about a thousand things in one half hour...”

Life for work.

Van Gogh was extremely rich creatively: his “extravagance” broke him personal life, mutilated physically, but not spiritually. He died at thirty-seven years old, not because he no longer had anything to talk about, but because he did not want to give up his art to illness. “I paid with my life for my work, and it cost me half my sanity.”

His latest works are sometimes shaken by despair, sometimes cold and constraining, but more often poured out with a thirst for existence, piercing to the point of pain. “Landscape in Auvers after the rain” is outwardly peaceful and blissful, dictated precisely by this state of the artist. The rain-washed greenery sparkles brightly. A horse harnessed to a cart is rushing along a wet road. A train running along the rails in the distance smokes merrily. Among the beds, a peasant works with his back bent. Everything would be almost idyllic if it weren’t for the frantic rhythm of the long and seemingly writhing strokes, forcing the rectangles of the vegetable gardens to collide in such a way that the space of the picture becomes as if uplifted and tense. Another second, and this entire bright, shining world will be blown up from the inside by a terrible destructive force bubbling somewhere in its depths.

“In a thousand torments - I am, I am stuck in torture - but I am!... I see the sun, but if I don’t see the sun, I know that it exists. And knowing that the sun exists is already your whole life.” Van Gogh could have written these lines from Dostoevsky.

Literature:

Perryucho A. "The Life of Van Gogh" 1997

Dmitrieva N. A. "Vincent Van Gogh: an essay on life and work"

Robert Wallace “The World of Van Gogh” 1998

Photos taken from “Internet” http://www.vangoghgallery.com/index.html

“The sadness will last forever”... In 2015, Europe celebrates 125 years since the death of Van Gogh. Exhibitions, excursions, festivals and performances serve one thing - to remind us who this amazing, extraordinary person was.

Van Gogh. 10 interesting facts. Fact No. 1. Just 10 years of creativity

The world-famous artist, whose works are now sold for tens of millions of dollars, was painting for only the last 10 years of his life.

Van Gogh. "The Potato Eaters" (1985)

Van Gogh. 10 interesting facts. Fact No. 2. Art dealer

Before finding something he liked, Vincent Van Gogh tried his hand at the trade and art industry, working in his uncle's firm in London. Dealing with painting, Van Gogh learned to understand and love it. But due to his careless character, he was fired from his job, despite his family ties with the owner himself.

Van Gogh. 10 interesting facts. Fact No. 3. Van Gogh - a preacher?

For a long time, Van Gogh seriously wanted to become a priest, like his father. He showed a keen interest in the Bible and was engaged in its translation. I was preparing for exams at the University of Amsterdam at the Faculty of Theology, but quickly lost interest in studying. Later he attended a Protestant missionary school near Brussels, and was even sent to the south of Belgium for six months to preach sermons to the poor. There Van Gogh showed extraordinary zeal, for which he was awarded the trust of local residents. They even instructed him to petition the mine management on behalf of the workers to improve working conditions. But in this matter Van Gogh failed. Not only was the petition rejected, but Van Gogh himself was removed from service. The already eccentric and hot-tempered young man suffered this event painfully.

Van Gogh. "Van Gogh's Bedroom in Arles" (1888)

Van Gogh. 10 interesting facts. Fact No. 4. Woe-disciple

Depression after an unsuccessful pastoral experience pushed Van Gogh to find himself in painting. He even enters the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, but after studying for a year, he quits. Instead, Vincent works a lot on his own, takes private lessons, and studies various techniques.

Van Gogh. 10 interesting facts. Fact No. 5. Rejected in Paris

The artist's most productive period was in Paris. Here he meets the impressionists, who have a significant influence on him. Here Van Gogh participates in many exhibitions, but the public categorically does not accept his work, forcing him to return to study.

Van Gogh. 10 interesting facts. Fact No. 6. The myth of cut off ears

In 1889, while searching for a concept for a common workshop, a conflict took place between Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, during which Van Gogh attacked Gauguin with a razor in his hands. Gauguin was not injured, but Van Gogh cut off his earlobe that night. What it was - pangs of remorse or the consequences of excessive consumption of absinthe - is not known for certain. However, after this incident, Van Gogh ends up in a psychiatric hospital with a diagnosis of temporal lobe epilepsy. Residents of the town of Arles, where the incident with the razor occurred, asked the mayor of the city to isolate Van Gogh from society, so the artist was sent to a settlement for the mentally ill in Sant-Rémy-de-Provence. But even there Van Gogh works hard, creating, among other things, famous work"Starlight Night".

Van Gogh. "Self-portrait with a cut off ear and a pipe" (1898)

Van Gogh. 10 interesting facts. Fact No. 7. Recognition after death

Van Gogh's first public recognition came in Last year life, after participating in the G20 exhibition, when the first positive article about his work “Red Vineyards in Arles” was published.

Van Gogh. "Red Vineyards at Arles" (1888)

Van Gogh. 10 interesting facts. Fact No. 8. Mysterious death

Van Gogh passed away at the age of only 37. The circumstances of his death are still ambiguous. He died from loss of blood after a gunshot wound to the chest from a pistol, which the artist used to drive away birds during the plein air. It is not known for sure whether it was suicide or attempt. Last words Van Gogh were: “Sadness will last forever.”

Van Gogh. Last work. "Wheat Field with Crows" (1890)

Van Gogh. 10 interesting facts. Fact No. 9. The closest person

A special person in Van Gogh's life was his brother Theo. It was he who supported him more than others and helped in organizing the “southern” workshop. It was he who tried to organize a posthumous exhibition of the artist, but fell ill mental disorder and followed his brother exactly six months later.

Van Gogh. 10 interesting facts. Fact No. 10. The myth of the only painting sold

There is a version that in his entire short life, Van Gogh sold only one work - “Red Vineyards in Arles”. The myth, of course, is spectacular, but there are documents indicating that the artist sold his paintings before, albeit for more modest money.