Melissa McQuillan, Van Gogh (반 고흐) [고흐 관련 서적] Gogh

*Melissa McQuillan, Van Gogh, Thames and Hudson (1989)

여섯 개의 장으로 이루어진 이 책은 고흐의 생애와 그의 작품을 균형 잡힌 시각으로 제시하고 있다. 고흐에 대한 개론서답게, 신화화 된 고흐의 이미지를 무너뜨리고, 화상으로서 고흐가 일반 대중의 취향에 대해 배운 점, 또 그의 작품들이 갖고 있는 특징, 장단점 등을 침착하게 소개하고 있다. 미술사가인 저자의 그림에 대한 설명은 고흐의 그림을 보는 눈을 확대해 준다.

This book consisting of six chapters provides a balanced look of the life and oevres of Vincent van Gogh. As an introductory book about Gogh, this book tries to demolish the mythologized Gogh image, and shows what he learned about public taste as an art-dealer, and characteristics and merits and demerits of his oevres

calmly. The author's explanation as an art historian helps us enlarge the viewing point.

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*. . . van Gogh's work found public showing as much as any of his collegues. Nor did he completely fail to

sell his work (despite popular mythology). Gauguin recorded the purchase of a still-life of shrimps by one of the small dealers. (50)

*His earliest experience taught him the commodity function of art. Work at Goupil's made him aware of the

art market's mediation between artist and public. It established his ideas about public taste and his visits to

other galleries presented him with past art that had been accorded public value. (89)

*In handling, the work of most of the Hague School painters produced atmospheric effects through a light, often grey tonality. Painterliness softened the forms and gave a lively texture to the canvas surface. The

dominant horizons, whether low or raised, the static composition, the stillness and monumentality of the

figures suggest a kind of eternal and natural relationship between the land and the traces or presence of the people whose lives depended on it. In their reference to the conventions and formats of seventeenth-

century Dutch forebears they asserted the value of tradition. Nevertheless, the Hague School represented

the new painting in the Netherlands. It aspired to a renewal of Dutch art, although it lacked the powerful

institutions against which to rebel that were provided in France by the Academy and the Salon. (92)

*Van Gogh was twenty-seven by the time he decided to practice art seriously. He had not shown more than an amateur interest in sketching until his experience in the Borinage had left him disillusioned with religion. His early drawings, ill-proportioned and awkward, give no sign of conventional skill or talent. Through

dogged determination and self-criticism he trained his eye and his hand, while through looking, reading and discussion he worked out his concept of an artistic practice. (105)

*A realist in contrast to his friends' 'abstractions', but no realist in the sense of Courbet or naturalist in the

sense of early Impressionism, van Gogh used intensified colours and exaggerated drawing not to reject

nature but to bring out its experience more vividly, to express himself more forcibly. Gauguin nominated him a romantic in contrast with his own primitivism. (117)

*The writings of Jules Michelet and Thomas Carlyle contributed substantially to the formation of van Gogh's social and political framework. Michelet was a liberal romantic republican, nostalgic for the first French

revolution. Van Gogh became acquainted with his writings in 1873, and although he disavowed Michelet

during his religious phase, he again drew support from the French writer's ideas on women and the family

while in The Hague. In 1883 he began reading Carlyle. Carlyle sanctioned his distaste for social realities,

reinforced a withdrawl into abstract thought rather than formulation of the poet (or artist) as prophet, a

revealer of sacred mystery, supported van Gogh's assumption of a posture of romantic alienation and the

role of religious martyrdom for the sake of his art. (118)

*Puvis de Chavannes, born in 1824, but still active and just beginning to attract attention from the generation of the 1880s, became a late final enthusiasm of the moderners. Puvis's simplified, classicizing, yet

suggestively evocative decorations found supporters among the painters of the Symbolist generation. By

1889 van Gogh had come to equate Puvis with Delacroix in importance. (126)

*Van Gogh's mental image of the Japanese projected a primitive, religious, natural people. Japan stood in his mind for an ideal world, a world he sought in the south. He thought the light in Arles would render nature

closer to the Japanese colouring, and soon after his arrival wanted 'to make some drawings in the manner of Japanese prints'(LT 474, April 1888). (132-3)

*He sold a self-portrait to the London dealers Sulley and Lori in 1888 and in 1890 a painting to Anna Boch

for four hundred Belgian francs. (137)

*For van Gogh The Potato Eaters was the culmination of his effort to make himself a painter, and its

disheartening reception from friends and dealers contributed to his change of course within the year.

Nevertheless, he continued to regard it as one of his best works and returned to the motif in drawings done at Saint-Rémy in 1890. (150)

*Van Gogh had always read into Millet's work his own spiritual reverence for the natural world and its

'natural' inhabitant the peasant. (184)

*Van Gogh's moves--his change of residence, his reorintations of his enterprise, his shift of style--might

be linked to these contradictions. Moving on became a way of avoiding conflict. Two crucial moves, from

The Hague to Drenthe and from Paris to Arles, were escapes from the city, from the insecurity of change

and the social conflicts that change produced, to the vision of a natural ideal, and in each case when the

ideal proved to be an illusion he again departed for a venue projected as an opposite of the place of his

disillusion: from nature (Nuenen) to culture (Antwerp and Paris), from 'the south' (Arles and Saint-Rémy) to 'the north' (Auvers). It might even be argued that the closure of space in his late work was a kind of formal

strategy to exclude contradiction of illusion, as if not allowing room for contradiction. (193)

*Although van Gogh claimed the peasant to be more beautiful than the city dweller, these peasants are

represented as lumpish. Unlike Millet's peasants, dehumanized by their work, van Gogh's Nuenen peasants

are simply alien beings opaque to the viewer's understanding is spite of their proximity and their steady

gazes. (198)