Van Gogh and the Artists He Loved
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
The compelling story of how Vincent van Gogh developed his audacious, iconic style by immersing himself in the work of others, featuring hundreds of paintings by Van Gogh as well as the artists who inspired him—from the New York Times bestselling co-author of Van Gogh: The Life
“Important . . . inspires us to look at Van Gogh and his art afresh.”—Dr. Chris Stolwijk, general director, RKD–Netherlands Institute for Art History
Vincent van Gogh’s paintings look utterly unique—his vivid palette and boldly interpretive portraits are unmistakably his. Yet however revolutionary his style may have been, it was actually built on a strong foundation of paintings by other artists, both his contemporaries and those who came before him.
Now, drawing on Van Gogh’s own thoughtful and often profound comments about the painters he venerated, Steven Naifeh gives a gripping account of the artist’s deep engagement with their work. We see Van Gogh’s gradual discovery of the subjects he would make famous, from wheat fields to sunflowers. We watch him experimenting with the loose brushwork and bright colors used by Édouard Manet, studying the Pointillist dots used by Georges Seurat, and emulating the powerful depictions of the peasant farmers painted by Jean-François Millet, all vividly illustrated in nearly three hundred full-color images of works by Van Gogh and a variety of other major artists, including Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, positioned side by side.
Thanks to the vast correspondence from Van Gogh to his beloved brother, Theo, Naifeh, a Pulitzer Prize winner, is able to reconstruct Van Gogh’s artistic world from within. Observed in eloquent prose that is as compelling as it is authoritative, Van Gogh and the Artists He Loved enables us to share the artist’s journey as he created his own daring, influential, and widely beloved body of work.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Naifeh (Jackson Pollock) offers a captivating look inside the mind of Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) through the artists who inspired him. Propelled by a "wide-ranging curiosity drew him to one artistic and intellectual movement after another," the Dutch painter's omnivorous taste led him to study numerous works of artistic expression. Drawing primarily from Van Gogh's correspondences with his brother Theo, Naifeh lucidly traces the painter's relationship with everything from 17th century works by Rembrandt (who, like Van Gogh, had a penchant for "obsessively" painting himself) to experimenting with the Pointillist dots of Georges Seurat (which, Naifeh writes, "freed Van Gogh from the unforgiving linearity of realism") to his fascination with Japanese woodblock prints in the mid-1880s. Further enriched with images of prints that Van Gogh himself owned and annotated—including Vase with Flowers (c. 1875) by French painter Adolphe Monticelli, which, Van Gogh wrote, encapsulated "in a single panel the whole range of his richest and most perfectly balanced tones"—the book allows readers to glimpse the lessons the artist drew from prototypes when executing his own vivid works, including his famous Sunflowers and Green Wheat Fields, Auvers (1890). While illuminating the life of one of the world's most significant artists, this also sheds a broader light on the fascinating nuances of the creative process.
