Posthumous fame of Vincent van Gogh - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

For a timeline, see Vincent van Gogh chronology
Vincent van Gogh chronology
This is a chronology of the artist Vincent van Gogh. It is based as far as possible on Van Gogh's correspondence. However, it has only been possible to construct the chronology by drawing on additional sources...

The fame of Vincent van Gogh began to spread in France and Belgium during the last year of his life, and in the years after his death in the Netherlands and Germany. His friendship with his younger brother Theo

Theo van Gogh (art dealer)

Theodorus "Theo" van Gogh was a Dutch art dealer. He was the younger brother of Vincent van Gogh, and Theo's unfailing financial and emotional support allowed his brother to devote himself entirely to painting...

was documented in numerous letters they exchanged from August 1872 onwards. The letters were published in three volumes in 1914 by Johanna van Gogh-Bonger

Johanna van Gogh-Bonger

Johanna Gezina van Gogh-Bonger was the wife of Theo van Gogh, art dealer, and the sister-in-law of the painter Vincent van Gogh. After the death of Vincent and her husband she worked assiduously on editing the brothers' correspondence, producing the first volume in Dutch in 1914...

, Theo's widow, who also generously supported most of the early Van Gogh exhibitions with loans from the artist's estate. Publication of the letters helped spread the compelling mystique of Vincent van Gogh the intense and dedicated painter who suffered for his art, and died young, throughout Europe and the rest of the world.

His fame reached its first peak in Austria and Germany before World War I

World War I

World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

, and at the end of World War I in Switzerland

Switzerland

Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....

. Due to the economic crisis in Germany and France after 1918, pioneer collections of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art which included works by Van Gogh were dissolved. Thus, British and American collectors (private as well as public) had the opportunity to acquire first rate works relatively late. The American novelist Irving Stone

Irving Stone

Irving Stone was an American writer known for his biographical novels of famous historical personalities, including Lust for Life, a biographical novel about the life of Vincent van Gogh, and The Agony and the Ecstasy, a biographical novel about Michelangelo.-Biography:In...

published an account of Vincent van Gogh's life in 1934 entitled Lust for Life
Lust for Life (novel)
Lust for Life is a biographical novel written by Irving Stone and is based on the life of the famous Dutch painter, Vincent van Gogh and his hardships....

that was largely based on the letters to Theo

Theo van Gogh (art dealer)

; this book and later the movie of the same name

Lust for Life (film)

Lust for Life is a MGM biographical film about the life of the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh, based on the 1934 novel by Irving Stone and adapted by Norman Corwin.It was directed by Vincente Minnelli and produced by John Houseman...

added further the artist's fame.

Lifetime exhibits

During his lifetime, Van Gogh contributed works of his own only on a few and minor occasions which mainly passed unnoted by critics and public. For example, in 1887, a display of Japanese woodcuts in the Restaurant Au Tambourin, 62 Boulevard de Clichy, then run by Augustina Ségatori, for which Van Gogh probably interpreted three famous ukiyo-e
Ukiyo-e
' is a genre of Japanese woodblock prints and paintings produced between the 17th and the 20th centuries, featuring motifs of landscapes, tales from history, the theatre, and pleasure quarters...

prints by Keisai Eisen

Keisai Eisen

Keisai Eisen was a Japanese ukiyo-e artist who specialised in bijinga . His best works, including his ōkubi-e , are considered to be masterpieces of the "decadent" Bunsei Era...

and Hiroshige

Hiroshige

was a Japanese ukiyo-e artist, and one of the last great artists in that tradition. He was also referred to as Andō Hiroshige and by the art name of Ichiyūsai Hiroshige ....

.

Towards the end of this year, he organized another exhibition in the Grand-Bouillon Restaurant du Chalet, 43 Avenue de Clichy, on Montmartre to which his friends Emile Bernard

Émile Bernard

Émile Henri Bernard is known as a Post-Impressionist painter who had artistic friendships with Van Gogh, Gauguin and Eugene Boch, and at a later time, Cézanne. Most of his notable work was accomplished at a young age, in the years 1886 through 1897. He is also associated with Cloisonnism and...

, Louis Anquetin

Louis Anquetin

Louis Anquetin was a French painter.Anquetin was born in Étrépagny, France and educated at the Lycée Pierre Corneille in Rouen....

and evidently Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa or simply Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was a French painter, printmaker, draughtsman, and illustrator, whose immersion in the colourful and theatrical life of fin de siècle Paris yielded an œuvre of exciting, elegant and provocative images of the modern...

contributed. Van Gogh considered the first one a disaster, while he was prepared to take the second one as a success: Bernard and Anquetin sold paintings, and he himself had exchanged works with Paul Gauguin

Paul Gauguin

Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was a leading French Post-Impressionist artist. He was an important figure in the Symbolist movement as a painter, sculptor, print-maker, ceramist, and writer...

. There are two short accounts of this exhibition, one based on information supplied by Seurat, and the other one written by Emile Bernard:

- In 1890, Seurat recalled to have met Vincent there for the first time, "in one of these populaire soup kitchens in Avenue de Clichy, now closed. The hall was decorated with his canvases (1887)."

- Already in 1889, at the time of the Volpini Exhibition, Emile Bernard had prepared a review of Van Gogh's work for Aurier's Moderniste, which was, as this modest paper ceased to appear suddenly, published for the first time a century later, in 1990.

In 1888, Van Gogh joined the "Société des Artistes Indépendants

Société des Artistes Indépendants

—The Société des Artistes Indépendants formed in Paris in summer 1884 choosing the device "No jury nor awards" . Albert Dubois-Pillet, Odilon Redon, Georges Seurat and Paul Signac were among its founders...

"; so this year three of his paintings were on show in their annual exhibition in Paris, and two in the year following (due to restrictions caused in 1889 by the Exposition Universelle

Exposition Universelle (1889)

The Exposition Universelle of 1889 was a World's Fair held in Paris, France from 6 May to 31 October 1889.It was held during the year of the 100th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, an event traditionally considered as the symbol for the beginning of the French Revolution...

). In 1890 and 1891, their annual exhibitions comprised ten paintings by Vincent; part of them had been shown before by the society "Les XX

Les XX

Les XX was a group of twenty Belgian painters, designers and sculptors, formed in 1883 by the Brussels lawyer, publisher, and entrepreneur Octave Maus. For ten years 'Les Vingt' , as they called themselves, held an annual exhibition of their art; each year twenty international artists were also...

" in Brussels, in 1891 completed by a dozen of drawings (some of them only on view "by demand"). According to letters from his brother Theo, Vincent's contributions to these few exhibitions established his renown amongst French vanguard painters like Claude Monet

Claude Monet

Claude Monet was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. . Retrieved 6 January 2007...

and Paul Signac

Paul Signac

Paul Signac was a French neo-impressionist painter who, working with Georges Seurat, helped develop the pointillist style.-Biography:Paul Victor Jules Signac was born in Paris on 11 November 1863...

Early promoters

Probably it is little more than for curiosity that one of the first mentions of Van Gogh in newspapers was printed in Arles. September 30, 1888, L'Homme de Bronze told its readers

"Mr. Vincent, impressionist painter, works in the night, as we are assured, in the glow of the gas lanterns on one of our public places."

Earlier this year, Van Gogh's contribution to the exhibition of the Artists Indépendants has been reviewed.

Notes on Van Gogh's exhibits were again published in 1889, amongst them a review by the Dutch painter Joseph Jacob Isaacson, a friend of Meyer de Haan and Theo van Gogh

Theo van Gogh (art dealer)

, printed in the 17 August 1889 issue of the Amsterdam weekly De Portefeuille. Vincent felt more troubled than honoured, and asked Isaacson to stop writing about him.

But there was no chance to turn the wheel back: January 1890 - in the first issue refounding the Mercure de France
Mercure de France
The Mercure de France was originally a French gazette and literary magazine first published in the 17th century, but after several incarnations has evolved as a publisher, and is now part of the Éditions Gallimard publishing group....

- Albert Aurier

Albert Aurier

G. Albert Aurier was a poet, art critic and painter, devoted to Symbolism.Son of a notary born in Châteauroux, Indre, Aurier went to Paris in 1883 to study law, but soon his attention was drawn to art and literature, and he began to contribute to Symolist periodicals...

published his enthusiastic essay 'Les Isolés: Vincent van Gogh', on which Vincent's fame as an artist is based as well as Aurier's as a leading art critic.

Another voice was that of Octave Mirbeau

Octave Mirbeau

Octave Mirbeau was a French journalist, art critic, travel writer, pamphleteer, novelist, and playwright, who achieved celebrity in Europe and great success among the public, while still appealing to the literary and artistic avant-garde...

whose review article 'Vincent van Gogh' in L'Echo de Paris
L'Écho de Paris
L'Écho de Paris was a daily newspaper in Paris from 1884 to 1944.The paper's editorial stance was initially conservative and nationalistic, although it did later become close to the French Socialist Party. Its writers included Octave Mirbeau, Georges Clemenceau, Henry Bordeaux, François Mitterrand,...

on 1 March 1891. Later that year Van Gogh's friend Émile Bernard

Émile Bernard

contributed short pieces on Van Gogh for La Plume and Les Hommes d’aujourd’hui.

Julius Meier-Graefe

Julius Meier-Graefe

Julius Meier-Graefe was a German art critic and novelist. His writings on Impressionism, Post-Impressionism as well as on art of earlier and more recent generations, with his most important contributions translated into French, Russian and English, are considered to have been instrumental for the...

wrote influentially of Van Gogh, his publications including: Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst (Stuttgart, 1904 and later Munich 1927), Über Vincent van Gogh, Sozialistische Monatshefte (February 1906), Vincent van Gogh (Munich 1912), and Van Gogh der Zeichner (Berlin, 1928, published by Otto Wacker

Otto Wacker

Otto Wacker was a German art dealer who became famous for commissioning and selling forgeries of paintings by Vincent van Gogh.Otto Wacker became an art dealer in 1925 after various false starts in other professions. He developed a reputation for reliability in the art field...

).

In the English-speaking world, the Bloomsbury

Bloomsbury Group

The Bloomsbury Group or Bloomsbury Set was a group of writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists who held informal discussions in Bloomsbury throughout the 20th century. This English collective of friends and relatives lived, worked or studied near Bloomsbury in London during the first half...

art critics Roger Fry

Roger Fry

Roger Eliot Fry was an English artist and art critic, and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Establishing his reputation as a scholar of the Old Masters, he became an advocate of more recent developments in French painting, to which he gave the name Post-Impressionism...

and Clive Bell

Clive Bell

Arthur Clive Heward Bell was an English Art critic, associated with formalism and the Bloomsbury Group.- Origins :Clive Bell was born in East Shefford, Berkshire, in 1881...

were his first champions. Fry, in a 1924 essay, "Vincent Van Gogh," reported that after Van Gogh's death, he "disappeared" and "scarcely any picture dealer in Bond Street

Bond Street

Bond Street is a major shopping street in the West End of London that runs north-south through Mayfair between Oxford Street and Piccadilly. It has been a fashionable shopping street since the 18th century and is currently the home of many high price fashion shops...

gave him another thought" until the 1910 show titled "Post Impressionist Exhibition" in which "his works dazzled, astonished and infuriated all cultured England." Fry's essay canonized Van Gogh as "a saint" of art, "the victim of the terrible intensity of his convictions—his conviction that somewhere one might lay hold of spiritual values compared with which all other values were of no account." His works gave "an expression in paint for the desperate violence of his spiritual hunger....". That set the agenda for many subsequent Van Gogh studies, which are predominantly biographical to this day. Van Gogh fits modern culture's attempt to find secular substitutes for a religion it no longer believed in, as M.H. Abrams describes in "Natural Supernaturalism" (1970).

Early exhibitions

There were retrospectives in Brussels and Paris in 1891. During the 1890s, Van Gogh exhibitions were staged in several Dutch and Belgian towns. In 1893, Julien Leclercq

Julien Leclercq

Julien Leclercq was a French poet and art critic, devoted to Symbolism. Like his close friend Albert Aurier, he contributed regularly to the Mercure de France, for example in September 1890 an obituary of Vincent van Gogh...

brought together a first exhibition featuring Van Gogh, Gauguin and other "modernists" touring Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Berlin. In 1895 and in 1896 Ambroise Vollard

Ambroise Vollard

Ambroise Vollard is regarded as one of the most important dealers in French contemporary art at the beginning of the twentieth century...

mounted Van Gogh retrospectives in his galleries Rue Lafitte; other minor dealers in Paris had works by Van Gogh continuously on display. In 1901, Leclercq arranged a Van Gogh Exhibition at the Galeries Bernheim Jeune in Paris .

A little later in the year 1901, the Berlin Secession

Berlin Secession

The Berlin Secession was an art association founded by Berlin artists in 1898 as an alternative to the conservative state-run Association of Berlin Artists. That year the official salon jury rejected a landscape by Walter Leistikow, who was a key figure amongst a group of young artists interested...

ists entered the scene, accompanied by the art dealers Bruno Cassirer

Bruno Cassirer

Bruno Cassirer was a publisher and gallery owner in Berlin who had a considerable influence on the cultural life of the city.He was born on 12 December 1872, the second child of Jewish parents, Julius and Julcher Cassirer. Julius was a partner, with two of Bruno's cousins, in a cable factory...

and especially his cousin Paul

Paul Cassirer

Paul Cassirer was a German art dealer and editor who played a significant role in the promotion of the work of artists of the Berlin Secession and of French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, in particular that of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne.- Starting out :Paul Cassirer started out as...

, who set the pace for the years to come. In the last days of December, running through January 1902, Paul Cassirer

Paul Cassirer

organized the first van Gogh exhibition in Berlin, Germany. Minor exhibitions of some recently found early works

Lost works by Vincent van Gogh

The events that befell the early paintings and drawings by Vincent van Gogh in the period prior to the posthumous recognition of Vincent van Gogh as an innovative artist show how the appreciation of his legacy changed his reputation in a relatively short time...

were held in Rotterdam and Amsterdam in 1903 and 1904. Paul Cassirer first established a market for Van Gogh, and then, with the assistance of Johanna van Gogh-Bonger

Johanna van Gogh-Bonger

, controlled market prices. In 1906 Bruno Cassirer

Bruno Cassirer

published a small volume of selected letters of Vincent's to Theo

Theo van Gogh (art dealer)

, translated into German. However, Johanna was keen to maintain her independence, and contributed important loans to Roger Fry

Roger Fry

's 1910 London exhibition, as well as to the Sonderbund

Sonderbund westdeutscher Kunstfreunde und Künstler

The "Sonderbund" — as it is normally called; its complete name being Sonderbund westdeutscher Kunstfreunde und Künstler — was a "special union" of artists and art lovers, established 1909 in Düsseldorf and dissolved in 1916...

exhibition of 1912 in Cologne

Cologne

Cologne is Germany's fourth-largest city , and is the largest city both in the Germany Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia and within the Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Area, one of the major European metropolitan areas with more than ten million inhabitants.Cologne is located on both sides of the...

. This was organized by an independent committee of artists, collectors and museum professionals, but in fact dependent on loans arranged by Cassirer, Bernheim Jeune and other art dealers.

The first major exhibition from the artist's estate was shown in 1892 in the Amsterdam 'Panorama' Building, the next in 1905 in the Stedelijk Museum

Stedelijk Museum

Founded in 1874, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam is a museum for classic modern and contemporary art in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. It has been housed on the Paulus Potterstraat, next to Museum Square Museumplein and to the Rijksmuseum, Van Gogh Museum and the Concertgebouw, in Amsterdam Zuid...

Amsterdam, followed in 1914 by a display concentrating on Van Gogh's drawings.

Early private and public collectors

Van Gogh's friends, his colleagues and promoters were at the same time his first collectors. Paul Gauguin

Paul Gauguin

Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was a leading French Post-Impressionist artist. He was an important figure in the Symbolist movement as a painter, sculptor, print-maker, ceramist, and writer...

, Émile Bernard

Émile Bernard

, Toulouse Lautrec, Émile Schuffenecker

Émile Schuffenecker

Émile Schuffenecker was a French Post-Impressionist artist, painter, art teacher and art collector. A friend of Paul Gauguin and Odilon Redon, and one of the first collectors of works by Vincent van Gogh, Schuffenecker was instrumental in establishing the Volpini exhibition, in 1889...

, Edgar Degas

Edgar Degas

Edgar Degas[p] , born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas, was a French artist famous for his work in painting, sculpture, printmaking and drawing. He is regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism although he rejected the term, and preferred to be called a realist...

as well as Albert Aurier

Albert Aurier

, Octave Mirbeau

Octave Mirbeau

, Julien Leclercq

Julien Leclercq

and Van Eeden - each of them held works by Van Gogh.

In 1903, the first works of Vincent Van Gogh entered museum collections in Vienna and Rotterdam, as well as Folkwang Museum, then privately run by Karl-Ernst Osthaus in Hagen (later transferred to Essen).

Little attention was paid at this time to the considerable number of Van Gogh masterpieces already held by the Museum of Modern Art

Museum of Modern Art

The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...

New York (established in 1929), along with the Tate Gallery

Tate Gallery

The Tate is an institution that houses the United Kingdom's national collection of British Art, and International Modern and Contemporary Art...

in London and other British and American galleries.

Art historians

In 1928, Jacob Baart de la Faille

Jacob Baart de la Faille

Jacob Baart-de la Faille compiled the first catalogue raisonné of the work of Vincent van Gogh, published in 1928...

published the first catalogue raisonné of Van Gogh's works, comprising paintings as well as drawings and prints (and illustrating almost all of them) - a landmark in art history.

There has been a reaction against the depiction of Van Gogh as a saint. John Rewald

John Rewald

John Rewald was an American academic, author and art historian. He was known as a scholar of Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cézanne, Renoir, Pissarro, Seurat, and other French painters of the late 19th century. He was recognized as a foremost authority on late 19th-century art...

was one of the first to attempt an anti-hagiography

Hagiography

Hagiography is the study of saints.From the Greek and , it refers literally to writings on the subject of such holy people, and specifically to the biographies of saints and ecclesiastical leaders. The term hagiology, the study of hagiography, is also current in English, though less common...

; books pointing to Van Gogh's neuroticism have continued since. Counter-claims, particularly based on Van Gogh's three volumes of letters, support Roger Fry's praise.

Forgeries and reattribution

In winter 1927/1928, a problem began that has overshadowed Van Gogh research ever since—the emergence of forgeries

Art forgery

Art forgery is the creation of works of art which are falsely attributed to other, usually more famous, artists. Art forgery can be extremely lucrative, but modern dating and analysis techniques have made the identification of forged artwork much simpler....

. Otto Wacker

Otto Wacker

staged an extensive exhibition of drawings by Van Gogh, catalogued and annotated by Julius Meier-Graefe

Julius Meier-Graefe

. Then in January 1928, Paul Cassirer opened a large retrospective of paintings, from which two were removed just before the opening, as their authenticity had been questioned. The suspect paintings had been provided by Otto Wacker, and a scandal ensued.

In 2007, it was concluded by a team of specialists from the Van Gogh Museum

Van Gogh Museum

The Van Gogh Museum is an art museum in Amsterdam, Netherlands, featuring the works of the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh and his contemporaries. It has the largest collection of Van Gogh's paintings and drawings in the world.-Background:...

in Amsterdam that the painting Head of a Man, attributed to Van Gogh for over 70 years, was not by him, but was painted by one of his peers. The team determined that the style was inconsistent with Van Gogh's other works, and there was no mention of the painting in any of Van Gogh's known letters. There is no evidence to suggest that the painting was intentionally created as a fake Van Gogh.

In February 2010, the Fundatie museum in the Dutch city of Zwolle

Zwolle

Zwolle is a municipality and the capital city of the province of Overijssel, Netherlands, 120 kilometers northeast of Amsterdam. Zwolle has about 120,000 citizens.-History:...

discovered it owned a Van Gogh painting made in 1886, the Le Blute-fin windmill, authenticated “beyond any doubt” by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The museum's founder Dirk Hannema

Dirk Hannema

Dirk Hannema was a controversial museum director and art collector. The Museum Boijmans flourished under his directorship, but he was also arrested and interned for eight months for his conduct during the German occupation of the Netherlands during World War II...

(1895–1984), who bought the anonymous painting from a Parisian art dealer in 1975 for 6,500 francs (less than 1,000 euros), was always convinced it was a Van Gogh and insured it for a sum equivalent to 35,000 euros. However, as managing director of Rotterdam’s Museum Boijmans

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen

The Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen is the main art museum in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The museum began in 1847 with the collection of Frans Jacob Otto Boijmans . Much of the museum's original collection was destroyed in a disastrous 1864 fire...

in 1938, Hannema had purchased a number of paintings that were attributed to Johannes Vermeer

Johannes Vermeer

Johannes, Jan or Johan Vermeer was a Dutch painter who specialized in exquisite, domestic interior scenes of middle class life. Vermeer was a moderately successful provincial genre painter in his lifetime...

, that turned out to be forgeries.

Theft

On February 10, 2008, van Gogh's Blossoming Chestnut Branches
Blossoming Chestnut Branches
Blossoming Chestnut Branches was painted by Vincent Van Gogh during the artist's Auvers-sur-Oise period in May of 1890, the final year of his life....

, along with three other paintings, valued at more than $163 million, were stolen from the E.G. Buehrle Collection, a private museum in Zurich, Switzerland, by three armed men.

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.