•
Rating: Thank goodness for Taschen.
The famous German publishing house indeed offers us truly well-made art books at incredibly low prices. The "creations" of Taschen are, in fact, highly enjoyable, and it's easy to get lost among the pages of its vast catalog. We must thank this publishing house, then, as it was the first to bring art to bookstores around the world, making it accessible to everyone with wonderfully curated volumes conceived with truly admirable attention. Consequently, art enters the homes of all those who wish to admire it, recognizing it as a precious gift.
"The first child of Theodorus and Anna Cornelia Van Gogh was stillborn. Exactly a year later, in 1853, on the same day, March 30, another child was born who survived. He was given the same name as the firstborn, Vincent Willem [...] From the first day, therefore, Vincent's life was marked by a tragic coincidence [...] Numerous psychologists have noted that this child, in a certain sense, was born on the anniversary of his own death, and they see in this the root of the artist's inclination towards paradox"
These are the distressing and painfully poignant words that open the gates to the narrative. The story the author will attempt to tell us is that of Vincent Van Gogh. The spiritual odyssey of a man who desperately sought, throughout his life, the roots on which to build a humble yet happy life. An unstable artist who frantically sought an unreachable illusory stability, remaining faithful to a lifestyle that never lost sight of the moral objectives he had set for himself. A man who never ceased to "seek," even at the cost of sacrificing himself completely, pursuing with undiminished innocence, the path to salvation.
"His life was a continuous failure. He failed in all the areas that mattered to the society of his time: he was unable to start a family, unable to provide for himself, even unable to maintain human contacts"
Vincent Van Gogh, with his weaknesses and defeats, is the perfect representation of man as a vulnerable being enslaved by feelings and illusions. Man conceived as an original, fragile form of life and therefore never infallible. This is what Van Gogh communicates to us with his paintings, allowing us to enter his world, painstakingly brought back to its original state, cleansed of the superfluous that prevents us from being truly human. Van Gogh shows us the way, then, without being able to undertake it himself; thus sacrificing himself and his mental and physical integrity:
"And for my work, therefore, I risk my life, while half of my reason is already affected"
Van Gogh gives himself completely to his art, miserably exposing himself before it. As we observe a drunk lost in absinthe, a cut flower, dirty shoes, or an empty bench, we are witnessing nothing but the ruthless representation the artist makes of himself. The painful and all-too-real representation of man's misery.
"Van Gogh, The Complete Paintings" is not only an invaluable and irreplaceable volume that, for the first time, gathers in its relatively small dimensions the entire work of the most influential and revolutionary painter of modern art. It is much more. Indeed, the texts and analyses by the authors (Ingo F. Walther and Rainer Metzger) compose, chapter by chapter, a true biography that attempts to reconstruct and analyze all the artistic and personal phases of the Dutch painter with extraordinary depth and sensitivity.
Loading comments slowly
