Thanks to blockbuster movies and books, it is by now the most familiar legend in the history of art, and still it’s beyond understanding: that Vincent Van Gogh, a Dutch minister’s son and a tender-hearted do-gooder and drifter into his late twenties, should then have taught himself to draw and paint and in the brief burst of ten years’ work should have turned his original vision into a mountain of masterpieces until his mind came apart and he killed himself at the age of 37.
He painted sunflowers and irises and landscapes and skyscapes — but it’s the portraits now touring that seem at the heart of Van Gogh’s project, as he said, “to express not sentimental melancholy but serious sorrow,” so that people might say of his work, “he feels deeply, he feels tenderly,” in spite of his roughness. A century later, they’re everything he aspired to: apparitions of character intensified by his color genius and his passion.
(hosted by Christopher Lydon)
Guests:
George T. M. Shackelford, Chair of the Department of the Art of Europe, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Sjraar Van Heugten, Head of the Collections, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.