Fijne Vergaardg! Vincent van Gogh!

Starry

Starry night

Paint your palette blue and grey

These are the opening lines to Don McLean’s song 1971 hit, "Vincent."  It is in reference to van Gogh’s painting The Starry Night. This song is just one example of how Vincent Van Gogh has reached a level of notoriety he never achieved in his life time.

Vincent van Gogh was born in the Netherlands on March 30, 1853. His artistic career started in 1883 and, until his death in 1890, he created about 2,100 pieces of artwork, including around 860 oil paintings. Most of his work was completed in the two years before his death. This can be seen in the frantic nature of his work from this period. I learned about all this in college.

I was formally introduced to van Gogh in an art appreciation class in college. It sounded like an easy class and for the most part it was. We sat in a darkened classroom looking at slides of some of the masters of Post-Impressionism. Loved it, but really fell in love when we took a trip to the Princeton University Art Museum. At the time the collection included van Gogh’s Tarascon Stagecoach.

Take the chance and go see one of his paintings up close and notice the thick paint application and the quick short brush strokes. It is amazing.

If you want to see other van Goghs up close you can plan visits to:

• The Philadelphia Museum of Art to see his famed Sunflowers painting.
• The Museum of Modern Art in NYC to see The Starry Night and 5 other of his works.
• The Guggenheim in NYC to see Landscape with Snow along with more paintings, some prints and letters written by van Gogh.  You can borrow a museum pass to the Guggenheim from the Ewing and West Windsor branches.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art has one of the biggest collections of van Gogh’s work in the US including one of his self-portraits.

After this class I wanted to know more about the Post-Impressionistic artists so I started looking for books. The more I dug, the more I was interested in Vincent and his brother, Theo.  Theo was his brother’s biggest supporter, best friend, and art dealer.  We know so much about Vincent because Theo kept all the letters his brother wrote.

MCLS has a number of items that include the letters as well as books for all age groups on Vincent Van Gogh including:

Biography: The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

Young Adult Biography: Vincent and Theo: The Van Gogh Brothers by Deborah Heiligman

Juvenile Biography: Vincent van Gogh by Jennifer Howse

Easy Biography: Vincent Can’t Sleep: Van Gogh Paints the Night Sky by Barb Rosenstock

I started this post off by mentioning the Don McLean song "Vincent" from his album American Pie, which is just one example of van Gogh showing up in pop culture.  Here are a few more:

Tupac Shakur’s "Starry Night" on his album The Rose that Grew from Concrete.

Leonard Nimoy starred in a one-man play called Vincent that he adapted from the play Van Gogh by Phillip Stephens.

The new movie which has been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Loving Vincent - an animated biographical drama about his life. Each frame of the movie is an oil painting mimicking van Gogh’s style done by a team of 125 painters.

 And my favorite: the 10th episode of the 5th season of Doctor Who titled “Vincent and the Doctor” has The Doctor and Amy investigating a mysterious figure that has shown up in van Gogh’s The Church at Auvers. My favorite scene is at the end when they bring van Gogh to the Musee d’Orsay in Paris where he sees the crowded exhibit featuring his artwork.  The Doctor than asks the curator his thoughts on van Gogh and Vincent is overwhelmed to hear himself referred to as “the greatest painter of them all” and “one of the greatest men who ever lived.”

- Amelia R. Information Technology