Word: gogh
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...heat of inspiration, Vincent Van-Gogh could put in a straight eleven-hour stretch before his easel, then sit down and write: "These colors give me extraordinary exaltation. I have no thought of fatigue; I shall do another picture this very night, and I shall bring it off. I have a terrible lucidity at moments when nature is so beautiful; I am not conscious of myself any more, and the pictures come to me as in a dream...
Such superb passages from Van Gogh's letters to his younger brother, Art Dealer Theo Van Gogh, plus the fact that Van Gogh sliced off his left ear during an epileptic fit, have prompted popularizers to portray him as an artist who raised painting to such a pitch of ecstasy that he went mad. The result has been to make Van Gogh one of the most misinterpreted artists in history. In an ambitious Hollywood effort to right the record and explain the inner workings of an artist, M-G-M this week released its version of Van Gogh...
Intensity & Tragedy. To photograph Van Gogh's original oils, M-G-M sought out the canvases of collectors and museums all around the world, including some of the masterpieces in Moscow's rarely seen collection (see color). Film crews shot on-the-spot takes of the Van Gogh family house in Holland, re-created some of the scenes he painted, retraced his footsteps from the Borinage to Paris and the sun-baked square at Aries...
...film is best when it places the scenes that inspired Van Gogh next to sweeping CinemaScopic closeups of his paintings. Actor Kirk Douglas (whose natural red beard makes him look astonishingly like Van Gogh's self-portrait) and Anthony Quinn (splendid as the swaggering Paul Gauguin) at times manage to catch what Van Gogh called "the high yellow note" of painting intensity and the "electric arguments" about art which Van Gogh wrote left them "with our heads as exhausted as an electric battery after it is discharged." The film captures the fierce drive and bitter tragedy in the life...
...painter's old gallery, Durand-Ruel. the first major Pissarro show in Paris for 30-odd years, goes far to clear and enhance Pissarro's reputation. He was the most impressionable of the impressionists, a painter who influenced a host of painters from Cezanne to Van Gogh and Gauguin, then had the sensitivity and malleability to be influenced by them in turn. The full sweep of Pissarro's lifetime output, ranging from an early landscape done in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, where he was born in 1830 (into a mixed French-Portuguese-Jewish family), to his self...