132 pp. With 69 illustrations including 49 color plates. "In a single decade, between his twenty-seventh and thirty-seventh years, Dutch-born Vincent van Gogh created one of the most important legacies of painting ever to enrich the world. His striking use of color--much of it pure color, and thick-layered--exalted and even immortalized what he chose to depict: cypresses, orchards, wheat fields, and swirling clouds all ablaze under the scalding sun of Provence; a cafe in Arles crowned by a star-dappled evening sky; sunflowers and oleanders almost palable in their brilliance; and the hardworking peasants of the low countries and France, for whom he had a deep, almost religious feeling. Van Gogh's paintings, we are reminded by Meyer Schapiro, University Professor Emeritus, Columbia University, 'are the first brightly colored paintings of the nineteenth century.' In his introduction, this world-renowned art historian sees absolute color as Van Gogh's 'carrier of his own passionateness and vitality.' Schapiro traces the painter's developing technique, as well as his travels in France and Belgium, his stormy relations with painter Paul Gauguin, and his periods of confinement in a hospital and an asylum--where he continued to paint. He analyzes with great sympathy and astuteness the reflection in Van Gogh's work of the artist's high aspirations and the defeats that life dealt him. Quotations from Van Gogh's letters to his beloved brother Theo, reflections on his own approaching death, and his portraits of friends as well as himself further our understanding of this tormented genius. Forty-nine dazzling colorplates, each with a commentary that is informative about both the painter and his art, are supplemented by twenty black-and-white reproductions. Together, illustrations and text give a profoundly stirring account of a master who came out of Holland and transfigured the art of painting forever." KEYWORDS: MEYER SCHAPIRO VINCENT VAN GOGH ART ARTISTS
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