The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (196 page)

(1749–1832).
German writer, scientist, and amateur artist, one of the giants of European literature and one of the major figures of the
Romantic
movement. Throughout his life he devoted much time to the study of painting and was a prolific draughtsman. Although his talent as an artist was modest, his writings on art were very influential in the upsurge of Romantic ideas in Germany. Identifying art with ‘nature’, Goethe held that great art must simulate and carry on the blind creative force in nature. He also advocated the typically Romantic view that art should concentrate on what is individually ‘characteristic’ rather than the generic type. In 1786–8 he visited Italy, where he came into contact with German artists such as
Tischbein
in Rome, and his taste changed to an appreciation of the
classicism
of the
Renaissance
. Identifying art with ‘style’, he now maintained that beauty is symbolic expression of the inner laws of nature, and that this expression had been supremely achieved by the art of antiquity. His writings on art included a book on theory of colour (
Zur Farbenlehre
, 1810, English translation 1840), in which he purported to refute the
Optics
of Newton, and a translation into German of
Cellini's
Autobiography
(1798).

 
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(1853–90).
Dutch painter and draughtsman, with
Cézanne
and
Gauguin
the greatest of
Post-Impressionist
artists. His uncle was a partner in the international firm of picture dealers Goupil and Co. and in 1869 van Gogh went to work in the branch at The Hague. In 1873 he was sent to the London branch and fell unsuccessfully in love with the daughter of his landlady. This was the first of several disastrous attempts to find happiness with a woman, and his unrequited passion affected him so badly that he was dismissed from his job. He returned to England in 1876 as an unpaid assistant at a school, and his experience of urban squalor awakened a religious zeal and a longing to serve his fellow men. His father was a Protestant pastor, and van Gogh first trained for the ministry, but he abandoned his studies in 1878 and went to work as a lay preacher among the impoverished miners of the grim Borinage district in Belgium. In his zeal he gave away his own worldly goods to the poor and was dismissed for his literal interpretation of Christ's teaching. He remained in the Borinage, suffering acute poverty and a spiritual crisis, until 1880, when he found that art was his vocation and the means by which he could bring consolation to humanity. From this time he worked at his new ‘mission’ with single-minded intensity, and although he often suffered from extreme poverty and undernourishment, his output in the ten remaining years of his life was prodigious: about 800 paintings and a similar number of drawings. The spontaneous, irrational side of his character has often been stressed, but he was a cultivated and well-read man, who in spite of his speed of work thought deeply about his paintings and planned them carefully.
From 1881 to 1885 van Gogh lived in the Netherlands, sometimes with his parents, sometimes in lodgings, supported by his devoted brother Theo, who regularly sent him money from his own small salary. In keeping with his humanitarian outlook he painted peasants and workers, the most famous picture from this period being
The Potato Eaters
(Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, 1885). Of this he wrote to Theo: ‘I have tried to emphasize that those people, eating their potatoes in the lamp-light have dug the earth with those very hands they put in the dish, and so it speaks of manual labour, and how they have honestly earned their food.’ In 1885 van Gogh moved to Antwerp on the advice of Antoine
Mauve
(a cousin by marriage), and studied for some months at the Academy there. Academic instruction had little to offer such an individualist, however, and in February 1886 he moved to Paris, where he met
Pissarro
,
Degas
, Gauguin,
Seurat
, and
Toulouse-Lautrec
. At this time his painting underwent a violent metamorphosis under the combined influence of
Impressionism
and Japanese woodcuts (see
UKIYO-E
), losing its moralistic flavour. Van Gogh became obsessed by the symbolic and expressive values of colours and began to use them for this purpose rather than, as did the Impressionists, for the reproduction of visual appearances, atmosphere, and light. ‘Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes,’ he wrote, ‘I use colour more arbitrarily so as to express myself more forcibly.’ Of his
Night Café
(Yale Univ. Art Gal., 1888), he said: ‘I have tried to express with red and green the terrible passions of human nature.’ For a time he was influenced by Seurat's delicate
pointillist
manner, but he abandoned this for broad, vigorous, and swirling brush-strokes.
In February 1888 van Gogh settled at Arles, where he painted more than 200 canvases in 15 months. During this time he lived in poverty and suffered recurrent nervous crises with hallucinations and depression. He became enthusiastic for the idea of founding an artists’ co-operative at Arles and towards the end of the year he was joined by Gauguin . But as a result of a quarrel between them van Gogh suffered the crisis in which occurred the famous incident when he cut off his left ear (or part of it), an event commemorated in his
Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear
(Courtauld Inst., London). In May 1889 he went at his own request into an asylum at St Rémy, near Arles, but during the year he spent there continued a frenzied production of tumultuous pictures such as
Starry Night
(MOMA, New York). He did 150 paintings besides drawings in the course of this year. In 1889 Theo married and in May 1890 van Gogh moved to Auvers-sur-Oise to be near him, lodging with the patron and connoisseur Dr Paul Gachet . There followed another tremendous burst of strenous activity and during the last 70 days of his life he painted 70 canvases. But his spiritual anguish and depression became more acute and on 29 July 1890 he died from the results of a self-inflicted bullet wound. He sold only one painting during his lifetime (
Red Vineyard at Arles
, Pushkin Mus., Moscow), and was little known to the art world at the time of his death, but his fame grew rapidly thereafter. His influence on
Expressionism
,
Fauvism
, and early abstraction was enormous, and it can be seen in many other aspects of 20th-cent. art. His stormy and dramatic life and his unswerving devotion to his ideals have made him one of the great cultural heroes of modern times, providing the most auspicious material for the 20th-cent. vogue in romanticized psychological biography.

 
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Golden Section
.

A proportion in which a straight line or rectangle is divided into two unequal parts in such a way that the ratio of the smaller to the greater part is the same as that of the greater to the whole. Like the mathematical value pi, it cannot be expressed as a finite number, but an approximation is 8 : 13 or 0.618 : 1. The proportion has been known since antiquity and has been said to possess inherent aesthetic value because of an alleged correspondence with the laws of nature or the universe. It was much studied during the
Renaissance
, and Luca Pacioli , the most famous mathematician of his day and a close friend of
Leonardo
and of
Piero
della Francesca, wrote a book on it called
Divina Proportione
(1509). In accordance with the tendencies of the time, Pacioli's book, illustrated with drawings by Leonardo, credits this ‘divine proportion’ with various mystical properties and exceptional beauties both in science and in art.

 
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