New Van Gogh identified!!!! (Also a look at the impressionists from a Christian perspective)
Art of Love – Part 1.flv
Uploaded on Apr 14, 2011
Stars: James Garner, Dick Van Dyke and Elke Sommer ; Paintings & Drawings: Don Cincone; (July 1965) A Struggling artist fakes his own death so his works will increase in value.
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Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
I was excited to read about a Van Gogh being found recently. Vincent Van Gogh was broke his whole life and then after he died his paintings sold very well. I love the movie “The Art of Love” which stars: James Garner, Dick Van Dyke and Elke Sommer from July of 1965 and it is about a struggling artist that fakes his own death so his works will increase in value. Today I am posting links to all the posts I have done on Van Gogh and posting clips both from the movie “Art of Love” and the film series HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? from Francis Schaeffer that discusses Van Gogh and the other impressionist painters.
Van Gogh Museum: new Van Gogh identified
Museum identifies long-lost Van Gogh painting that lingered in Norwegian attic for decades
“Sunset at Montmajour” by Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh is seen during a press conference at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, Netherlands, Monday Sept. 9, 2013. The museum has identified the long-lost painting which was painted by the Dutch mater in 1888, the discovery is the first full size canvas that has been found since 1928 and will be on display from Sept. 24. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong)
AMSTERDAM (AP) — The first full-size Vincent Van Gogh painting to be discovered in 85 years has been authenticated as a genuine long-lost work of the Dutch master after an odyssey that included lingering for six decades in the attic of a Norwegian industrialist who had been told it was a fake.
“Sunset at Montmajour” depicts a dry landscape of twisting oak trees, bushes and sky, and it was done during the period when Van Gogh was increasingly adopting the thick brush strokes that became typical of his work in the final years of his short life, experts at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam said Monday.
It can be dated to the exact day it was painted because Vincent described it in a letter to his brother, Theo, and said he had painted it the previous day — July 4, 1888.
“At sunset I was on a stony heath where very small, twisted oaks grow, in the background a ruin on the hill and wheat fields in the valley,” Van Gogh wrote.
“It was romantic…the sun was pouring its very yellow rays over the bushes and the ground, absolutely a shower of gold.”
But then Vincent confessed that the painting was “well below what I’d wished to do,” and later he sent it to Theo to keep.
Museum director Axel Rueger, at an unveiling ceremony in the museum, described the discovery as a “once-in-a-lifetime experience”.
“This is a great painting from what many see as the high point of his artistic achievement, his period in Arles, in southern France,” he said. “In the same period he painted works such as ‘Sunflowers,’ ‘The Yellow House’ and ‘The Bedroom’.”
Van Gogh struggled with bouts of mental distress throughout his life, and died of a self-inflicted gun wound in 1890. He sold only one painting while he was alive, though his work was just beginning to win acclaim when he died.
According to a reconstruction published in The Burlington Magazine by three researchers, the painting was recorded as number 180 in Theo’s collection, and given the title “Sun Setting at Arles.” It was sold to French art dealer Maurice Fabre in 1901.
Fabre never recorded selling the work, and the painting disappeared from history until it reappeared in 1970 in the estate of Norwegian industrialist Christian Nicolai Mustad.
The Mustad family said that Christian had purchased the work in 1908 as a young man in one of his first forays into art collecting, but he had soon after been told by the French ambassador to Sweden that it was a fake. Embarrassed, Mustad banished it to the attic.
After Mustad’s death in 1970, art dealer Daniel Wildenstein said he thought the painting was either a fake Van Gogh or possibly the work of a less-known German painter, and the painting was sold to a collector. The museum said it will not disclose who purchased it, or whether it has been resold since then.
In 1991 the museum itself declined to authenticate the painting.
“That may be a painful admission, given that the same museum is now attributing it to Van Gogh, but it is understandable” as experts had no information about what the painting depicted, the Burlington Magazine article said.
Teio Meedendorp, one of three experts who worked on the project, said his predecessors might also have been confused because the painting was done at a “transitional” moment in Van Gogh’s style.
“From then on, Van Gogh increasingly felt the need to paint with more and more impasto (thick strokes using lots of paint) and more and more layers,” he said.
The painting was unsigned. Some parts of the foreground were not “as well-observed as usual.” And part of the right side of the painting used a different style of brush strokes — possibly the same reasons Van Gogh himself considered the painting a failure.
But when the museum took a fresh look at the work in 2011, they had the advantage of a newly edited and published compendium of all Van Gogh’s letters, and were able for the first time to identify the exact location “Sunset” depicts: Monmajour hill, near Arles, France. The ruins of Monmajour abbey can be seen in the background on the left side of the painting.
Van Gogh mentioned the painting in two other letters the same summer.
The number 180 on the back of the canvas was an important clue, and new techniques of chemical analysis of the pigments showing they were identical to others Van Gogh used on his palette at Arles — including typical discolorations.
Meanwhile, an X-ray examination of the canvas showed it was of the same type Van Gogh used on other paintings from the period, such as “The Rocks,” which hangs in Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts.
Rueger described “Sunset” as ambitious, because the canvas is relatively large, at 93.3 by 73.3 centimeters (36.7 by 28.9 inches) — and because Van Gogh himself felt the result didn’t live up to his imagination of what it was meant to be.
The artist made similar remarks about some of his most famous paintings, including the 1889 “Starry Night” that hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Meedendorp said that “Sunset” belongs “to a special group of experimental works that Van Gogh at times esteemed of lesser value than we tend to do nowadays.”
Meedendorp said it’s not impossible that another unknown or lost Van Gogh could be found someday. The artist destroyed some works himself when he wasn’t satisfied with the results, but others that are mentioned in his letters or early collection of his work have since disappeared. He is believed to have completed more than 800 works, painting at an accelerating pace before his death aged 37.
The Van Gogh Museum, which houses 140 paintings, receives more than a million visitors annually. Van Gogh paintings are among the most valuable in the world, selling for tens of millions of dollars on the rare occasions one is sold at an auction.
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Here below is episode 8 called “The Age of Fragmentation” from Francis Schaeffer’s film series HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? and it talks about the impressionist painters at the beginning of the episode.
Schaeffer’s film series “How should we then live? Wikipedia notes, “According to Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live traces Western history from Ancient Rome until the time of writing (1976) along three lines: the philosophic, scientific, and religious.[3] He also makes extensive references to art and architecture as a means of showing how these movements reflected changing patterns of thought through time. Schaeffer’s central premise is: when we base society on the Bible, on the infinite-personal God who is there and has spoken,[4] this provides an absolute by which we can conduct our lives and by which we can judge society. Here are some posts I have done on this series: Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 10 “Final Choices” , episode 9 “The Age of Personal Peace and Affluence”, episode 8 “The Age of Fragmentation”, episode 7 “The Age of Non-Reason” , episode 6 “The Scientific Age” , episode 5 “The Revolutionary Age” , episode 4 “The Reformation”, episode 3 “The Renaissance”, episode 2 “The Middle Ages,”, and episode 1 “The Roman Age,” .
E P I S O D E 8
How Should We Then Live? Episode 8: The Age Of Fragmentation
Published on Jul 24, 2012
Dr. Schaeffer’s sweeping epic on the rise and decline of Western thought and Culture
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I saw this film series in 1979 and it had a major impact on me.
T h e Age of FRAGMENTATION
I. Art As a Vehicle Of Modern Thought
A. Impressionism (Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Degas) and Post-Impressionism (Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat): appearance and reality.
1. Problem of reality in Impressionism: no universal.
2. Post-Impression seeks the universal behind appearances.
3. Painting expresses an idea in its own terms as a work of art; to discuss the idea in a painting is not to intellectualize art.
4. Parallel search for universal in art and philosophy; Cézanne.
B. Fragmentation.
1. Extremes of ultra-naturalism or abstraction: Wassily Kandinsky.
2. Picasso leads choice for abstraction: relevance of this choice.
3. Failure of Picasso (like Sartre, and for similar reasons) to be fully consistent with his choice.
C. Retreat to absurdity.
1. Dada , and Marcel Duchamp: art as absurd.
2. Art followed philosophy but came sooner to logical end.
3. Chance in his art technique as an art theory impossible to practice: Pollock.
II. Music As a Vehicle of Modern Thought
A. Non-resolution and fragmentation: German and French streams.
1. Influence of Beethoven’s last Quartets.
2. Direction and influence of Debussy.
3. Schoenberg’s non-resolution; contrast with Bach.
4. Stockhausen: electronic music and concern with the element of change.
B. Cage: a case study in confusion.
1. Deliberate chance and confusion in Cage’s music.
2. Cage’s inability to live the philosophy of his music.
C. Contrast of music-by-chance and the world around us.
1. Inconsistency of indulging in expression of chaos when we acknowledge order for practical matters like airplane design.
2. Art as anti-art when it is mere intellectual statement, divorced from reality of who people are and the fullness of what the universe is.
III. General Culture As the Vehicle of Modern Thought
A. Propagation of idea of fragmentation in literature.
1. Effect of Eliot’s Wasteland and Picasso’s Demoiselles d’ Avignon
compared; the drift of general culture.
2. Eliot’s change in his form of writing when he became a Christian.
3. Philosophic popularization by novel: Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir.
B. Cinema as advanced medium of philosophy.
1. Cinema in the 1960s used to express Man’s destruction: e.g. Blow-up.
2. Cinema and the leap into fantasy:
The Hour of the Wolf, Belle de Jour, Juliet of the Spirits, The Last Year at Marienbad.
3. Bergman’s inability to live out his philosophy (see Cage): Silence and The Hour of the Wolf.
IV. Only on Christian Base Can Reality Be Faced Squarely
Questions
1. Explain what “fragmentation” means, as discussed by Dr. Schaeffer. What does it result from? Give examples of it.
2. Apart from the fact that modern printing and recording processes made the art and music of the past more accessible than ever before, do you think that the preference of many people for the art and music of the past is related to the matters discussed by Dr. Schaeffer? If so, how?
3. “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds… With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.” Emerson wrote this over a century ago. Debate.
4. How far do you think that the opinion of some Christians that one should have nothing to do with philosophy, art and novels is a manifestation of the very fragmentation which is characteristic of modern secular thought? Discuss.
Key Events and Persons
Beethoven’s last Quartets: 1825-26
Claude Monet: 1840-1926
Poplars at Giverny, Sunrise: 1885
Paul Cézanne: 1839-1906
The Bathers: c.1905
Claude Debussy: 1862-1918
Wassily Kandinsky: 1866-1944
Arnold Schoenberg: 1874-1951
Picasso: 1881-1973
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon: 1906-7
Marcel Duchamp: 1887-1969
Nude Descending a Staircase: 1912
T.S. Eliot: 1888-1965
The Wasteland: 1922
John Cage: 1912-1992
Music for Marcel Duchamp: 1947
Jackson Pollock: 1912-1956
Karlheinz Stockhausen: 1928-
Sartre’s Nausea: 1938
Beauvoir’s L’Invitée: 1943
Camus’ The Stranger: 1942
Camus’ The Plague: 1947
Resnais’ The Last Year at Marienbad: 1961
Bergman’s The Silence: 1963
Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits: 1965
Antonioni’s Blow-Up: 1966
Bergman’s The Hour of the Wolf: 1967
Buñel’s Belle de Jour: 1967
Further Study
Perhaps you have seen some of the films mentioned. You should try to see them if you haven’t.Watch for them in local art-film festivals, on TV, or in campus film series. They rarely return nowadays to the commercial circuit. The sex and violence which they treated philosophically have now taken over the screen in a more popular and crude form! Easier of access are the philosophic novels of Sartre, Camus and de Beauvoir. Read the titles Dr. Schaeffer mentions. Again, for the artwork and music mentioned, consult libraries and record shops. But spend time here—let the visual images and the musical sounds sink in.
Listening patiently to Cage and Webern, for example, will tell you more than volumes of musicology.
T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland (many editions, usually in collections of his verse).
Joseph Machlis, Introduction to Contemporary Music (1961).
H.R. Rookmaaker, Modern Art and the Death of a Culture (1970).
Donald J. Drew, Images of Man (1974).
Colin Wilson, The Outsider (1956).
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