Vincent Van Gogh, Le brouillard d'Arles : Carnet retrouvé

by Vincent van Gogh, Bogomila Welsh-Ovcharov (Avec la contribution de), Ronald Pickvance (Préface)

Du livre de comptes, autrement appelé « brouillard », offert par monsieur et madame Ginoux, les propriétaires du Café de la Gare à Arles, Vincent Van Gogh a fait un carnet de dessins qu’il a emporté avec lui pendant deux années cruciales, dans ses pérégrinations en Provence, entre février 1888 et mai 1890, pour réaliser des paysages, des esquisses, quelques portraits, dont celui de Gauguin, et son autoportrait, de face, saisissant. On découvre ainsi toute la gamme du génie dans les derniers mois de sa vie, juste avant la remontée fatale vers Auvers-sur-Oise.Ce document d’une valeur historique et esthétique inestimable a traversé plus de cent vingt ans d’oubli pour ressurgir aujourd’hui comme un trésor intact, dont l’analyse détaillée de Bogomila Welsh-Ovcharov permet de saisir toute la mesure et le retentissement. Elle raconte l’histoire passionnante de ce « brouillard », et resitue chaque dessin dans le contexte de l’œuvre de Van Gogh et de son séjour à Arles puis à Saint-Rémy-de-Provence.

280 pages, Hardcover

Published November 30, 2016

About the author

Vincent Willem van Gogh (30 March 1853 – 29 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art.

Van Gogh, for whom color was the chief symbol of expression, was born in Groot-Zundert, Holland. The son of a pastor, brought up in a religious and cultured atmosphere, Vincent was highly emotional and lacked self-confidence.

Between 1860 and 1880, when he finally decided to become an artist, van Gogh had had two unsuitable and unhappy romances and had worked unsuccessfully as a clerk in a bookstore, an art salesman, and a preacher in the Borinage (a dreary mining district in Belgium), where he was dismissed for overzealousness. He remained in Belgium to study art, determined to give happiness by creating beauty. The works of his early Dutch period are somber-toned, sharply lit, genre paintings of which the most famous is "The Potato Eaters" (1885). In that year van Gogh went to Antwerp where he discovered the works of Rubens and purchased many Japanese prints.

In 1886 he went to Paris to join his brother Théo, the manager of Goupil's gallery. In Paris, van Gogh studied with Cormon, inevitably met Pissarro, Monet, and Gauguin, and began to lighten his very dark palette and to paint in the short brushstrokes of the Impressionists. His nervous temperament made him a difficult companion and night-long discussions combined with painting all day undermined his health. He decided to go south to Arles where he hoped his friends would join him and help found a school of art. Gauguin did join him but with disastrous results. In a fit of epilepsy, van Gogh pursued his friend with an open razor, was stopped by Gauguin, but ended up cutting a portion of his ear lobe off. Van Gogh then began to alternate between fits of madness and lucidity and was sent to the asylum in Saint-Remy for treatment.

In May of 1890, he seemed much better and went to live in Auvers-sur-Oise under the watchful eye of Dr. Gachet. Two months later he was dead, having shot himself "for the good of all." During his brief career he had sold one painting. Van Gogh's finest works were produced in less than three years in a technique that grew more and more impassioned in brushstroke, in symbolic and intense color, in surface tension, and in the movement and vibration of form and line. Van Gogh's inimitable fusion of form and content is powerful; dramatic, lyrically rhythmic, imaginative, and emotional, for the artist was completely absorbed in the effort to explain either his struggle against madness or his comprehension of the spiritual essence of man and nature.