Van Gogh

World of Art

by Melissa McQuillan

Van Gogh, the painter whose work was one of the major inspirations for twentieth-century art, is given a fresh and thorough appraisal in this comprehensive new study. Placing the artist in the context of his time, Melissa McQuillan looks at the influences on his life and work and discusses his paintings in depth. The author argues that Van Gogh's works were products of his deliberate engagement with contemporary artistic questions and of his experience as an art dealer. His subsequent reputation, the mythology that grew up after his death, the debates between naturalism and modernity and the social implications of Van Gogh's imagery are studied in full in this lucid account of an artist who sold only one painting during his lifetime but whose works now command the highest prices in the world. 168 illus., 25 in color.

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, Art, Art History, History

216 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

Reviews

[Kristoffer Sørensen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Flot

[v · Rating 3 out of 5]

I collected dozens of books from museum gift shops as a child and this, from the Rijksmuseum, is one of only a few left. I couldn't tell you why this one, because in ten years I've never flicked through it let alone read it. Yet it does have much of what you need to achieve some artistic literacy at a manageable length, size, and cost, and includes both b&w and color images (of which some are the essentials, and others are beautiful works I wasn't as familiar with, like: "Open Bible, Extinguished Candle and Novel" (1885), "Window at the Restaurant Chez Bataille in Paris" (1887), and "Asylum Garden (Field of Grass with Flowers and Butterflies" (1890)).
Melissa McQuillan, an art historian writing in the 1980s, is careful not to contribute to the cultural construction of van Gogh in convergence with paradigmatic discourses of Modernist individualism and madness: in other words, she has to make his life sound very boring, and she can never say that he was a genius. But by extensively quoting from van Gogh's letters and by studying his early works alongside the drawing guides or art theories that inspired him, she pokes a few holes through that thick critical curtain and evokes some warm feeling for him as an earnest, troubled amateur. Her analyses of individual works are also solid.

[Julie Akeman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book, I just wish all the pictures were in color, he was a great artist of color.

[Sarah Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A thoughtful and reflective account of the artist's life and work.