Van Gogh Exhibit Quotes

Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time. Anything erected there, a city, a pyramid, a motel, stands outside time. It's no coincidence that religious leaders emerge from the desert. Modern shopping malls have much the same function. A future Rimbaud, Van Gogh or Adolf Hitler will emerge from their timeless wastes.

Have you ever seen people line up outside a Van Gogh exhibit? When they get inside there are so many they can't even see the paintings, they just pass by like sheep or like mourners passing the tomb of a fallen hero, a bier, with the same solemnity. And the extent of their knowledge concerning Van Gogh is that he "cut off his ear." Man, it's religion they make it into.

Thank you very much too for all the steps you have taken toward the exhibition of the Independents. On the whole I’m very glad that they’ve been put with the other impressionists.

Most people are more predetermined as to what is the human form and the human face than they are as to what are flowers, landscapes, still lifes. Not everybody. I remember one of the first exhibitions of Van Gogh, there was an American there and she said to her friend, I find these portraits of people quite interesting for I don't know what people are like but I don't at all like these flower pictures because I know very well what flowers are like. Most people are not like that. I do not mean to say that they know people better than they know other things but they have stronger convictions about what people are than what other things are.

I shall have to produce an enormous number of things against next year - when the World’s Fair will be held - seeing that my friends will not fail to have many interesting things on hand by then. Not that I myself or any of the painters I hold regular or special intercourse with are going to exhibit along with the others, but it is to be expected that there will be a free exhibition besides the official one. Now, for

You know that Gauguin is invited to exhibit at the “Vingtistes.” He is already imagining settling in Brussels, and that certainly would be a means towards his being able to see his Danish wife again. Since in the meantime he is very successful with the Arlésiennes, I should not consider this entirely insignificant. He is married but he doesn’t look it very much. In short, I fear that there is an absolute incompatibility of character between his wife and him, but he naturally cares more for his children, who are very pretty according to the portraits.

Van Gogh was a complete nut job! Can you imagine in this day and age, if an artist or writer that you were going to sign or host an exhibit for had just cut off their freaking EAR and mailed it to their unrequited love? Talk about a PR nightmare. No one would be willing to work with that mess – seriously! How would you feel if you were told, “Hey, umm, your next writer just cut her own finger off? No big deal. She’s all right.” As artists, we’re all kind of odd in our own ways. I think that should be celebrated and more appreciated – I’m not saying that more people should start to cut off their ears or fingers or other appendages – but for god’s sake, stop censoring everyone to death. It makes me sick.

For years Matisse had battled his conflicting impulses, between commercially viable conservatism and something else, although he had not yet grasped what that something else was. Earlier that year he had helped organize the first official exhibition of Vincent van Gogh’s works, as part of the Salon des Indépendants—certainly an influence, for he later gave credit to van Gogh as well as Gauguin for his summer breakthrough. But it was the little fishing village of Collioure that dazzled him with color and light, and drove him to take more risks than ever before. Two summers in the south of France had exposed this northerner to vibrant color, and he responded ardently, even gratefully. Collioure radiated color and light, but it also exuded an element of savagery, for there was a fierce primitivism in this Catalan town that expressed itself in the explosive colors and contrasts of Fauvism, so unlike the gentler colors of the Impressionists. Embracing Gauguin’s insistence that art should primarily communicate emotion, Matisse forged ahead, daring all by rejecting art as representation, and producing works of shattering impact.