Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art
Categories: Books, Arts & Photography, History & Criticism



Dimensions: 8 x 1.5 x 9 inches
ISBN-13: 978-0374282431
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0374282439
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Print length: 512 pages
Publication date: November 15, 2000
subtitle: Hardcover – November 15, 2000
author: Visit Amazon's Debora Silverman Page search results Debora Silverman
review: Editorial Reviews From Publishers Weekly The paintings of Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin continue to attract critical attention in books like Stephen Eisenman's acclaimed Gauguin's Skirt. The artists' stormy friendship, which climaxed in the famous incident when Van Gogh cut off part of his ear and sent it to an Arles prostitute, contains high drama amid some world-class art. Now Silverman (UCLA professor of modern European history, art, and culture and author of Selling Culture) weighs in with this massive new study, as ponderous as it is extensively pondered. Attempting to deepen the understanding of Van Gogh and Gauguin's work during the time the artists spent together in Arles, Silverman examines their religious education in sections like "Catholic Idealism and Dutch Reformed Realism" and "Peasant Subjects and Sacred Forms." A galumphing prose style does not lighten the load of these subjects. The author goes on at great length, for example, about Bishop Dupanloup, a 19th-century French pedagogue, and Cornelius Huysmans, a Dutch teacher, and their supposed influences on Gauguin and Van Gogh, respectively. However, these influences come off as generalized at best, and indisputably dull at worst, smothering the natural drama and excitement of both the work and the artists' lives. Dramatic rights, Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency. (Nov.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal The stormy relationship of Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh during their tenure in Arles has enjoyed a long history of speculation. The relationship's failure and van Gogh's infamous self-mutilation are usually interpreted to be the result of Van Gogh's pychopathology. Silverman (Selling Culture; Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Si cle France) provides a broader perspective, emphasizing key ideological differences that likely drove the two artists apart. Gauguin and van Gogh were engaged in developing a contemporary form of sacred art, but they approached their subject matter very differently. Gauguin, who was Catholic, saw the material world as an obstacle to spiritual attainment. Van Gogh, on the other hand, was enmeshed in the social fabric of the Dutch Reformed Church and saw the material world as a direct expression of the divine. For Van Gogh, the highest form of contemplation was daily activity and attention to one's craft. It's no wonder that this brotherhood of artists, which began in friendship and was generally positive, was due to have conflict. Silverman's scholarship and lucid writing makes this one of the most refreshing and insightful texts on these two artists in years. Because there are so many, this is saying a lot. -DSusan Lense, Columbus, OH Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist Silverman concedes that the story of van Gogh and Gauguin painting together in Arles has been told many times, but she believes that art historians haven't delved deeply enough into the religious legacies of these two revolutionary painters or considered the specific nature of their divergent quests for a "new and modern form of sacred art." She redresses these omissions in a series of adept and biographically flavored readings of major paintings by both artists, in which she articulates a rarely discerned connection between the technical and the theological. Silverman contrasts van Gogh's Protestant belief in the sanctity of labor and his ecstatic reverence for nature with Gauguin's lapsed Catholicism and preoccupation with a transcendent ideal, then links these orientations to their artistic techniques. Van Gogh was lavish in his application of thick layers of paint and palpable brushstrokes, exalting in the life force he depicted, while Gauguin, more concerned with the mystical and the symbolic, used a minimum of paint to subvert painting's physicality. Silverman develops these fresh perceptions with energy and expertise, powerfully altering and enhancing her readers' perspectives on these seminal figures and their timeless masterpieces. Donna Seaman Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Review "...Debora Silverman's book on the subject reminds us that scholarship can be its own rich and stirring adventure." -- Deborah Solomon, author of Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell "...The tremendous encounter between van Gogh and Gauguin, which has been worked over by generations of scholars, receives unexpected illumination..." -- Michael Fried, author of Manet's Modernism: Or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s "A highly original and challenging account of the tortuous and revealing relationship between two seminal figures of modern painting ..." -- Jerrold Seigel, author of The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp: Desire, Liberation, and the Self in Modern Culture "Incisive, engaging, informative . . . illuminates those dark, chilly months that dramatically changed the two painters--and the future of modern art." -- Francine Prose, Elle From the Inside Flap During the fall of 1888, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin lived and worked together in the town of Arles, in Provence. Until now, the Arles period has been interpreted in the light of the temperamental differences between the two painters, culminating in the famous incident in which van Gogh cut off part of his left earlobe to spite Gauguin. In "Van Gogh and Gauguin", Debora Silverman reinterprets their vexed collaboration: concentrating on their very different religious backgrounds, she traces the quest of each painter to discover a modern form of sacred art to fill the void left by the traditional Christian system that he rejected but could never fully escape, as a man or as an artist. Both artists emerge in startling new ways, as the paintings they produced--before, during, and after Arles--are given close readings and new meanings. At the heart of this beautifully illustrated book--an art story even more than a personal story--are two contending ways of using paint and canvas for spiritual ends, of putting God in pigment. Silverman uncovers the ethos of the sanctity of labor in the van Gogh family's Dutch Reformed Church, and discovers van Gogh as a weaver-painter and builder of craft tools, seeking to express divinity in the labor forms of paint as woven cloth, plowed earth, and crumbled brick. Gauguin, on the other hand, was educated in a little-known Catholic institution that emphasized release from a corrupt earth and corrupt bodies; Silverman presents him as a penitent sensualist, who turns to painting as a new site to pose the fundamental question of the Catholic catechism--"Why are we here on earth?"--and who oscillates between visionary ascent and carnal temptation. Throughout "Van Gogh and Gauguin", Silverman unfolds the cultural meaning of visual form. Analysing specific pictures, she shows how van Gogh's labor theology pressed him to emphasize the materiality of painting and to embed the sacred in the stuff of matter and the faces of ordinary people. Gauguin's quest for the sacred, by contrast, led him to develop techniques that would dematerialize the physical surface of the canvas as much as possible, emulating the matte permeation of the fresco, for example, or devising unusual forms to represent what he considered the misery of the age and one of its keys sources: sexual suffering. Debora Silverman's book enables the reader to see van Gogh's and Gauguin's art--from the familiar masterpieces of Arles, Nuenen, Tahiti to lesser-known drawings and objects--in constantly new and surprising ways and to appreciate the special character of their nineteenth-century cultures and contexts. This book, the first of its kind, opens up an unmined terrain of central importance: the relationship between religion and modernism. About the Author Debora Silverman holds the Presidential Chair in Modern European History, Art, and Culture at UCLA. She is the author of Selling Culture and Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siecle France . Read more