Van Gogh: Less Crazy After All These Years?

No myth about art and artists abides as pervasively as that of Vincent Van Gogh, the mad genius. To mark the grand reopening of the renovated Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, curators and conservators hope to renovate Van Gogh’s madman mythology with the exhibition Van Gogh at Work. That workmanlike title relates perfectly the show’s goal to demonstrate just how workmanlike Van Gogh was in developing and thriving as an artist. Less a portrait of a man touched by angels and demons and more a depiction of a troubled man who immersed himself in the craft of painting, Van Gogh at Work might succeed in making Vincent more normal, more relatable, and less crazy after all these years. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Van Gogh: Less Crazy After All These Years?"

[Image: Vincent Van Gogh. Self-Portrait as an Artist (detail), 1887. Image source.]  
[Many thanks to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, for providing press materials related to the exhibition Van Gogh at Work, which runs through January 12, 2014.]

How the Great Artists Imagined Paradise Lost, and Regained

“We are stardust. We are golden. We are billion year old carbon. And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden,” sang Joni Mitchell in her song “Woodstock.” Every generation before and since has longed to return to the garden—the Edenic paradise found in every human culture and religion on earth. In Gauguin, Cézanne, Matisse: Visions of Arcadia, we see how these three giants of modern art traced their own paths back. Along with a supporting cast of artists spanning centuries and crossing international borders, their journeys become a massively complex web of influences and dialogues that demonstrate just how deeply this vision of heaven on earth lies in the collective consciousness of humanity and continues to influence not only our taste in artists, but also our taste in presidents. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "How the Great Artists Imagined Paradise Lost,and Regained." 

[Image: Bathers by a River, March 1909-10, May-November 1913, and early spring 1916-October (?) 1917. Henri Matisse, French, 1869-1954. Oil on canvas, 102 1/2 x 154 3/16 inches (260.4 x 391.6 cm). The Art Institute of Chicago, Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Collection.]

 
[Many thanks to the Philadelphia Museum of Art for the image above from, other press materials related to, and an invitation to the press preview for Gauguin, Cézanne, Matisse: Visions of Arcadia, which runs through September 3, 2012.]