Everyone has a favorite Vincent Van Gogh painting.
Or, if they don't, perhaps they should.
All great art is priceless, of course; though the more than $82 million paid for a Van Gogh painting a couple of years ago — a world record — is indeed impressive. Especially since the artist could barely give away his work during his life.
This year marks the 150th anniversary of Van Gogh's birth. And, needless to say, the art world is jumping on the event to promote not only the artist but the importance of art. Companies are offering "Van Gogh Tours of Europe," with a stop at the Van Gogh Museum in the Netherlands. There two massive exhibitions have been mounted. The A&E Network recently profiled the artist and is offering his biography to home viewers. Other documentaries and displays are on the way.
For of all the Impressionists, Van Gogh may have been the most impressionable — and impressive. His palette of bright colors, choppy brush strokes and tendency to use grand gobs of paint seem to radiate the word "passion." At the time, photography was fast replacing "representational painting" as a medium for showing what people could see. Van Gogh and his cohorts stepped in to offer an option. They painted what people felt. When the artist would paint the dark inner-wall of a bridge a robin egg blue, he was painting his own insides. And millions upon millions have responded to his work with robin-egg-blue feelings of their own.
As with Ernest Hemingway, Garbo and others, the stories surrounding Van Gogh's life have given him celebrity beyond the grave. There was that business about cutting off his ear and sending it to an estranged lover, for example; not to mention the bouts of depression and his eventual suicide. Indeed, biographers will be sifting through the man's ashes for decades.
Yet, as with any great artist, what mattered most to Van Gogh was the work. And in this era of calculated music, packaged movies and pre-digested posters, Van Gogh's breath-taking vision reminds the world what true art can do.
True art challenges, takes chances, breaks all attempts to define it. And, in the end, true art reveals humanity itself, adding to the catalog of the heart and expanding the inner-world of mankind.
Van Gogh's almost frighteningly gorgeous paintings do just that.
Would that more people in arts today had the audacity to do the same.