Van Gogh

Fifty works by Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) from the prestigious Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo (which houses one of the greatest patrimonies of Van Gogh's works) document the Dutch painter's entire career, on the eve of the 170th anniversary of the artist's birth.

Van Gogh was born in Holland on March 30, 1853, he was an artist with an extreme sensitivity and a tormented life. His attacks of madness, the long stays in the psychiatric hospital of Saint Paul in Provence, the episode of the severed ear, as well as the epilogue of his life, which ends on July 29, 1890, at the age of thirty-seven, are famous.

with a suicide: a gunshot to the chest in the Auvers fields. Despite a life steeped in tragedy, Van Gogh paints a shocking series of masterpieces, accompanying them with sublime writings (the famous Letters to his brother Theo Van Gogh), inventing a unique style that has made him the most famous painter in the history of art. Through 50 masterpieces and many biographical testimonies, the volume reconstructs the human and artistic story, to celebrate his universal size offering a chronological thread referring to the periods and places where the painter lived: from the Dutch one, to his stay in Paris, to that in Arles, up to St. Remy and AuversSur-Oise, where he put an end to his troubled life.

From the passionate relationship with the dark landscapes of youth to the sacred study of the work of the earth, figures arise who act in a severe daily life such as the sower, the potato pickers, the weavers, the woodcutters, the women intent on domestic tasks or fatigued to transport bags of coal or digging the ground; attitudes of awkward sweetness, expressiveness of faces, fatigue understood as an ineluctable destiny. All of these are an expression of Van Gogh's greatness and intense relationship with the truth of the world.