Quotes from Steven Naifeh

Puente levadizo y dama con sombrilla, MAYO DE 1888, TINTA Y TIZA SOBRE PAPEL, 60 X 31,9 CM © Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Ángeles, CA, USA.

was] a stranger to himself.

Chavannes's gigantic mural Inter artes et naturam (Between Art and Nature)

PARIS WAS IN AN UPROAR. IT WAS THE WINTER OF 1875 AND THE ART world was under attack by a rebellious cadre of young painters who styled themselves the Société anonyme (Anonymous Society), but whose enemies had stuck them with a range of dismissive labels including "Impressionalists," "Impressionists," and "lunatics.

Long after the children had dispersed, they avidly exchanged books and reading recommendations as if no book was truly read until all had read it.

No andéis preocupados por vuestra vida, qué comeréis, ni por vuestro cuerpo, con qué os vestiréis…».

Todo el mundo le había rechazado, obstaculizado o se había opuesto a él.

Just a few months before his fateful train trip, Theo had sent a grateful note to the first critic who dared to praise his brother's work: "You have read these pictures, and by doing so you very clearly saw the man.

es mejor provocar un estallido, por enorme que sea, que estar en deuda con el mundo por preservarte».

the comfort of the infinite and never lost his taste for the poetic

Like the illustrated books of his childhood, he grafted words to images and images to words, insistently reshaping both to his narrative of reassurance. He paired pictures with poetry, sometimes transcribing lines from literature and scripture directly onto his prints to create collages of consolation. This process of layering words and images so gratified his manic imagination and his search for comfort that it would become his principal way of seeing and coping with the world.

Vincent looked to images not just to be instructed and inspired, but, most of all, to be moved. Art should be "personal and intimate," he said, and concern itself with "what touches us as human beings.

Every year in late May, hundreds of pilgrims made the arduous journey across the salty marshland of the Camargue to celebrate the Festival of Saint Sarah, the servant girl who accompanied the Marys on their magical boat.

company. To move in any good circle, even one as

On his side, Vincent felt increasingly thwarted, alienated, and rejected—a knot of feelings that characterized his later life just as pious resignation characterized his parents'. "Family," he complained years after leaving Zundert, "is a fatal combination of persons with contrary interests, each of whom is opposed to the rest, and two or more are of the same opinion only when it is a question of combining together to obstruct another member.

Me pregunto por qué los brillantes puntitos del cielo no nos resultan tan asequibles como los puntos negros que llenan el mapa de Francia. Cogemos un tren para ir de Tarascón a Ruán, pero para llegar hasta una estrella hemos de morir. Sin duda, hay algo cierto en este razonamiento: no podemos alcanzar estrella alguna mientras sigamos vivos, igual que ya no podemos coger el tren una vez muertos. (Vincent Van Gogh, en una carta a tu hermano Theo).

Trabajo solo, lucho por progresar en el arte y la vida».

Vincent's reading would eventually range far beyond the books approved by his parents. But these early exposures set the trajectory. He read with demonic speed, consuming books at a breakneck pace that hardly let up until the day he died. He would start with one book by an author and then devour the entire oeuvre in a few weeks.

In drawing a wall, he said, "the artist who must copy every small stone and each stroke of whitewash has missed his calling: he should have become a bricklayer.

PAUL GAUGUIN, 1891 (Illustration credit 34.1)