Page 164 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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Vincent van Gogh: ‘self portrait ’ 1889 + portrait photos of Vincent and/or Theo van Gogh.
Vincent van Gogh was learning voraciously throughout his life, teaching himself to draw, learning how to paint, to adopt and adapt impressionist painterly technique, and of course how to integrate his religious and personal psychological insights and feelings into his technique and his out-pouring of work during his short life. Recently several photographs of Vincent have emerged - a carte-size image by Victor Morin (discovered in the early 1990s); an 1887 melanotype of a group including Gauguin, Emile Bernard, van Gogh and others; - and other portraits of a van Gogh (perhaps Vincent, perhaps Theo), so at last we have some photographic ('objective') evidence of what Vincent 'really' looked like. I have chosen the 1889 self-portrait (above left) to contrast with the photographic portraits. Starry Night is the image (perhaps with Wheatfield with Crows, 1890) that epitomises his lifelong task - trying to learn how to express himself perfectly, and to capture on canvas the beauty and horror of his world.
Not since Rembrandt has an artist analysed himself in paint so thoroughly, revealing his long-term quest to discover himself and to come to terms with the psychosis and fear of rejection that afflicted him (the diagnosis in 1888, after he had mutilated his ear, was ‘generalized delerium’). He killed himself in 1890, at age 37, having achieved virtually no recognition of his genius throughout his life.
The best book source on Vincent is Royal Academy: The Real Van Gogh - the Artist and His Letters 2010 - a magnificent, beautifully designed and comprehensive monograph - paintings, drawings, letters and contextual documents, scholarly essays etc...
In the early 1970s, I knew Martin Sharp - the Oz magazine art-director and illustrator, and his Kings Road studio at the beautiful old Pheasantry apartments was papered with repros of van Gogh’s paintings, interspersed with press cuttings about Bob Dylan, and all his other heroes - Gurdjieff, Alfred Jarry, William Burroughs et al... Vincent inspired my generation to the point of hero worship...
And take a look at Dorota Kobiela & Hugh Welchman’s Loving Vincent 2016 - a 96 minute animated, partial biography of van Gogh, created from oil-paintings faithfully reproducing Vincent’s style of impasto painterly brushwork, and integrating actual van Gogh paintings as master-frames.