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The Evolution of Art in the Van Gogh Era

1. Introduction to Vincent van Gogh and His Influence on Art

The irony is that Van Gogh, in his lifetime, only managed to sell a single painting. Further, he knew next to no other artists and seldom visited galleries. Some latter-day artists aspire to precisely the lifestyle Van Gogh experienced – removed from the tradings of the art business. However, gone are those days. Van Gogh can, therefore, be said to be the precise fulcrum around which all former value systems revolved, allowing for weak indications as to his future monopoly potential. After Van Gogh, a whole aimable d’art was initiated. With the indicators now heavily in wild demand. His genius, reflected in just one exhibition held after his death, has become the artistic monolith of the 20th century. In a twisted sense, the canny liar has arisen in the subtext portion of his spiritual obituary and gives him full employment.

The legendary painter can most accurately be described as a cultural phenomenon. Because, in Van Gogh’s case, the creative process, very nearly, is as well-known as the paintings. Van Gogh is born – well-documented in his own letters. Van Gogh struggles with life and his art – again, well-documented. Van Gogh goes mad and dies – the supposed issues surrounding the ear are largely preserved in the annals of time. He is the first star of art. Throughout history, artists were perceived, in varying guises, as near outsiders in society. Often the perceived artistic demeanor of artists was beyond reproach. This was until society’s pulse gained its most perceptible deviations. And still, Van Gogh remains with us today. Not so much in the person, but more in the form of iconic picture-posters or squabbled auctions in major art houses.

2. Key Characteristics of Van Gogh’s Artistic Style

What kind of art was Van Gogh creating? What makes his artworks stand out and retain their appeal and evaluative importance even a century after being made? In the Van Gogh era, specific features of individual artists’ styles, genres, schools of painting, and entire epochs were typically noted in comments on current exhibitions and new books on art, in reproductions including art reviews and casual conversation. Today, everything serious in the mass media and popular publications about art, from monographs to reproductions, is expected to be illustrated with factual, recognizable images of works of art for easier, more vivid, and expressive textual communication with the reader. Despite all the commonality and robustness of Van Gogh’s distinctive recognizable style and the existence of a simple “authentic/naive” test for establishing real or fake “mistaken” attributions with him, it is not possible to draft an exhaustive verbal description or specify the key features that will be characteristic of his entire oeuvre that has taken shape and has been steadily evolving over his 10-year professional career as an artist.

3. Impact of Van Gogh’s Work on Contemporary Art Movements

Van Gogh didn’t impress only the established art world and create the emotional (crying)-sentimental-admired artist of his legacy. In the last century, around the 60s, while following building André Breton overcoming Louvre’s Venus de Milo art vandalism after Second World War (possibly part of the post-modernism culture), artists raised to a new level the expressive and emotional purpose of painting. The action painters often created this way mainly abstract pieces, but from the 80s onwards, a new generation of emotional contemporary art combined the technical with expressiveness again, emphasizing message and expanding the personality they expressed through a variety of figurative, real, or abstract terms.

Van Gogh didn’t just impress the art world. For instance, in the Western, post-industrial society, with its mass urbanization, individual personalization became evident in the arts and psychology alike. In complete isolation or as part of a network, like the Impressionists, painters started to teach and learn from each other. The harsh contrast that the Impressionists introduced into their brilliant world caused a reaction, too, and the world embraced the Fauvists, the avant-garde artists who built on the Impressionist stature in Post-Impressionism and instead of realistic subject matter favored a (perceived) raw but bright color scheme, as well as somewhat childish (stylistic or naive) lines. By the end of the 20th century, Van Gogh works often show up at the top of most loved paintings. However, his latest auction sale record isn’t placed on the first spot.

4. Technological Innovations in Art during the Van Gogh Era

Up in the North, there was one person who was brave enough to refuse to design his purple or green twilight using a pot of paint, and who sought a more meaningful, multi-faceted solution: he was called Vincent Van Gogh. In a letter to his brother, Theo, from 31 March 1884, he wrote ‘Indeed, I am proud of composing a piece of music just as you might be of making a portrait.’ He would have appreciated Liszt’s sonata, La Chapelle de l’Enfer, or Prokofiev’s War sonata, to which Rodchenko added his enthusiastic explanation of what the music is trying to express. Van Gogh tried to give his painting the same narrative, musicological, and social significance, incorporating all three together seamlessly, just as music always manages to synchronize two temporal movements, because without that synchronization both melody and narration would be entirely impossible. But Van Gogh’s contemporary, Emile Verhaeren, was the only noteworthy historian who attempted to describe color and the cushion of air that we call ‘space’. That makes Van Gogh’s letters and the information he was able to pass on to later generations so interesting. This accompanied the posthumous recognition Van Gogh experienced in 1905, when Louis Anquetin, Paul Serusier, and Juan Gris staged a retrospective in which they were able to show the depth of the somber and brooding skies above Saint-Remy.

People in the Van Gogh era found it superficially hard to distinguish between art and life. There was much talk of ugliness, and people had supposedly become far too practical, but lying in wait around the corner were those openly pre-Modern hypocrites, the futurists. The Impressionists had already isolated the visible light spectrum for their cause, but these smilers soon managed to persuade the masses that as there were five colors, no real artist should restrict himself solely to white, black, and sixty-four other shades of gray. They were convinced that the reproduction of the planet’s plant, animal, and mineral kingdom in paint would only go from strength to strength, that more features would emerge that would make Man even more beautiful and that in the end everything would work out fine. This was the mistaken belief of the scientists of the time – always on the lookout for ‘the missing link’, a convincing demonstration of the superiority of the white race (in this case in the American plays of S. Millward Phelps). Freud had not yet written his Interpretation of Dreams. Anyone who was not brave enough to show respect for the power of science and acknowledge that the new discoveries would reveal the ultimate Truth, rather than the temporary verisimilitude of Visual Truth, was simply a naysayer who had no understanding of contemporary developments and ought to shut up.

Van Gogh realized that we can never be sure about things and that people talk too much, often without thinking about what they are saying. He tried to express his doubts about anything and everything quite radically through a fresh approach to painting, which in his eyes was ideally suited to an age that was taking its first stumbling steps towards democracy. Scepticism was a characteristic feature of the second half of the nineteenth century, but so was the rise of the social sciences, positivism, and technological innovation. These scientific innovations were in turn beginning to give a whole new dimension to art. Characters and scenes were brought off the printed page into the living room by the illustrated press, people spoke in verse in the theaters thanks to the gas lamps, and sound was captured on a flat lacquer disk in almost all its infinite variety. Van Gogh could not remain unaffected by these things, but he reduced his three dimensions to two and put his models on display in the art gallery, which meant they had to compete with all the other images.

5. Conclusion: Reflecting on Van Gogh’s Enduring Legacy in the Art World

In Dr. Haebler’s critique offered for earlier generations of the Van Gogh renaissance that already have amounted to at least some extent of successful treatment of integration in terms of psychiatric art and more. Especially, in the hands of the painting, the key to a very skeptical appreciation of this collaboration’s limited value may be the interpretation of it… Even the least and harshest critics among us concur not unfeignedly in the pictures and the spiritual vitality of the robust and intense painter Vincent Van Gogh. Even the least and harsh of the vigorous and intense Van Gogh of painters whose pictures are not to confirm this skeptical appreciation as well as significant worth of application for the artistic and mental nature. Contrariwise, no matter how different the picture of Van Gogh seems to be for each one of us, they are always ready to defend the significance and worth of the great myth. The great painter and his masterpieces assert a kind of kinship that brings us behind the swings and converges in the arbitrary fogland of our relativistic imagination. In a word, so much of understanding Van Gogh asks from us.

The artistic tradition symbolized by Van Gogh has a powerful and enduring legacy in the modern world. It is clear that the Van Goghs receive more attention in our day than all the great artists of the past. Their art, with its stunning objective and remarkable spontaneity, has a particular appeal to the modern sensibility and the post-Freudian psychological anxieties of a perplexed and baselessly reared people. Their painting of today, we feel, is closer to the fount of emotion and experience that created the race, before the alienation from life to which endless abstractions and religious and practical rules were lying. Van Gogh’s painting life was a great battle, and he died of battle injuries. The art he carried out in this epic struggle is an indomitable testimony to our new religion, where we strive to set up invincible ideals as formidable achievements of the brute.