The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Provence - Softcover

Gayford, Martin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0618990585 ISBN 13: 9780618990580

Publisher: Mariner Books, 2008

Synopsis

From October to December of 1888, Paul Gauguin shared a yellow house in the south of France with Vincent van Gogh. They were the odd couple of the art world -- one calm, the other volatile -- and the denouement of their living arrangement was explosive. Making use of new evidence and Van Gogh’s voluminous correspondence, Martin Gayford describes not only how these two hallowed artists painted and exchanged ideas, but also the texture of their everyday lives. Gayford also makes a persuasive analysis of Van Gogh’s mental illness -- the probable bipolar affliction that led him to commit suicide at the age of thirty-seven. The Yellow House is a singular biographical work, as dramatic and vibrant as the work of these brilliant artists.

About this title

About the Author:

Martin Gayford was educated at Cambridge University and the Courtauld Institute of the University of London. He is the coeditor of The Grove Book of Art Writing and was the chief art critic for Bloomberg Europe. Gayford lives in Cambridge, England.

From Publishers Weekly:

Starred Review. Van Gogh's reputation in the public imagination has been made as much by his descent into madness as by his art. Detailing the final year of his life and the "Studio of the South" in which Gauguin and Van Gogh painted side by side, Gayford brings the art back into focus. Explications of the works illuminate the collaboration—similar subjects find very different treatment by two entirely different temperaments. Yet their influence on each other is everywhere—a story that Van Gogh recommends to Gauguin finds its way into a painting; Van Gogh uses the jute canvas that is Gauguin's material of choice. While some of this is well-trodden territory, Gayford's narrative is genuinely dramatic as it moves toward Van Gogh's fateful end. Gayford makes exciting new connections between the tone of Van Gogh's correspondence and known scholarship about his probable bipolar disorder. The influences of literature, the news media and so-called "hygienic excursions" (visits to the local brothels) percolate in these letters and under the surfaces of the artists' canvases. So, argues Gayford, were they invading Van Gogh's mind. Though it is impossible to entirely understand what motivated these two great artists during their weeks together in Arles, these pages deliver as close and vivid an image as may be possible. 60 b&w illus. (Nov. 14)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0618990585
• ISBN 13: 9780618990580
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352