The Truth in Art: Vincent Van Gogh's Work of Art Essay

The life span of 37 years saw Vincent Willem van Gogh (Vincent) in creating beautiful works he dearly loved. Painting was an avenue, which allowed him to express his inner thoughts or vent his struggles. My decision to research on Vincent’s painting, Starry Night (1889) came with the inspiration from Don Mclean’s Song, Starry Starry Night where his lyrics spoke about Vincent’s life that further intrigued me in writing this paper.

Aestheticism was a popular dogma in the late 1800s that centered on the belief that art should exist for beauty alone. This doctrine is defined as an “exaggerated devotion to art, music, or poetry, with indifference to practical matters” and “the acceptance of artistic beauty and taste as a fundamental standard, ethical and other standards being secondary” (“Aestheticism,” def. 1 and 2). In Oscar Wilde’s sole novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, aestheticism is a fashionable belief accepted by society at the time. Oscar Wilde uses the moral deterioration and ultimate destruction of Dorian Gray in The Picture of Dorian Gray to emphasize the negative effects of society’s preoccupation with aesthetics and offer a moral for the reader.

When comparing the lines in the Vincent Van Gogh’s The Starry Night painting and Sol LeWitt’s the Wall Drawing No. 681, the lines are the opposite. In the Starry Night painting the lines of the sky are very curvy and flowing, but the lines of the buildings are very straight. The artist in this painting is showing you a vision he has had during the time he was in the asylum. The lines of the sky are erratic, and it shows how the artist was feeling very unstable during the time he painted the piece. You can feel how peaceful the buildings are, but the sky is not peaceful. The artist is fighting with himself, and it shows in the painting. The Wall Drawing No.681 shows very straight and precise lines.

“Aestheticism can be defined as the ideal of creating works of art that renounce any purpose or meaning other than their own refined beauty.” (Quirk) Aestheticism’s main goal was to be a way to counter the political and social views of the time. “Human beings in decadent art and writing are irretrievably flawed and live in a state of disruption both with themselves and with an equally flawed Nature. Since this is the case, humans can only overcome this imperfect melancholy state momentarily in acts of sin, disguise, or pretense.” (Quirk) Perhaps Aestheticism’s most recognizable figure was Oscar Wilde, who was the author of Dolan Grey. Aesthetic art focused more on being beautiful and pleasing to the eye rather than having a deeper meaning. The paintings often do not have any subject and are abstract, which is different than many types of art.

The people back in the 19th century really didn’t accept Van Gaogh’s truthful and emotionally morbid way of expressing the way of art is to himself. It finally was seen as art through the people’s eyes. This set a stage of art that is now known as Expressionism. It is best characterized by the use of symbols and a style that expresses the artist’s inner feelings about his subject. His style of painting is exemplified by a projection of the painter’s inner experience onto the canvas he paints on. Van Gogh’s paintings are done with his feelings that goes on in his life. (Mark Harden’s Artchive)

So over this week i was told from a teacher from my school that i draw like a child and i have no perspective.This to me was not constructive feedback but an attack on me as an individual artist. I will admit i am not the best drawer in the world but i am trying to become better. At frist my reaction was anger , than came tears. I want everyone to know that no matter what anyone says never stop doing what you love. I always refer back to vincent van gogh , his struggles , his illness yet he still proceeded his passion with at most love. But sadly he took his own life...He never got that chance to see his art flourish the way it has. So when looking at his life and comparing it to my own i understand his struggles and i take his quotes and apply

Heidegger contrast the earth and the world by the differences in perspective with the given examples of criticizing artwork. We view art differently by our experiences. Artists create an artwork with certain feeling in mind, but to the viewer, the artwork may be just a thing. The specific artworks Heidegger used in the book are the painting of several shoes by Van Gogh. For everyone that knows what the shoes are like to them is just a thing or equipment they use. However to Gogh’s purpose was to express what the peasant women feel when they wears their shoes as Heidegger stated, “only then they becomes what they what they are”. Another detail stated by Heidegger that he used to contrast the earth and the world is “In virtue of the reliability

According to Hegel, nothing man made is equal in beauty to God’s creation of nature. Hegel constructs an argument explaining, “Here the ordinary way of looking at things took easily to the notion that the human art-product ranked below the product of nature; for the work of art has no feeling in itself and is not through and through enlivened, but, regarded as an external object is dead; but we are accustomed to value the living higher than the dead.” (Hegel, 638). Hegel conveys how art products of humans are in lower beauty than nature itself. He describes how living things are of higher value than dead, art is not living thus, nature is of higher value. Humans are unable to create living things therefore, we make things without life which

Heidegger suggests, in other words, that art can accomplish its world-disclosing work in at least three different and primary ways: (1) micro-paradigms he will later calls “things thinging,” which help us become aware of what matters most deeply to us; (2) paradigmatic artworks like Van Gogh's painting and Hölderlin's poetry, which disclose how art itself works; and (3) macro-paradigmatic “great” works of art like the Greek temple and tragic drama (works Heidegger also sometimes calls “gods”), which succeed in fundamentally transforming a historical community's “understanding of being,” its most basic and ultimate understanding of what is and what

Art is all around us. There are many different forms of art. It can be something created, captured, or it can be already existent. Not a single person is to say what makes something art because there is a different definition for everyone. However, there are a couple factors that come into mind whenever someone decides to declare something as art. In this essay I will be comparing and contrasting four different pieces of art. I will be discussing each art piece’s form, time period of creation, intention or purpose, and value. These four pieces of art are Michelangelo’s Pieta, Fountain by Marcel Duchamp, Mark Rothko’s No.61, and the “Oyster Dress” by Alexander McQueen. These works of art come in all different shapes and sizes but they are valued

Vincent Van Gogh is one of the most recognized artists in the world. Van Gogh was born on March 30, 1853 in Groot-Zundert, Netherlands. Van Gogh was born into a family of six children in which his father was a pastor and his mother was an artist. He was named after his stillborn brother who died exactly one year before he was born.

Vincent Van Gogh was formed by his social, cultural and historical context. This is expressed clearly in the underlying stories of both paintings, Starry Night, 1889 and Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, 1889. Both of these paintings portray a narrative relating to Van Gogh significantly as he emotionally connects to the subject in each painting. Van Gogh’s aim of these subjective works was to express meaning through colour and express the painting to a more personal emotion for the viewer. Van Gogh belonged to a small style of Post Impressionism which was a reaction against Impressionism and their formality.

Vincent Willem van Gogh was born on March 30th 1853, in Zundert, The Netherlands. Van Gogh spent his teenage year’s working for a firm of art dealers; however, he did not embark upon his art career until 1880. Originally, he worked only with dark and gloomy colors, until he came across the art movements developed in Paris known as, Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism (Meier-Graefe 4). Van Gogh than included their brighter colors and unique style of painting into his very own creations. He produced more than 2,000 works, including around 900 paintings and 1,100 drawings and sketches, during the last ten years of his life (Meier-Graefe 10). However, most of his best-known works were produced in his last

          4.Vincent would stay there for two years and transfer to paris for a year and then come back to london.

Schiller asserts that beauty is an aesthetic unity of thought and feeling, of reason and emotion. It Is by the attainment of this unity that Schiller believes enables human nature to be realized and fulfilled. That Beauty may lead to truth, meaning one can become the ideal through joining the logical and the emotional. However, when truth is perceived, feeling may follow thought, or thought may follow feeling.(189) When beauty is understood, thought is unified with feeling. He states the need for this unity much beautifully than just a philosopher could “The reality of things is the work of the things; the appearance of things is the work of man and a nature which delights in appearance no longer takes pleasure in what it receives, but in what it does”(125). At first, the second half did not make much sense, but upon reflection one may see that Schiller is saying we should not just revel in what the senses take in, but use our reason to look deeper, beyond the surface. Schiller however does not believe this is a realistic goal or even an attainable one, as we discussed in class. Schiller needs to make some sort of distinction between the potential Man and the goal of Man, as a manifestation or visualization of that potential or archetype. The impossibility of ever attaining the ideal calls for the identification of potential and goal, which shows that they cancel each other out: unrealizable potential is not,