A short life - only thirty-seven years - lived Vincent van Gogh. On artistic creativity he was given only ten years. Nevertheless, he left a huge creative legacy, among which there is a place for everything: portraits, self-portraits, landscapes, still lifes. The painting "Sunflowers" is not a single phenomenon, but constitutes a whole cycle. It contains eleven paintings. We will consider some of them. Before you is a work that Van Gogh wrote - “Sunflowers”, a photo of a painting from a series created in Arles in August-September 1888.

short biography

A year before Van Gogh's birth, his parents had a son, Vincent, who died in infancy. The second son, who is now revered as brilliant artist, received the name of the deceased brother, because he was born the same way as he was, on March 30. Perhaps this had an impact on the psyche of the child, and then the adult.

In any case, the boy grew up gloomy and unsociable. Before graduating from school, he began to engage in family business: the sale of paintings. Loving painting, he abandons the trade in which Van Gogh gained material independence, and rushes into the unknown. He begins to paint, even without knowing the basics of drawing. Pictures are not for sale, but cause a sharp rejection. He goes to his brother Theo in Paris, gets acquainted with contemporary artists, works a lot on himself, making copies of his work famous masters, and in parallel writes his work. At this time, earthy colors disappear from his paintings, the palette becomes bright and joyful. The first picture "Sunflowers" appears.

Parisian period, 1887

During his stay in Paris, many works were created, and all of them were painted in series: self-portraits, six canvases "Shoes". A style is developed, which will later be called post-impressionism. We are also interested in the painting "Sunflowers".

Van Gogh became fascinated with cut, withering, abandoned flowers. There are four paintings in the series. Each is worthy of separate consideration. The first three paintings are an exploration of the subject. But we will pay attention to four large sunflowers - a combination of previous work. These flowers are depicted in almost life size. Here Van Gogh does not decorate his sunflowers with a vase. The photo of the picture shows 4 heads, which will then go to the seeds.

These fading flowers fill the entire canvas. He explores the contrasts of blue and orange, red and green, yellow and purple, seeking to harmonize the extremes. This painting "Sunflowers" is filled with warm and cold colors. It was these contrasts that the artist was looking for, and not gray harmony. The strokes go in all directions, and the space in which the flower heads are placed is not consciously defined by the artist. This work is one of the pinnacles of his Parisian period. This painting is now in the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo.

Disease

Van Gogh was seriously ill. Regarding his psychiatric illness, the opinions of modern doctors almost do not differ - schizophrenia. The only question that can cause controversy is: which of its forms did the painter have? The disease is varied and insidious. Until the age of twenty-seven, Van Gogh suffered several severe depressions caused by turmoil in his personal life: he could not start a family with any of his lovers. In Paris, the painter became addicted to absinthe. So he tried to drown out the misunderstanding on the part of the audience and artists and the complete lack of earnings. His paintings did not find buyers, and financially he could only rely on the help of his younger brother, who loved Vincent immensely.

addiction to absinthe

The immoderate use of absinthe - the drink of many artists in France - led Van Gogh to sad results. Absinthe, a drink based on wormwood and alcohol, was first considered a medicine. Then artists began to resort to it as a hallucinogen that causes creative breakthroughs. By the nature of the action, he approached marijuana. The artist manifested increased excitability, lack of coordination, tremor, the vision of color changed. Yellow became predominant.

Arles, August-September 1888

Having moved to sunny Provence on the banks of the Rhone in Arles, Van Gogh dreamed of creating a commune of artists. He fled from the suffering that befell him. With him was a friend of Gauguin. Everything here was conducive to creativity in order to convey the essence of local nature. Van Gogh filled his still lifes with sunflowers with the sun of the south and yellow. The first oil painting in the series "Sunflowers" turned out on a turquoise background, like the sky of Arles. The painter created the series in less than a week because he worked with obsession. It was windy and he worked indoors. Van Gogh put only three flowers in a clay pot with green watering.

The turquoise of the background and the yellowness of the flowers play and shimmer on the brown table. They still fit on the canvas. The second still life, too, with three flowers in a vase on a royal blue background and two sunflowers lying on the table, was destroyed by the Americans during the bombing of Japan. He next painted a bouquet of fourteen flowers on a pale blue-green background, and this is preserved and exhibited in the Neue Pinakothek Munich. The fourth option is in London. Its blue outlines are a tribute to Gauguin. No one was going to buy the bright sunny colors of Van Gogh.

Hospital

First, Gauguin left the artist, leaving his friend face to face with his demons. Then on December 22, 1888, he received a letter from his adored brother Theo, informing him that he was about to get married. It was a strong blow to the psyche. The artist was in complete despair that his brother would not be close to him, as before.

On the same evening, he cut off a piece of his ear, washed himself of blood, bandaged it, wrapped a piece of the earlobe in a newspaper and presented it as a keepsake of himself. lung girl behavior. When she opened the gift, she fainted, and her mistress insisted that Van Gogh be placed in a psychiatric hospital. Having healed as far as it was possible at that time, he was released. He set to work again, surrounding himself with his favorite sunflowers.

Arles, January 1889

The artist makes more and more still lifes, trying to escape from hallucinations, obsessive delusions of paranoid fantasies.

Overcoming the fog of madness, he creates his three most significant still lifes. Now they are in Philadelphia, Amsterdam and Tokyo.

Van Gogh, "Sunflowers": a description of the painting of the Tokyo Museum

The artist pounces on the canvas, quickly paints the background and begins to squeeze out a thick layer of paint from the tubes, correcting them not with a brush, but with a palette knife. Flowers become voluminous, embossed, rough and do not want to fit on the canvas. Fifteen heads, swaying serpentine, tend to go beyond the picture. Saturated orange and yellow tones "burn" on the canvas. The artist placed them randomly, trying to draw anyone who glances at the still life into this magical wild world. Among them are real sunflowers, and their mutants, which are easy to identify.

They do not have the usual petals, and they look like pompoms. In the very center, the artist places a flower with a scarlet, like blood, core, as if anticipating his imminent bloody end. From the canvas comes the incredible energy of the artist, animated by flowers, who put his suffering soul into flowers. Van Gogh could not help but follow them independent life. Flowers ruled him, turning their heads towards the sun, to the joy that the sick soul of the artist yearned for. But joy was not given to him, the drama filled him entirely. The description of the painting “Sunflowers” ​​will be incomplete, if not to say what happened after the sunflowers blossomed on his canvases, gathering the joy and bitterness of the world.

Illness and death

The disease progressed. The people of Arles demanded that he leave their city. Van Gogh left in 1890 near Paris. Walking in the fields with a sketchbook and paints, he suddenly decided to shoot himself. The bullet went below the heart, but a day and a half later he died. Theo survived his beloved brother by only six months, dying from a nervous breakdown.

"The Yellow House" (The Yellow House 2007), which tells about the life of Van Gogh and Gauguin in Arles, where, for 9 weeks, which they spent in gloomy poverty, they created more than 40 works of art.

Two cut sunflowers.
Paris, September 1887. Oil on canvas, 42x61.
Metropolitan Museum, New York, USA.

"I feel the need to be different, start over and apologize that my paintings are almost a cry of despair, although my rural sunflowers may sound grateful."
Vincent Van Gogh

The "soul" of the sunflower was especially in tune with him. "Sunflowers" by Van Gogh is a symbol of our beautiful and tragic existence, its formula, its quintessence. These are blooming and fading flowers; they are young, mature and aging living beings; these are nascent, hotly burning and cooling stars; it is, ultimately, the image of the universe in its relentless cycle...

Four cut sunflowers.
Paris, September 1887. Oil on canvas, 60x100.
Oterlo, Croller-Moller Museum.

Vincent persistently invites fellow artists to come to him, dreams of creating a kind of commune under the roof of the “yellow house”, which he calls the “southern workshop”.

Paul Gauguin responds to his call, and Vincent happily prepares his house to receive the guest. In mid-August, he tells his brother: “I draw and write with the same zeal with which a Marseille man eats his bouillabaisse (Marseille fish soup bouillabaisse - M.A), which, of course, will not surprise you - I write large sunflowers. The last picture - light on light - will, I hope, be the most successful. But I probably won't stop there. In the hope that Gauguin and I will have a common workshop, I want to decorate it. Just big sunflowers, nothing else... So, if my plan succeeds, I will have a dozen panels - a whole symphony of yellow and blue. Van Gogh is in a hurry: "I work in the mornings from the very dawn, because the flowers fade quickly, and I have to finish the thing in one go." But despite all the efforts, the artist fails to fully realize his plan: by the end of summer, only four paintings are ready, and Vincent decides to hang them not in the studio, but in the guest room, which was intended for Gauguin.

Of the four canvases painted in August 1888, three survived: a painting with five sunflowers on a blue background was lost in Japan during the Second World War. "Vase with Three Sunflowers" is in a private collection in the United States, and finally, the most famous canvases are kept in London (fifteen flowers on a pale yellow-green background) and Munich (twelve flowers on a light blue background). Six months later, in January 1889, Van Gogh again paints sunflowers: a lighter variation of the "Munich" painting * and two variations of the "London" one.** (The authenticity of one of these paintings, bought by the Japanese insurance company Yasuda in 1987. at Christie's auction for $39.5 million, still disputed.)

Vase with twelve sunflowers.
Arles, August 1888. Oil on canvas, 91x72.
Munich, Neue Pinakothek, Germany.

A rough peasant vase seems disproportionately small and light compared to huge flowers. Not only the vase is small for sunflowers - the whole canvas is cramped for them. Inflorescences and leaves rest against the edges of the picture, displeasedly “recoil” from the frame. Van Gogh applies paints very thickly (impasto technique), squeezing them directly from the tubes onto the canvas. Traces of the touch of a brush and a palette knife are clearly visible on the canvas; the rough relief texture of the painting is like a cast of violent feelings that owned the artist at the moment of creativity. Sunflowers painted with energetic vibrating strokes seem to be alive: heavy inflorescences full of inner strength and flexible stems move, pulsate and change before our eyes - they grow, swell, ripen, fade.

For Van Gogh, there really was no difference between animate and inanimate matter. “I see in all nature, for example, in trees, an expression and, so to speak, a soul,” the artist wrote. The "soul" of the sunflower was especially in tune with him. A flower that lives in harmony with cosmic rhythms, turning its corolla after the sun, was for him the embodiment of the interconnection of all things - small and great, earth and space.

And the sunflower itself is like a heavenly body in a halo of golden rays-petals. All shades of yellow - the color of the sun - shine still lifes with sunflowers. Recall that the artist saw this series as a "symphony of color", it was color that he most often mentioned when sharing the details of the idea with his brother and friends. In one of his letters, he says that in "Sunflowers" the yellow should glow against a changing background - blue, pale malachite green, bright blue; in another letter he mentions that he would like to achieve "something like the effect of stained glass windows in a Gothic church".

The idea is clear: to achieve a radiance, a sunny yellow glow. Van Gogh felt color with extraordinary sharpness. For him, each shade of paint was associated with a whole complex of concepts and images, feelings and thoughts, and a stroke on canvas was equivalent to a spoken word. The yellow color beloved by the artist embodied joy, kindness, benevolence, energy, the fertility of the earth and the life-giving warmth of the sun. That is why Van Gogh was so pleased with the move to the south, to the kingdom of the generous sun, to the bright “yellow house”.

The artist himself wrote that the “high yellow note” got through him that summer. The paintings painted in Arles flood all shades of yellow: Van Gogh depicts himself in a bright yellow straw hat, he often chooses a yellow background for portraits, paints meadows gilded by the sun, fields of ripe grain, haystacks, sheaves of straw, ocher-yellow trunks, the lights of the evening city, the sky painted by the sunset, the solar disk, the huge stars shrouded in a luminous haze ... Yes, what are the stars - even a simple wooden chair in the artist's studio shines with festive yellowness!

Vase with fifteen sunflowers.
Arles, January 1889. Oil on canvas, 95x73.
Vincent Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

And sunflowers sparkle brighter than the sun, as if absorbing the light of hot rays and emitting it into space. The artist sought to create "something peaceful and comforting" in last years his short long-suffering life. But is it only joy and consolation that his later canvases bring? The more violently the colors shine, the more electrified, intense the paintings become. As in a complex chord, a jubilant exclamation and a cry of despair are merged into one.

The same creative force that brings renewal to the world, causing the luminaries to rotate and plants to ripen, becomes a source of destruction and decay. All living things grow and ripen under the sun, but ripening is naturally and inevitably followed by wilting. The artist perceived these simple primordial truths with his whole being. So about the painting "The Reaper" he wrote: "humanity is an ear that must be harvested ... But there is nothing sad in this death, it happens in full light, with the sun that illuminates everything with golden light."

Van Gogh deeply felt the eternal variability of the universe. The feeling of the unity of interrelated opposites - light and darkness, flourishing and fading, life and death - was for him not an abstract philosophical category, but a strong, painful, almost unbearable experience. Therefore, as the author of the remarkable book “Van Gogh. Man and artist "N.A. Dmitriev, the mature work of the artist is marked by "a rare fusion of drama and festivity, imbued with a martyr's delight in the beauty of the world."

"Sunflowers" by Van Gogh is a symbol of our beautiful and tragic existence, its formula, its quintessence. These are blooming and fading flowers; they are young, mature and aging living beings; these are nascent, hotly burning and cooling stars; it is, ultimately, the image of the universe in its relentless cycle.

I feel the need to be different, to start over
and apologize for what my pictures carry
almost a cry of despair, although my rural sunflowers,
perhaps they sound grateful.

Vincent Van Gogh

Van Gogh often painted flowers: branches of flowering apple trees, chestnuts, acacias, almond trees, roses, oleanders, irises, zinnias, anemones, mallows, carnations, daisies, poppies, cornflowers, thistles...The flower was presented to the artist as "an idea symbolizing appreciation and gratitude." The sunflower was Van Gogh's favorite flower.In one of his letters to his brother Theo we read: "The sunflower is, in a sense, mine."

Sunflowers. August-September 1887

The artist painted sunflowers eleven times. The first four paintings were created in Paris in August - September 1887. Large cut flowers lie like some strange creatures dying before our eyes. The crushed, losing elasticity petals look like disheveled wool or like tongues of a dying flame, black cores look like huge mournful eyes, stems look like convulsively bent hands. These flowers exude sadness, but they still slumber a vitality that resists withering.

Yellow house. 1888

Exactly one year later, in the happiest and most fruitful time of his life, the artist returns to sunflowers again. Van Gogh lives in the south of France, in Arles, where everything delights him: the violent sun, bright colors, a new home, which the artist calls the "yellow house" and about which Theo writes:“Outside, the house is painted yellow, inside it is whitewashed, there is a lot of sun.” Vincent persistently invites his fellow artists, dreams of creating a kind of commune under the roof of the “yellow house”, which he calls the “southern workshop”. Paul Gauguin responds to his call, and Vincent happily prepares his house to receive the guest.In mid-August, he informs his brother: “I draw and write with the same zeal with which a Marseilles eats his bouillabaisse (Marseilles fish soup bouillabaisse - M.A), which, of course, will not surprise you - I paint large sunflowers. The last picture - light on light - will, I hope, be the most successful. But I probably won't stop there. In the hope that Gauguin and I will have a common workshop, I want to decorate it. Just big sunflowers, nothing else... So, if my plan succeeds, I will have a dozen panels - a whole symphony of yellow and blue. Van Gogh is in a hurry: "I work in the morning from the very dawn, because the flowers fade quickly, and I have to finish the thing in one go." But despite all the efforts, the artist fails to fully realize his plans: by the end of summer, only four paintings are ready, and Vincent decides to hang them not in the studio, but in the guest room, which was intended for Gauguin.

Vase with twelve sunflowers. August 1888
Neue Pinakothek, Munich

Of the four canvases painted in August 1888, three survived: a painting with five sunflowers on a blue background was lost in Japan during the Second World War. "Vase with Three Sunflowers" is in a private collection in the United States, and finally, the most famous canvases are kept in London (fifteen flowers on a pale yellow-green background) and Munich (twelve flowers on a light blue background).

Six months later, in January 1889, Van Gogh again paints sunflowers: a lighter variation of the "Munich" painting (Museum of Art, Philadelphia) and two variations of the "London" (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; Museum contemporary arts Yasuda Kasai, Tokyo. The authenticity of one of these paintings, bought by the Japanese insurance company Yasuda in 1987 at the Christie's auction for $39.5 million, is still disputed). There is an abyss between the August and January paintings: heavy quarrels with Gauguin, an attack of madness, a hospital, loneliness, lack of money. Vincent, who survived the collapse of all hopes, seems to be looking back at a short time of happiness, but already without the former enthusiasm. The artist has nothing to pay for the rent, and he will have to move out of the “yellow house”, which he so dreamed of decorating with his “Sunflowers”. A magnificent idea - a series of panels with sunflowers - did not materialize to the end, but his best fragments, the "London" and "Munich" still lifes, belong to Van Gogh's most famous public favorite creations.

Vase with fifteen sunflowers. August 1888
National Gallery, London

The plot of these paintings is extremely simple: flowers in a ceramic vase - and nothing else. The surface on which the bouquet stands is not worked out, its texture is not expressed in any way. What is it: a table, a shelf or a window sill, a tree or a tablecloth fabric - it does not matter. The same can be said about the background: this is not a drapery, not a wall, not an air environment, but simply a kind of shaded plane. The volume of the vase is not emphasized, only the flowers live freely in three-dimensional space - some petals vigorously stretch forward towards the viewer, others rush into the depths of the canvas. A rough peasant vase seems disproportionately small and light compared to huge flowers. Not only the vase is small for sunflowers - the whole canvas is cramped for them.

Van Gogh applies paints very thickly (impasto technique), squeezing them directly from the tubes onto the canvas.Traces of the touch of a brush and a palette knife are clearly visible on the canvas; the rough relief texture of the picture is like a cast of violent feelings that owned the artist at the moment of creativity.Sunflowers painted with energetic vibrating strokes seem to be alive: heavy inflorescences full of inner strength and flexible stems move, pulsate and change before our eyes - they grow, swell, ripen, fade.

Vase with five sunflowers. August 1888
The painting was destroyed during World War II.

For Van Gogh, there really was no difference between animate and inanimate matter. “I see in all nature, for example, in trees, an expression and, so to speak, a soul,” the artist wrote. The "soul" of the sunflower was especially in tune with him. The flower, which lives in harmony with cosmic rhythms, turning its corolla after the sun, was for him the embodiment of the interconnection of all things - small and great, earth and space. And the sunflower itself is like a heavenly body in a halo of golden rays-petals.

All shades of yellow - the color of the sun - shine still lifes with sunflowers. Recall that the artist saw this series as a "symphony of color", it was color that he most often mentioned when sharing the details of the idea with his brother and friends. In one of his letters, he says that in "Sunflowers" the yellow color should blaze against a changing background - blue, pale malachite green, bright blue; in another letter, he mentions that he would like to achieve "something like the effect of stained glass windows in a Gothic church." The idea is clear: to achieve a radiance, a sunny yellow glow.

Van Gogh felt color with extraordinary sharpness. Each shade of paint was associated with a whole complex of concepts and images, feelings and thoughts for him, and a brushstroke on canvas was tantamount to a spoken word. The yellow color, beloved by the artist, embodied joy, kindness, benevolence, energy, the fertility of the earth and the life-giving warmth of the sun. That is why Van Gogh was so pleased with the move to the south, to the kingdom of the generous sun, to the bright “yellow house”. The artist himself wrote that the “high yellow note” got through to him that summer. Pictures painted in Arles flood all shades of yellow: Van Gogh depicts himself in a bright yellow straw hat, he often chooses a yellow background for portraits, paints meadows gilded by the sun, fields of ripe grain, haystacks, sheaves of straw, ocher-yellow trunks, evening lights cities, the sky painted by the sunset, the solar disk, huge stars shrouded in a luminous haze ... Yes, stars - even a simple wooden chair in the artist’s studio shines with festive yellowness! And sunflowers sparkle brighter than the sun, as if absorbing the light of hot rays and emitting it into space.

Reaper. 1889

The artist strove to create “something peaceful and comforting” in the last years of his short, long-suffering life. But are his later canvases only joy and consolation? The more violently the colors shine, the more electrified, intense the paintings become. As in a complex chord, a jubilant exclamation, the screams of despair are merged into one. The same creative force that brings renewal to the world, causing the luminaries to rotate and plants to ripen, becomes a source of destruction and decay. All living things grow and ripen under the sun, but ripening is naturally and inevitably followed by wilting. The artist perceived these simple primordial truths with his whole being. there is nothing sad, it takes place in full light, with the sun, which illuminates everything with a golden light.