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WebLinks: Contexts for Exploring Visual and Verbal Texts |
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Chapter 3 - Picturing Ourselves |
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The Web sites listed below offer you an opportunity to consider the van Gogh self-portrait on page 79 in the context of van Gogh’s other self-portraits, his biography, and his career as an influential and fascinating artist. How does your understanding of this painting change when you place it in a broader context? What research questions and ideas do these sites prompt?
http://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/collection/catalog/vgmpainting.asp?ARTID=40&LANGID=0&SEL=1&PERIOD=-1&SORT=2
The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam houses a huge collection of the artist’s paintings, as well as art from Van Gogh’s contemporaries. You might not be able to make it to Amsterdam this weekend, but you can take a virtual tour of the museum by clicking on the link above. It explores the artist’s different periods in Holland and France and documents Van Gogh’s increasingly somber and dark mood. This site also compares and contrasts the many self portraits Van Gogh made over the years.
http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/eurptg/29pc_vangogh.html
This link from the Art Institute of Chicago discusses the self portrait in the book, one of 35 he made during his career! Van Gogh liked to paint self portraits as a way of exploring new techniques in painting. The link above discusses Van Gogh’s interest in Seurat’s “dot technique,” which he employs in the self portrait.
http://www.nga.gov/education/classroom/self_portraits/act_van_gogh_closer.htm
http://www.nga.gov/education/classroom/self_portraits/act_van_gogh_anatomy.htm
At these websites at The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. you can actually adjust one of Van Gogh’s self portraits to smooth out the artist’s busy brushstrokes and see how striking the effect is. This website links some of Van Gogh’s art to the many letters he wrote to his brother, Theo. The website also puts forward an interesting thesis about why Van Gogh looks so solemn in his self portraits: he was not well known in the art world at the time and wanted to be taken seriously as an artist!
http://www.buehrle.ch/index.asp?lang=e&id_pic=85
The E.G. Büehrle Collection in Zurich, Germany contains large holdings of French Impressionist paintings, as well as some by Van Gogh. This site discusses Van Gogh’s affinities—and dislikes—for French Impressionists like Claude Monet.
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