Verso V

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) - Pollard Willows With Setting Sun, 1888


Coutances

Un dimanche aprés-midi, à Coutances
Dans une chambre d'hôtel moyen, sans étoiles
Le soleil passait à travers des rideaux de voiles
Un soleil frais

Je me suis levé bien tard, ce matin
Trop tard pour le petit déjeuner
Je suis sorti, sans rien manger
Je me suis rangé derriére la queue de la boulangerie
La ville était toute habillée de dimanche et de soleil
Un soleil frais

Sur un banc d'un jardin public, je me suis recueilli
Avec un sablé et un pain raisin comme seule compagnie
Mais qu'est ce que je suis venu faire ici?
Entre deux vacances
Un dimanche aprés-midi à Coutances

Dick Annegarn

Darkness Visible

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) - Olive Trees in the Sun, 1889


'I became insane. With long intervals of horrible sanity.'

Edgar Allan Poe

You Still Lookin' At Me?

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890). The most recently discovered portrait photograph of Vincent van Gogh, found in the collection of his cousin, Anton Mauve. Research suggests that it was taken when Vincent was working in Goupil's in The Hague, so he would have been between sixteen and twenty years of age.


"The noeme of Photography is simple, banal; no depth: "that has been". I know our critics: What! a whole book (even a short one) to discover something I know at first glance? Yes, but such evidence can be a sibling of madness. The Photograph is an extended, loaded evidence - as if it caricatured not the figure of what it represents (quite the converse) but its very existence, The image, says phenomenology, is an object-as-nothing. Now, in the Photograph, what I posit is not only the absence of the object; it is also, by one and the same movement, on equal terms, the fact that this object has indeed existed and that it has been there where I see it. Here is where the madness is, for until this day no representation could assure me of the past of a thing except my intermediaries; but with the Photograph, my certainty is immediate: no one in the world can undeceive me. The Photograph then becomes a bizarre medium, a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest, shared hallucination (on the one hand "it is not there", on the other "but it has indeed been"): a mad image chafed by reality."

Roland Barthes

"'But I don't want to go among mad people, ' Alice remarked.
'Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat. 'We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.'
'How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.
'You must be,' said the Cat, 'or you wouldn't have come here.'"

Lewis Carroll

"In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom!"

J. G. Ballard

"The extreme limit of wisdom, that's what the public calls madness."

Jean Cocteau

"Psychoanalysis can unravel some of the forms of madness; it remains a stranger to the sovereign enterprise of unreason. It can neither limit nor transcribe, nor most certainly explain, what is essential in this enterprise."

Michel Foucault

The Man Who Painted Shoes

Vincent van Gogh - Shoes (1888)

"Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together."

"I dream my painting, and then I paint my dream."

"I want to touch people with my art. I want them to say 'he feels deeply, he feels tenderly'."

"The emotions are sometimes so strong that I work without knowing it. The strokes come like speech."

"I am not an adventurer by choice but by fate."

Vincent van Gogh

Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil)

Exhibit A:



Adolf Hitler - Flowers (date unknown)

'Anyone who sees and paints a sky green and a field blue should be sterilised.'

Adolf Hitler

Exhibit B:



Vincent Van Gogh - Starry Night (1889)

'The night is even more richly coloured than the day...If only you pay attention to it you will see that certain stars are citron-yellow, others have a pink glow, or a green, blue and forget-me-not brilliance. And without expatiating on this theme it should be clear that putting little white dots on a blue-black surface is not enough.'

Vincent Van Gogh