Abstract

Art

The article focuses on painter Vincent Van Gogh and his works. If anything, some of Van Gogh's most controlled paintings evince his state of mind as patently as those which show a reduced motor security and optical certitude. For painting was the anchor he believed held him back from lunacy, and he often painted motifs with an exquisiteness of observation in order to demonstrate, to himself as much as to his doctors and attendants, that he was in possession of himself, even as a patient in a home for the insane. Consider the first work he did at the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, in Saint-Remy, a few kilometers west of Aries, which he entered voluntarily. It is a brilliantly observed segment of the asylum garden, an effort simply to render the marvelous forms of a stand of irises, botanically exact in furled blossoms and bladed leaves, with a carpet of marigolds behind them and, in the upper right-hand corner, what look like daisies in chartreuse grass.