Vincent’s unsustainable daily newspaper – Il Sole 24 ORE

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Van Gogh’s life and art are one. A sort of nuclear fusion in which the torment of the creative act never leads to an ecstatic contemplation of one’s work. A body that of Vincent, unable to support the empathic nature of his being. In Rome at Palazzo Bonaparte, the exhibition centered on Van Gogh’s work is proving to be one of the most important in Italy at the moment; due to the booking it was extended until May.

Fifty works

The corpus consists of about fifty works from the richest collection created by private individuals (second only to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam) which then became a museum institution taking its name from the founder Hellen Kröller-Müller who shared the painter’s works especially the urgency to communicate through art. These include the paintings of everyday scenes, often peasants, which refer physical work to an exhausting dimension of the soul. Such as Women in the Snow Carrying Sacks of Coal from 1882.

Van Gogh describes the exhausting dimension of mining work that not even women escape, who, losing all contours of shapes and colors, are portrayed almost like a ramification worthy of the enormous sacks they carry. In this period and under the guidance of Anton Mauve at the Hague school, the artist mastered the technique of drawing by practicing to reproduce the same subjects, above all the human figures. An analysis of the heritage that the artist has produced documented through the correspondence he had with his brother Theo, brain activity at least as much as his painting, in which he illustrates and gives voice to all the phases of his work and inevitably of the life of him.

The letters to his brother Theo

He dedicated passionate, tumultuous letters to Theo; he listens to him and supports him, helps him to clarify as in a therapeutic training. He entrusts his vision, pains and hopes to the writings, aware that the time in which he lives will not recognize him any merit but that the future will do him justice and so he writes to him about his paintings: “… when they are really good I assure you that you will have created them as much as I…”.

Van Gogh grafts the material consistency of his becoming into painting. His work has enormously influenced the intellectual world mainly that of German Expressionism both in terms of psychiatry and art. It could not be otherwise if we look at two specific paintings: Old Man in Suffering (1882) and Old Man in Desperation (At the Gates of Eternity, 1890). Both works, of which the first can be considered a negative study of the second (a detail of the same figure is portrayed in an opposite position with respect to the following work), lead back to two specific branches of the same theme. An allegorical picture, the representation of pain and a psychiatric reading. A man bent over with his face in his hands to hide his desperation denounces a pain that dominates, turned towards himself, no opening to an external consolation but an uncontrollable cry that comes and breaks inside.