Description
By (author) Unger Miles J.
Short /annotation:
The fascinating story of Vincent van Gogh’s two groundbreaking years in Paris, where he transformed himself from a provincial unknown into one of the world’s great visionary artists.
:
The fascinating story of Vincent van Gogh’s two groundbreaking years in Paris, where he transformed himself from a provincial unknown into one of the world’s great visionary artists.
Vincent Van Gogh arrived in the French capital on the last day of February 1886, a month short of his thirty-third birthday. He was a man beaten down by life, half-starved, and nearly broken psychologically. He was saved by his brother Theo, who provided him with room, board, and, most crucially, emotional support while he attempted to master the difficult craft of painting. Thus far, Vincent”s crude scenes of peasant life rendered in murky shades of brown and gray were both hackneyed and amateurish. Theo, a successful art dealer at a prestigious Parisian firm, dismissed them as gloomy, unappealing, and, worst of all, unmarketable.
By the time Vincent left Paris, almost exactly two years later, he’d transformed himself into one of the most original artists of the age, turning out works of hallucinatory intensity in vivid hues and stamped with his own distinctive personality. A Fire in His Soul chronicles this remarkable transformation. It’s a tale filled with tragedy and triumph, personal anguish and creative fulfillment, as Vincent, through sheer force of will, reinvents himself as a painter of unparalleled expressive power.
Along the way, the reader will discover an unfamiliar Van Gogh: not the solitary genius of the popular imagination, shunned by an uncomprehending world and conjuring masterpieces from the depths of his lonely soul. In Paris, he was at the center of a community of like-minded seekers. Here, Van Gogh was able to engage in a lively dialogue with fellow artists almost as daring as he was, expanding his notion of what art could and should be.
It was in the cafes and studios of Montmartre and in the grand galleries of the Louvre and Luxembourg, that Van Gogh received his artistic education—a crash course that at first disoriented him but ultimately sparked his creative breakthrough. Working alongside such legendary figures as Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Seurat, and Signac, Vincent perfected his technique and launched an artistic revolution.
Review quote:
“Miles Unger follows Vincent van Gogh’s time living in the bohemian Montmartre district, and its explosive effect on the painter’s work. No one can begin to consider him without acknowledging his strangely sacred place in the modern canon, rooted in our latent suspicion that madness is really a form of saintly enlightenment. How then to say anything fresh about this most widely exhibited, admired and discussed of artists? That is the hurdle, and also the spur to invention, faced by Miles Unger in A Fire in His Soul, a chronicle mostly of Van Gogh’s two years in Paris (from February 1886 to February 1888).”
Review quote:
“In his new book A Fire in His Soul, Miles J. Unger gives us Vincent van Gogh as we’ve never seen him before—abrasive, intransigent, egotistical, infuriating, and oh, so human! Prepare to be surprised, frustrated, and charmed anew as you get to know Vincent before he painted a single sunflower. Then follow him as he struggles with his demons in a battle that, sooner or later, we all have to fight ourselves.”
Review quote:
“Miles J. Unger brings Vincent Van Gogh vividly to life with this biography of his development as a painter. Unger has clearly done an impressive amount of research, relying not only on the well-known letters between Vincent and his brother Theo, but a host of other material from the period, starting with early reviews of Vincent”s wor
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