It is not a certain conformity of manners that the painting of Van Gogh attacks, but rather the conformity of institutions themsel...ves. And even external nature, with her climates, her tides, and her equinoctial storms, cannot, after van Gogh's stay upon earth, maintain the same gravitation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Van Gogh was right in saying that the method he had chosen could be compared to that of caricature. Caricature had always been "ex...pressionist," for the caricaturist plays with the likeness of his victim, and distorts it to express just what he feels about his fellow man. As long as these distortions of nature sailed under the flag of humour nobody seemed to find them difficult to understand. Humourous art was a field in which everything was permitted, because people did not approach it with the prejudices they reserved for Art with a capital A. But the idea of a serious caricature, of an art which deliberately changed the appearance of things not to express a sense of superiority, but maybe love, or admiration, or fear, proved indeed a stumbling block as Van Gogh had predicted.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When van Gogh paints sunflowers, he reveals, or achieves, the vivid relation between himself, as man, and the sunflower, as sunflo...wer, at that quick moment of time. His painting does not represent the sunflower itself. We shall never know what the sunflower itself is. And the camera will visualize the sunflower far more perfectly than van Gogh can.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One could love reason like an Encyclopaedist and still be favorably inclined toward mysticism. Throughout the ages, up to the eyes... of van Gogh, when he looked at a coffee pot or a garden path, mysticism has expanded the human realm by all sorts of threshold experiences.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It shrinks my liver, doesn't it? It pickles my kidneys. Yeah. But what does it do to my mind? It tosses the sandbags overboard so ...the balloon can soar. Suddenly, I'm above the ordinary. I'm competent, supremely competent. I'm walking a tightrope over Niagara Falls. I'm one of the great ones. I'm Michelangelo molding the beard of Moses. I'm Van Gogh, painting pure sunlight. I'm Horowitz playing the "Emperor Concerto." I'm John Barrymore, before the movies got him by the throat.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the ...only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a p...sychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But how is one to make a scientist understand that there is something unalterably deranged about differential calculus, quantum th...eory, or the obscene and so inanely liturgical ordeals of the precession of the equinoxes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is thus that the few rare lucid well-disposed people who have had to struggle on the earth find themselves at certain hours of ...the day or night in the depth of certain authentic and waking nightmare states, surrounded by the formidable suction, the formidable tentacular oppression of a kind of civic magic which will soon be seen appearing openly in social behavior.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »