It takes effort to come to grips with the paintings of Vincent van Gogh. Seemingly every aspect of his brief careerβroughly ten yearsβand his short lifeβhe killed himself at thirty-sixβhas been so thoroughly probed, analyzed, documented, and even popularized that itβs almost impossible to see his best known efforts. Despite the obvious intensity of feeling that emanates from Van Goghβs paintings, itβs difficult to ignore the horrible familiarity of those writhing sunflowers and thick-set figures, those tipped interiors and sun-baked landscapes, in order to confront them freshly and directly. Itβs not easy to get past the distancing layers of association surrounding them, banish the memories of the countless reproductions of his workβnot to mention the pop culture versions of his biographyβand concentrate on what is really there before us.
Whatever we think about Walter Benjaminβs theories about the effects of mechanical reproduction on perceptions of works of art, whether we agree with him that the βauraβ of celebrated paintings and sculptures is weakened by the proliferation of their images or, on the contrary, believe that media-bred familiarity can turn particularly famous works of art into pure βauraββicons of themselves, devoid of physical presenceβitβs clear that ubiquity affects our responses. Understanding Van Goghβs real achievement and accounting for his significance to the evolution of modernism can be, as they say, challenging. Itβs altogether too easy merely to recognizethose archetypal images, know where they are located on our mental maps of the history of art, and let it go