How to Know Van Gogh

FAIN: FZ-287321-22

Michael Eric Lobel
CUNY Research Foundation, Hunter College (New York, NY 10065-5024)

Research and writing of a book about the life and art of Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), with a focus on the artist’s lesser-known works and art interpretation.

This book on Vincent van Gogh, one of the most iconic modern artists, is meant to showcase what the humanities do best: to teach us that meaning is often found not in seeking definitive answers but in exploring enduring, difficult-to-answer questions. Rather than grasping for new, ostensibly shocking revelations—one of the most common ways of approaching the artist and his work—this project instead seeks to burrow into areas that prompt still more questions: Where did Van Gogh’s intense engagement with self-portraiture come from? In France, where his work underwent a seismic shift that made him into the artist we now know, what was his experience as an immigrant? And how do we understand his final period of illness without engaging in lurid speculation? Throughout, we engage with lesser-known and overlooked works to come to a broader and richer sense of Van Gogh’s art and its relationship to the times in which it was made.