Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Ever Yours, Vincent

The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has recently launched a marvelous new website, presenting hundreds of Vincent van Gogh’s gorgeous and revealing letters. The massive website not only features high resolution scanned facsimiles of more than 900 letters to and from Van Gogh, but also translates the letters into English, and provides a richly annotated index of the letters, searchable by chronology, place, and correspondent.

Perhaps the most impressive feature is the menu called Concordance. Here, the letters are hyperlinked to profiles of people and images of artworks specifically referenced by van Gogh — all the cultural scraps that formed the artist’s world.

It's an absolutely splendid website, but the ironies are manifold. Of course there's the cosmic joke that an artist who never made enough money to pay his rent is now the object of international veneration. Additionally, a project like this only makes sense in a world in which access to the internet is fast and widely available. Sadly, it's that same speed and available that has marked the death of letter writing. Van Gogh's letters were uniquely beautiful even at a time when letter writing was common, and are even more so in a world where we can throw millions of words and images at each other with a keystroke, yet create so little of lasting value.

Finally however, the letters are a powerful remedy for the over saturated market that is the Van Gogh industry. It's hard to have an unjaded opinion of Van Gogh. Who even looks anymore at the millions of cheap reprints available in any Hallmark store? The letters invite a lengthy new look at a truly fascinating artist.

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