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Vincent van Gogh is without a doubt one of the most famous artists in the world. His unique and intense painting is immediately recognisable even by those who have no expertise in art. His fraught life and tragic suicide have made him a true modern icon and a symbol of the existential unease that began afflicting man with the industrial revolution, when life became increasingly faster and more alienating. The myth of Van Gogh has also been fuelled by literature and film: even in 1921 the German writer and art critic Julius Meier-Graefe published Vincent: Der Roman eines Gottsuchers (Vincent: the story of a man in search of God), followed by Lust for life in 1934 by Irving Stone; the latter book inspired the famous 1956 film of the same name by Vincent Minnelli, with a tormented Kirk Douglas in the role of Van Gogh and Anthony Quinn as Gauguin. Psychoanalysis, which has always found artists a fertile subject for study – Freud wrote on Leonardo and Luca Signorelli for example – also dedicated itself to the study of the Dutch artist and in 1922 Karl Jaspers “diagnosed” his illness as schizophrenia. In fact, it is more likely that Vincent suffered from epilepsy, which was aggravated by his unstable, peripatetic lifestyle and his extreme sensitivity.
(From an essay by Federica Armiraglio)
The volume is available at the Skira bookstore in via Torino Milan and in all Skira bookstores.
