Art Minute

Van Gogh, so the story goes, used to be afraid of painting faces.  He found humans so strange and inaccessible a species, that he first attempted painting them without taking up the challenge of depicting their facial expressions at all.  In this vein, he obliged himself with a painful and diverse life, working as an art dealer, studying to become a minister in Amsterdam, failing to get a post in the church, living as an independent missionary among the Borinage miners.  Things changed when he discovered color in Paris, where he also met Seurat, Pissaro and Toulouse-Lautrec.  However, color did not help him to sell his paintings, and he committed suicide after managing to sell only one of his works.  The sign of the new times - his work is highly appreciated now, maybe because it somehow keeps us within the illusion of sanity, contemplating Van Gogh that crossed the limit in trying to understand human beings, losing his head in the process, but leaving us with the dowry - his loud and clear, unbounded and imaginative accomplishment.  At the threshold of eternity :

All this was a prelude to post one of my old-time favorites from Toulouse-Lautrec, another weirdo, a product and anti-product of the French culture of the time. Son of an aristocrat, at 12 he broke his left leg and at 14 his right leg.  The bones failed to heal properly, and his legs stopped growing.  His adult height was 1.5m. To escape his handicap, he invested himself wholly into his art and alcohol. He stayed in the Montmartre cartier of Paris, the center of the cabaret entertainment and bohemian life that he enjoyed painting so much. Circuses, dance halls, nightclubs, and racetracks - a new theme for too formal and romantic an art before the loud arrival of this short character. One of his most striking paintings, Alone:

I have been thinking recently about writing a paper on the institutionalization forces within French art development in the 19th century.  It seems to be a nice example of institutional entrepreneurship, where impressionists, such as Monet and Manet, having their paintings refused at the most legitimizing event - the Paris Salon, managed to convince the public during their lifetime about the value hidden in their paintings using alternative Salons and other 'social movement' tools.  Others, such as Van Gogh or Gauguin, simply refused to participate or play the game - and were left out of the legitimate art community.  Thus, the choice within society is either to conform, to try to change the rules, or to refuse to play the game altogether.  The outcomes seem to also be predetermined in a way...