Lust For Life

Gems from Irving Stone's novelistic "biography" of Vincent Van Gogh:

A motto from Millet (160): "I would rather say nothing than express myself feebly."

(My translation from the French).

Van Gogh remarks to Lautrec on his paintings of Montmartre dance hall girls (245): "They are authentic and penetrating commentaries on life. That is the very highest kind of beauty..."

A naturalist manifesto from Zola (276): "First, we think all truth beautiful, no matter how hideous its face may seem. We accept all of nature, without any repudiation. We believe there is more beauty in harsh truth than in a pretty lie, more poetry in earthiness than in all the salons of Paris. We think pain good, because it is the most profound of human feelings. We think sex beautiful, even when portrayed by a harlot and a pimp. We put character above ugliness, pain and prettiness, and hard, crude reality above all the wealth in France. We accept life in its entirety, without making moral judgments. We think the prostitute as good as the countess, the concierge as good as the general, the peasant as good as the cabinet minister, for they all fit into the pattern of nature, and are woven into the design of life!"

Remark attributed to Monticelli (300): "We must put in ten years of hard labour, so that in the end we will be able to paint two or three authentic portraits."

Van Gogh commenting on a canvas he produced in Arles (331): "It is good...It is well realized."

Van Gogh explaining to Gaugin his "theology" (337): "The fields that push up the corn, and the water that rushes down the ravine, the juice of the grape, and the life of a man as it flows past him, are all one and the same thing. The sole unity in life is the unity of rhythm. A rhythm to which we all dance; men, apples, ravines, ploughed fields, carts among the corn, houses, horses, and the sun. The stuff that is in you, Gaugin, will pound through a grape tomorrow, because you and the grape are one. When I paint a peasant labouring in the field, I want people to feel the peasant flowing down into the soil, just as the corn does, and the soil flowing up into the peasant. I want them to feel the sun pouring into the peasant, into the field, the corn, the plough, and the horses, just as they all pour back into the sun. When you begin to feel the universal rhythm in which everything on earth moves, you begin to understand life. That alone is God."