Van Gogh

Vincent Willem van Gogh (1853-1890) lived a very short life, but his creative life was even shorter - only the last ten years were devoted to painting. A hungry, almost beggarly existence, full of loneliness and contempt from others, titanic labor and self-forgetting search for calling, in the 20th century turned into worldwide interest and recognition. During his lifetime, van Gogh sold only one painting - for just 400 francs, and almost 100 years later at an auction in New York, one of his canvases was purchased for almost 100 million dollars. The biography of the artist, written by a French philosopher and writer, is based on correspondence with his brother Theo, as well as on the memories and testimonies of contemporaries; the book provides a detailed account of van Gogh's mental illness - the author, avoiding unambiguous interpretation of this issue, relies on the diagnoses of the doctors who treated the artist, as well as on the hypotheses of modern psychiatrists.