Exhibition on Screen: Vincent Van Gogh - A New Way

Some new info about Van Gogh. Gave it as a birthday gift to my son. He loves it! It's worth the price.

I have greatly enjoyed all the Exhibition on Screen videos. They highlight interesting and less commonly known facts about the artists.

I search for art documentaries that can be inspiring. I love it when the artist's work can be portrayed in a way that catches your imagination. I also love it when an artist has reached the heights of immortality and their artwork seems to hold some greater meaning. Unfortunately most art documentaries don't capture the spirit of the artist or his work, but there are some special ones out there and I have found this series "Exhibition on Screen" to have a few inspiring documentaries. This one on Van Gogh really shows him as one of the great immortal artists, which I found inspiring because I was never that inspired by him before. He comes across as one of those figures from history like a Rembrandt or Caravaggio who lived and died as unappreciated artists in their own time, but rose to be giants when later generations came to see the true magic of their genius. What I found most intriguing was "the Wheatfield with Crows" painted shortly before his suicide shows a haunted scene with an ominous country dirt path leading to the unknown.

I enjoyed learning more about Van Gogh's art and seeing pieces that are different than the usual ones that are often featured. I would like to see more of these 'Exhibition on Screen' DVDs.

We really enjoyed this documentary about Van Gogh taking a tour through his life, movement, growth, the relationship with his brother with readings of many of his letters and where he was when he created many of the paintings, amazing man.

This is A film that I would say any aspiring artist should view. Moving and wonderful hare pictures.it was like listening to Vincent Van Gogh talk about his life. I loved it.

I admit I did not watch the entire video because at some point the people working for the VG museum apparently were denigrating VG and his work saying he did not draw well etc. Why would they do that? It makes them look ignorant imo. I have a much better VG video called Van Gogh's Van Goghs which is no longer available only on vhs maybe. I recommend that instead.This is the second Pictures on Exhibition video that I have not been too thrilled with. Unfortunately I bought two of this one and it was too late to return it when I found the other one. I may sell it on ebay..

I very much like the presentation of Vincent's work in this documentary. Good historical facts. Fast shipping. My expectations have been met.

Everything you need to know about Vincent vanGogh, about his life, his struggles, his works and in which period of his life they were produced. There are, also, many quotes from his correspondence with his brother Theo which help to understand the man and artist. Very informative movie. I can only recommend.

At first I wondered whether this documentary would be worth the cost of the DVD. I hesitated slightly and asked myself: “What more remains to be discovered and said about an artist so well documented and known as Vincent Van Gogh?”I have read his illuminating — and deeply moving — letters to his brother Theo and many books about him. To the extent anyone can know a stranger, I feel I know him better than I do many other well-known artists. Also, there are more films about him than his contemporaries. These have given me insight as well. But I guess my love of Vincent won out here. Plus in the background there was that old chap called Curiosity whispering in my ear: “What if…?” Yes, exactly. What if there is more to be understood and appreciated? So curiosity prevailed over parsimony with me, and now I’m glad it did. This film, beautifully crafted, took me to some new places in the artist’s life, art and psychology.It makes sense, actually. If anybody should be in a position to know this artist and his work with detailed intensity, it ought to be the Dutch curators and researchers at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, people who owe their professional lives and careers to Vincent. They are here in this DVD to enlighten us and they do not disappoint. Although their love and admiration of the artist is real, they are calm and sober in their assessments of him as a man and artist. As it should be as professionals. I like the tone and approach.We are given plenty of early background sketches of the artist before he was an artist. Actually, he didn’t know what he was or wanted to be or become. This ate away at his soul. At first, aged 19, he went into the family art trade. He worked around art and artists at Goupil & Co., a French marketing firm of art in Europe. He liked the art but hated the job, detesting bureaucracy and salesmanship. He wasn’t a persuader. It embarrassed him to try to make people like things so that the firm could make money. He felt it was shameful, not an occupation befitting an honest man. In this way he was always moral, true to his own convictions of how a person should live. He couldn’t be what the job wanted him to be, so he did the right and logical thing and quit.This exasperated his father, a Protestant preacher in a country church. How could he turn down a career that many other young men would envy doing? Did he really know what he was doing? Did he care how it would affect the family, what others would think of him and his family? Was he selfish? What’s wrong with him?Vincent’s morality took him ever deeper into the Scriptures and the church. He sought solace in God. He saw the Bible as a roadmap of a journey, whatever it was and wherever it was taking him. He couldn’t do it alone, or even with the assistance of others around him. He needed a higher, wiser source. He needed miracles to survive.So he went into a seminary and passionately studied Protestant Christianity. He would become an evangelist and missionary. He would spread the good word to others and tell the stories of how he was saved by it and how it would save them as well. He ached to help others, to somehow be relevant in the world, to have an existence that made sense to him and answered the question of why he was born.He went into one of the poorest parts of Europe once he was ready to evangelise — the coal-mining district of the Borinage in southwestern Belgium, a grim, brutal place of mines, slag heaps, poverty, ill health and desperation. More than many others, these people needed help. They struggled to earn their bread and pay their rents, yet bread alone was not what they needed. They needed what Vincent had needed — a higher love filled with wisdom, something to give them direction and hope. So in this way Vincent projected his own life onto others, which is what missionaries do. Once saved, they want to save others.But it didn’t work. Shy and solitary by nature, he couldn’t preach well. He couldn’t tell others how to live. Same old thing: he was not a persuader. He couldn’t sell anything, not even salvation, and later on he couldn’t sell his beautiful art, not that he tried. In fact, he did the opposite, almost worked against it.For years this mystified me. Why use a gift to make beautiful things then hide the beauty of these things away from the world? Why do so much and expect so little or nothing in return? Was he a masochist? A martyr? A sufferer for humanity for its many sins? Why the self-punishment, humiliation, destruction? Of course there can never be easy answers because human psychology is complex. Some scholars say a strain of madness ran through the Van Goghs. Some relatives of Vincent had it. So did his sister Willemina. But even if true this explanation fails to fully satisfy. It’s too pat, too simplistic. Other factors must have been operating too. Of course they were. But what were they?One of the great virtues of this documentary is its understanding of this, its cultural appreciation of Vincent’s background. And it provides a piece of the puzzle I was looking for, and had been for years. The key, according to one of the curator’s at the museum, was Vincent’s Protestantism. The curator’s name is Louis van Tilborgh and he centres Vincent’s religious ethic in his family life and upbringing, a family led, as previously mentioned, by a religious patriarch.What was this ethic? Perhaps it was best described by the German sociologist and philosopher Max Weber (1864-1920) in his seminal work, “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”. Although van Tilborgh does not mention Weber, the spirit of Weber exists in everything he says about Vincent. And this is some of what van Tilborgh has to say in the film:“The Protestant work ethic says you should not be rewarded for what you do because in the end it is God who decides. You do not know if you are rewarded or not. How you do it is to simply organise your work as economically or as healthily and rationally as possible. That’s the Protestant work ethic. So Van Gogh is not a romantic genius who has inspirations. No, you simply do your work. And in terms of fame of course you do not want it because it, to a certain extent, will spoil you.”“We tend to think of Van Gogh as an avant-garde artist, but in fact he was quite old-fashioned. Drawing remains the main thing for an artist, so he started that way. He started in the traditional way of becoming an artist in the 19th century. You start drawing and you have to do a lot of it before you take up your brush.”“When Catholics want to become worthy of God they go to cloisters and pray…Protestants have a duty to show in their work that they are worthy of God. And how do they do that? By doing the work as well as possible. That’s how you get obsessed and driven men, and that’s what happened to Van Gogh…You have to choose the best occupation to find your position in life. And he really believed that if you want to do something in life it had to be small, not large. You didn’t have to join a large institution.”So the Academy was never for Vincent. Nature and life were sufficient. They would be his teachers, the voice and touch of God through all He had created. What better way? Only with this insight, this understanding, could Vincent become an artist.So now I get it. If he had been Catholic or anything else, he would not be the Vincent we know. Likewise, the works that exist would be different. But they — these works — are as they are because he was true to who he was. He did not compromise. He did not dilute his essence. He remained pure and we feel that purity when we look. Of course we do. It’s why we love him. We feel the honesty. We see it and it translates. You can’t manufacture this. It’s there and invites us in.By the end Vincent, his ethic, and his art had become one. His mind foundered, his body gave out, but he gave his all to be worthy of God. It wasn’t for him or others to decide. Others — those critics, buyers, whomever — could think what they wanted. Vincent’s worth and work in the eyes of God were what mattered. And so he sacrificed himself to this idea, the proof of which hangs in galleries throughout the world, and especially in Amsterdam in the museum named after him.Would he have approved of the museum? Probably not. He wouldn’t even have liked the name. He didn’t use Van Gogh. Never signed his pictures with it. Too much to be saddled with. Too much aggravating family history. He preferred Vincent — simple, direct, informal, intimate. That was him. Or a simplicity mixed with great complexity. He lived that paradox. He remained true to who he was. This is his greatness and why the art contains that greatness.Many films have been made about Vincent and will continue to be made. We can’t shake free of him because he’s a kind of mirror for us. We know him when we look because we want to know the better parts of ourselves as well. We want to be as pure and honest as we once were as children. We don’t want to lose ourselves in the madness of the world and its demands. We want to be worthy of whatever our idea or conception of God is. We want to honour this chance of life by honouring ourselves humbly and modestly as Vincent did. This is the important lesson for us and the film is brilliant in pointing it out to us. If He exists, God bless the curators of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. You are not likely to see a more insightful film of Vincent and his art.

I bought this to send to my brother in Australia. He’s a complete van Gogh fan and likes all sorts of “progressive” artists. I’d realised that there was a series on Sky Arts TV called “Exhibition on Screen” where the viewer is taken round an exhibition of a particular artist while the artists life story is told, key people in the gallery and researchers give their views and the pictures are explained in a specific order. The series is superb though I’m not interested in all the episodes. However, Vermeer, da Vinci, van Gogh and Rembrandt fascinated me. I thought I’d buy this one first and watch the price on the others to see if I can get any cheap sales! If you're an art fan you'll love this.

a new look at his life

I have to admit to being something of a SEVENTH ART addict. In fact I treat Phil Grabsky as the go-to DVD creator when it comes to the arts. It would be easy to assume that everything that can be said about Van Gogh has already been said, and this may be the case, but in this format and with this quality of production I do feel that a further advance has been achieved. The a many facets to the production and to the exhibition upon which it focuses, but to me the observation son the Scottish artist Lachlan Goudie were the most insightful. The test for a DVD of this type must be that it merits repeated viewings, just like the many original paintings themselves, and from my point of view it passes that test with flying colours