Any good books on the subject?

I recently saw some Van Gogh paintings and people really love/talk a lot about them, but it seems to me to be a bunch of white people just doing white people stuff.

Look at the wikipedia page for The Starry Night

Lots of words about what he meant and his mental state at the time, even tho he himself didn't talk much about it and sent it off with 9 other paintings.

Was it common for painters to support themselves with their art at the time? Is it common in history to have such a class of people? What sort of people brought the paintings? What did they think of them? What were the paintings made from? Where were those materials from and how where they made? Were painters considered "Artist" at the time, or more of a technical crafts man, like a black smith. How much money did they make? When did people decorating themselves and their environments turn in to "Art" for white people? Etc etc.

Those sorts of questions and answers are much, much more interesting to me than the mental state of some dude.

Maybe I'm just discribing an Art History book, but don't know enough to know what I don't know.

edit: also, dude cuts off his ear and then stays in a two story hospital room for a year that catered to the rich? I thought the dude was poor?

  • happybadger [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    In addition to John Berger and Ways of Seeing, Walter Benjamin is the other big name for a foundation in Marxist art theory: https://www.reddit.com/r/modernart/comments/mpikm5/walter_benjamin_the_work_of_art_in_the_age_of/

    I also run that subreddit with at least one other mod from here so it is/will be a socialist art subreddit. Modernism is an extremely radical period with a lot to teach us.

    edit: I also like that you intuited most of the big questions of Marxist art criticism. Art as a culmination of productive forces, as a commodity versus something with cultic significance, as superstructural spectacle and class warfare. The other big thing I'd point you in the direction of is the anticolonial side of modernism with movements like Negritude. It provided a really interesting counterweight to movements based around colonial extraction like Japonisme/Chinoiserie/cubism. Art as understanding wider psychic phenomenon, like the transition from machine worship and utopianism in futurism to the terrified babel of Dada and focused reform efforts of Constructivism/Social Realism in the wake of WW1, is also super interesting from our perspective.