A fascinating survey of the enduring human love affair with the exotic and the strange, and its impact on Western culture Exotic explores our obsession with the lure of distant lands and their promise of the weird and wonderful, the beautiful and grotesque. Through a host of evocative images, this book shows how the absorption of 'the foreign,' through arts, design, architecture, and other cultural elements, has consistently enriched Western society, contributing to it cultural dynamism and artistic energy. Exotic's focus is especially relevant to the modern globalized world in which our engagement with cultures and traditions from around the globe is easier – and potentially more fraught – than ever before.

A survey of Vincent van Gogh's brief but astonishingly eventful career.

Vincent van Gogh found tranquility and stimulation in the landscape about him, and in his paintings of fields and meadows he sought to represent eternal truths about humanity and nature. The challenges of depicting fields provide keys to understanding the development of Van Gogh's unique creative process. This book was published to accompany the Toledo showing of the exhibition VAN GOGH: FIELDS, February 23-May 18, 2003. The exhibition brought together 27 selections of the artist's landscapes from each phase of his short, intense career.

And his development as a visual artist. Van Gogh considered reading to be "a matter of importance that greatly influences one's work," and though he resolutely avoided the anecdotal and illustrative in his art, his oeuvre is nonetheless marked by his literary pursuits. In this study, Sund reveals the multiple and often subtle ways in which Van Gogh used nonnarrative imagery to evoke beloved texts. Citing primary sources, she demonstrates that Van Gogh considered French.

A volume which explores Van Gogh's oeuvre through two fundamental aspects of his artistic identity: his love for the countryside and his attachment to the city. Admired for his light-filled landscapes as much as for his impassioned portraits, Vincent van Gogh was an impetuous painter with a cavalier disregard for convention when it suited him. At the same time he was a sophisticated thinker, fluent in several languages, and trained as an art dealer. Though often plagued by several doubts about his work, he was immensely ambitious and ultimately had a clear sense of his oeuvre as a whole and the place it was to take in the history of art. Such apparently contradictory positions define much of Van Gogh's life and artistic output. They are also at the basis of this volume, which explores Van Gogh's oeuvre through two fundamental aspects of his artistic identity: his love for the countryside as a stable, never-changing environment and his attachment to the city as the center of fast-moving, modern life. The catalog features works by Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cezanne, Paul Gauguin, Jean-Francois Millet, Georges Seurat, Camille Pissarro, Charles Francois Daubigny, Anton Mauve; prints after Daubigny, Daumier, Millet, that Van Gogh himself collected and copied as well as etchings and aquatints by Pissarro and Cezanne; and five letters written by Van Gogh to friends, colleagues, and art critics. It accompanies an exhibition at Complesso Monumentale del Vittoriano that begins on February 20, 2011.

An original interpretation of the final years of Van Gogh's career, exploring the people and places in his late paintings The years prior to Van Gogh's death in 1890 were pivotal to the painter's brief artistic career. He was working in the South of France and intent on creating new work which would advance his career. Van Gogh set about developing compositions that were informed by the natural world surrounding him, by the poets and lovers he encountered in literature, and by the individual models he was depicting. The process of his imaginative transformations has never been explored, and this will provide the opportunity to present significant new insights into the much-loved painter's life. The catalogue features an incredible range of ambitious canvases and important works on paper. It presents new research on themes including the artist's innovative approach to exhibiting his work and the varied literary sources that inspired his characters and compositions. These topics are rarely written about in relation to this well-known artist and are bound to expand both scholarly and public interpretations of Van Gogh's remarkable oeuvre. Published by National Gallery Global/Distributed by Yale University Press Exhibition Schedule: The National Gallery, London (14 September 2024-19 January 2025)