Van Gogh's Ghost Paintings [Hardcover]

One of the most significant and revealing paintings by the world famous artist Vincent van Gogh was never seen by anyone but the artist himself. The painting was so important to the artist that he painted it twice. He was so conflicted about the painting that he destroyed it twice. Cliff Edwards argues these two unique paintings Vincent created and destroyed are at least as important to understanding the artist and his work as are the two thousand or more paintings and drawings that do exist. In Van Gogh's Ghost Paintings, Edwards invites his readers on a journey that begins in a Zen master's room in Japan and ends at a favorite site of the artist, a ruined monastery and its garden in the south of France. Recovering the intent of van Gogh and the nature of his ghost paintings becomes a zen koan waiting to be solved. The solution offers access to the deepest levels of the artist's life as painter and spiritual pilgrim. The journey leads to the artist's choice of the biblical theme of the Garden of Gethsemane. The answer to the mystery of the lost paintings illuminates the relationship of joy and suffering, discovery and creation, religion and the arts in van Gogh's life and work. In this fascinating book Edwards solves a long-ignored mystery that provides a critical key to the relation of van Gogh's religion and art. This is a superb work. The author's fearless journey into the life of van Gogh and the interiority of the writing take the reader herself into solitude, loneliness, labor, triumph, and sorrow. It is a complex work . . . [W]e tread with this book the very path van Gogh himself hesitated on and wrestled with himself on: the seeming contradiction between the intellect and the spirit in art, a contradiction that survives to the present. --Elizabeth C. King, sculptor, university professor, 2002 Guggenheim Fellow, 2006 recipient of the Academy Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and author of Attention's Loop Cliff Edwards' Van Gogl#!