A Pair of Shoes  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Revision as of 13:21, 16 April 2014; view current revision
←Older revision | Newer revision→
Jump to: navigation, search

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Shop


Featured:

A Pair of Shoes[1][2] is a painting by Vincent van Gogh painted in June 1895 at Auvers-sur-Oise. The painting depicts a pair of worn out shoes.

Martin Heidegger mentions this particular work in The Origin of the Work of Art as an example of a painting that reveals (aletheia) a whole world.

Artworks, Heidegger contends, are things, a definition that raises the question of the meaning of a "thing." As this concept is so broad, he narrows down the definition to "mere things," meaning inanimate objects. He then chooses to examine A Pair of Shoes painted by Vincent Van Gogh, looking to the work to establish a distinction between artwork and other "things."

Overview

Van Gogh made Pair of Shoes (F255) from a pair of boots he purchased at a flea market. He wore the boots on an extended rainy walk to create the effect he wished for this painting, which may have been a tribute to the working man. The Van Gogh Museum speculates that they may also be symbolic for Van Gogh of his "difficult passage through life." Of his walking through mud to make the shoes look more worn and dirty, Van Gogh was known to say "Dirty shoes and roses can both be good in the same way."

Van Gogh's friend and fellow artist, John Peter Russell, received Van Gogh's Three Pairs of Shoes (F332) in 1886. Russell had painted a portrait of Van Gogh that he dearly loved. In exchange for the portrait he had given Van Gogh, Russell selected Three Pairs of Shoes and a lithograph copy of Worn Out (Eternity's Gate) (F997) that Van Gogh made in 1882. Russell selected these works at a time when Van Gogh had begun to make more colorful work. Russell's selections indicate that he understood who Van Gogh was and the messages about the peasant or working man that he wished to convey through his work.

See also




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "A Pair of Shoes" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Personal tools