By Commerce with Works of Art

…It is by his activity, or if you want to, by the commerce with works of art, that an artist can only find himself. He cannot find himself by looking only at nature.

I do not pretend that it is easily given. Take the case of Van Gogh, he really started very badly: the first drawings of Van Gogh are more influenced by drawings he admired, than even by nature or even by art. They are really bad. If there would be only these early drawings of the first two years, well, one wouldn’t pay a cent for it. So it is by his activity, by his will, by his sensibility, by what he was, that he made these enormous strides…

…He fell into Paris in a period really, where there was made art everywhere around him and everything he digested, he understood, well, anyhow, he had a tremendous luck in a certain sense. But without his personality or what he was, he wouldn’t have been able to find what was good for him. He was pointillist for a while, we know, there are some paintings of him, but finally he declined it. And there was only one way, his own way of doing it. And this he found, and once found, well, there was no limit.

But how it came about, nobody can reconstruct that, that is not possible… There was Delacroix certainly who had an enormous influence on him, and all the copies he made of paintings he liked. He made even copies of Japanese prints. Later on, when he was in Arles, he was already very critical, he was very critical about Gauguin, he was very critical about Bernard, he felt himself rather sure about the road he went.