Mad Vinny for Kids

Vincent Van Gogh is hands down our favorite artist.
Visiting the Van Gogh museum is a wild ride through the perceptual dissolution
of a staggering genius. Over a hundred paintings spanning the artist’s
brief active career are displayed simply, in chronological order. Moving through the gallery one can watch
his vision evolve and refract from dark realism to unfiltered visions
of an alternate view of reality. It is a soul-wrenching, perception-altering
experience.

Obviously, in addition to color and style (for the record,
the Dowbrigade is seriously color-blind and equipped with a questionable
sense of style) the attraction of Van Gogh’s art is its total erasure of
the fine line between genius and madness. This seems to us an eminently
adult, potentially troublesome topic, so we were somewhat surprised to see
that Barbara Feldman’s latest "Surfing the Net With Kids" column in the
Boston
Globe
(no link in the electronic edition) was about old Vincent. However, after thinking about it, we realize it’s never too early to teach kids how tenuous and temporary sanity can be in an insane world, even if it does scare the shit out of the little tykes.

Besides giving us an excuse to post one of the great Self-Portraits
(from 1887), the article included links to some great Van Gogh sites, including
David Brook’s eight-year labor of love, a Complete
Online Catalog with every
one of Van Gogh’s 864 paintings, 1,037 drawings, 150 watercolors, 133 sketches
and 10 lithographs.

Also, a direct link to the Van
Gogh Museum in Amsterdam
features an amazing new multimedia exhibit called "Van Gogh and Gauguin"
as well as a 3-D walkthrough of the physical museum (windows only).

Finally, the National
Gallery of Art in Washington had
a visiting exhibit of 72 Van Goghs which closed in 1999, but the virtual
version is
still
up, with a very nice QuickTime tour with audio commentary about each painting.  Enjoy.