In Defence of Marxism

He originally intended to be a priest. His work brought him into contact with the lower classes of society, peasants and miners. His earliest work consists of drawings of miners and workers, of peasants bent double by toil. This is not the idealised picture we find in Milet, but a harsh realism, softened by a feeling of human solidarity and sympathy for the downtrodden and oppressed of the earth. He entered their homes and shared their bread.

Vincent himself shared some of the problems of these people: he was poor and never had any money. He often went hungry himself. All the painting of this period is characterised by fierce honesty. In these paintings we see, not the idealised picture of "the dignity of labour", no trace of sentimentality, but gnarled hands, prematurely aged faces and bodies crippled by hard labour. Here are peasants eating potatoes - their main source of sustenance.

He took up with prostitutes and had to be supported by his brother. Finally, his parents forced him to return home. There he continued to paint workers and peasants around the family home. All his time was spent on painting, which became an obsession.

At this time the Impressionists were transforming art. Here was an entirely new way of looking at things. It stirred his imagination. Vincent moved to Paris, to be near to the centre of this revolution in art. He did self-portraits, landscapes, still lifes. And his art underwent a transformation. Whereas his early paintings of workers and peasants were painted in dark, sombre colours, we now see a striking change: an explosion of colour.

He moved south to capture the strong colours of the southern sun. In 1888, he moved to Arles in Provence. Here he painted with passion: here the colours become extreme: bright yellow (sunflowers) and oranges (sun). The paint was slapped on thick with a palate knife instead of a brush, like a bricklayer applying cement, not an artist wielding a brush. The paint stands out of the canvas in thick blobs.

Here we have a man blinded by light. The themes of his paintings are drawn from everyday life - a painting of his room at Arles: a chair and a bed, little more. There is the influence of Japanese art in his prints. But there is an element of savagery and violence in these paintings: even the landscapes (cornfields) seem alive and somehow threatening. It is dangerous art. Here is a turbulent landscape: a wheat field with crows creates a sensation not of tranquillity but menace.

His mind became deranged by personal tragedy: His famous painting of a starry night was painted while he was confined in a lunatic asylum, a pathetic vision of freedom from the four walls of a prison, of forlorn hope amidst despair.

He was a man out of step with his age. This was not the kind of thing the French bourgeois wanted to see. After the shock of the Paris Commune, they wanted art that would act as a sedative. The bourgeois lovers of art were shocked by this art. What is great art if it has no power to shock?

Van Gogh made very little money. In his lifetime he did not sell a single painting. He died in 1890 in a state of isolation, poverty and despair. But in 1987 one of his paintings of sunflowers was sold for $40 million. It would now fetch a lot more. Art has become a mere commodity. Great art is merely a commodity with a very great price.