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VINCENT VAN GOGH:
Excerpts from the Letters
SIMULTANEOUS CONTRASTS OF LINES AND FORMS
To Emile Bernard, Arles, beginning half August 1888
When are you going to show us studies of such vigorous soundness again? I
urgently invite you to do it, although I most certainly do not despise your
researches relating to the property of lines in opposite motion--as I am not at all
indifferent, I hope, to the simultaneous contrasts of lines, forms. The trouble is-
you see, my dear comrade Bernard-that Giotto and Cimabue, as well as Holbein
and Van Dyck, lived in an obeliscal-excuse the word--solidly framed society,
architecturally constructed, in which each individual was a stone, and all the
stones clung together, forming a monumental society. When the socialists
construct their logical social edifice - which they are still pretty far from doing-
I am sure mankind will see a reincarnation of this society. But, you know, we are
in the midst of downright laisser-aller and anarchy. We artists, who love order and
symmetry, isolate ourselves and are working to define only one thing.
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