Vincent Van Gogh

Whole Green Catalog 1,000 Best Things for You and the Earth Edited Michael W. Robbins Foreword by Bill McKibben Introduction by Renee Loux Rodale: 390 pp., $29.99 It's about time. Modeled on the "Whole Earth Catalog," this compendium of products, easy on the Earth, ranges from kitchenware to cars to pet food. Lush and stylish, the book lists everything you need to make you want to go off-grid: sustainable skateboards, products to help you recycle, appliances, biofuel and cashmere.

Did Caravaggio use optical devices - essentially transforming his studio into a giant camera obscura  - to make his paintings? Pegged to their big exhibitions this winter, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Getty and the Norton Simon have organized a range of talks with guest scholars and scholar-scientists, and a LACMA lecture next week promises to address that question head-on. Admission to all of the lectures noted below is free, but some museums suggest advance reservations.

On Saturday, 25 May 1890, Vincent Van Gogh wrote to a critic who had praised his work urging him to keep any further comment to a minimum, "Because it is absolutely certain that I shall never do important things." Two months later the artist walked into the Auvers countryside, leaned his easel against a tree and shot himself below the heart.

What is it, exactly, about Van Gogh? For those of us with a vested interest in contemporary art, who spend much of our time immersed in the work of artists most Americans have never heard of, it is an important question to ponder from time to time - one that the Norton Simon Museum's temporary installation of an 1889 self-portrait on loan from the National Gallery of Art calls again to the fore. There is no more familiar face in all of modern art history: the piercing blue eyes; the gaunt, sallow features; the imagined spectacle of a severed ear (turned discretely away from the viewer in this, as in most, variations)

Vincent van Gogh, whose artistic brilliance and supposed madness have made him a focus of popular fascination, suffered not from epilepsy or insanity but from an inner-ear disorder that causes vertigo and ringing ears, a new analysis of his letters suggests. The authors of the study, reported today in the Journal of the American Medical Assn.

A still-life painting by Vincent Van Gogh has turned up in the home of a suburban Milwaukee couple who plan to sell it, a Chicago auction house said today. Leslie Hindman, who owns the auction house, said the painting, "Still Life With Flowers," was discovered by John Kuhn, a commercial real estate agent and part-time art prospector for Hindman. He recognized the painting as a Van Gogh last July when he saw it hanging on the couple's wall while he was examining antique furniture in their home.

Behind the impressive Vincent van Gogh retrospective that opened last week in two Dutch cities lay an idea to display works that the artist himself might have picked--if he were somehow resurrected and given several million dollars to pay insurance premiums on the collection. "We tried to select only those works of art that Vincent van Gogh would have shown," curator Louis van Tilborgh declared boldly in a recent interview.

With "Van Gogh's Van Goghs" drawing capacity crowds at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, it's clear the artist has star power. There aren't any other dead 19th century paupers with such a commanding presence in the 20th century media-entertainment complex. And as it is with stars, the fans want a piece of the celebrity.

What made Vincent van Gogh tick? More than a century after his death, he may be the world's most popular artist--and the most misunderstood.

Vincent Van Gogh didn't just work at things - he attacked them, eulogizes his grieving brother Theo in the Next Arena's revival of “Vincent.” As performed by French-born actor Jean-Michel Richaud, this insightful and often moving 1981 solo show penned by Leonard Nimoy transcends the usual clichés surrounding the high-maintenance artist with the tortured relationship to his aural appendage. Nimoy knows from ears, of course, but his script looks beyond merely sensational biographical episodes to the unifying themes in three principal facets of Vincent's adult life: God, love and art. As Theo admits during an imaginary tribute conducted a week after his brother's death, Vincent pursued all three with perhaps an overdeveloped sense of drama, but always with passion.

Vincent Van Gogh didn't just work at things - he attacked them, eulogizes his grieving brother Theo in the Next Arena's revival of “Vincent.” As performed by French-born actor Jean-Michel Richaud, this insightful and often moving 1981 solo show penned by Leonard Nimoy transcends the usual clichés surrounding the high-maintenance artist with the tortured relationship to his aural appendage. Nimoy knows from ears, of course, but his script looks beyond merely sensational biographical episodes to the unifying themes in three principal facets of Vincent's adult life: God, love and art. As Theo admits during an imaginary tribute conducted a week after his brother's death, Vincent pursued all three with perhaps an overdeveloped sense of drama, but always with passion.

Leaving Van Gogh A Novel Carol Wallace Spiegel & Grau: 268 pp., $25 "Vincent wrote once in a letter that a man who commits suicide turns his friends into murderers. What does that make me?" writes Dr. Paul Gachet in Carol Wallace's riveting fictional memoir of his very real relationship with Vincent van Gogh. It is with this tone of fondness and regret that Gachet tells how Vincent first came to his house in Auvers on the banks of the Oise, after the ear episode, after his tumultuous summer with Cézanne and after leaving the asylums at Remy and Arles.

Whole Green Catalog 1,000 Best Things for You and the Earth Edited Michael W. Robbins Foreword by Bill McKibben Introduction by Renee Loux Rodale: 390 pp., $29.99 It's about time. Modeled on the "Whole Earth Catalog," this compendium of products, easy on the Earth, ranges from kitchenware to cars to pet food. Lush and stylish, the book lists everything you need to make you want to go off-grid: sustainable skateboards, products to help you recycle, appliances, biofuel and cashmere.

Using a thin beam of synchrotron X-rays generated by a particle accelerator, European scientists have reconstructed a portrait of a peasant woman painted by Vincent van Gogh that had been concealed beneath another painting for 121 years.

Actress Elizabeth Taylor can keep a Vincent van Gogh painting after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal by three people who said their great-grandmother was forced to sell the work before fleeing Nazi Germany in 1939. On Monday, the justices, without comment, refused to revive a lawsuit that demanded Taylor turn over the painting, "View of the Asylum and Chapel at Saint-Remy." Taylor has owned the painting, now worth an estimated $20 million, since 1963.

AMSTERDAM -- Art historians had known of the Van Gogh landscape drawing stored at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. But they had always wondered whether it was a copy of a completed painting. Now, at last, the painting itself has been discovered -- concealed under another painting in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Van Gogh Museum said Friday.

Van Gogh Suspects Nabbed: Four suspects, including a museum guard, have been arrested in the bungled theft of 20 Vincent van Gogh paintings worth hundreds of millions of dollars, police in Amsterdam announced Thursday. The paintings were recovered in an abandoned car about half an hour after the April 14 robbery, which would have been among the greatest art heists in history.

Is Rohrabacher aware that the works of Vincent Van Gogh, Emily Dickinson and James Joyce were not "something valued by others" at the time of their creation? Perhaps he would have urged these artists to stop "wasting their time." THERESA KARANIK Santa Monica

Actress Elizabeth Taylor can keep a Van Gogh painting that might have been illegally seized by the Nazis because the family that once owned it waited too long to ask for it back, a U.S. appeals court ruled Friday. Taylor, 75, bought the 1889 painting "View of the Asylum and Chapel at Saint-Remy" at a Sotheby's auction in London in 1963 for 92,000 British pounds -- about $257,000 at the time. She keeps it in her Los Angeles-area home.

A family that claimed a Vincent van Gogh painting at a Detroit museum rightfully belonged to them since it was sold during the Nazi era lost their case because they waited too long to sue. Graham Beal, director of the Detroit Institute of Arts, said it was a "tremendous relief" to know that the painting, called "Les Becheurs," will be staying put.