Research Question for “Vincent’s Bedroom in Arles”

My question is what made Vincent Van Gogh paint 3 different versions of the same paintings

and if possible, to find out why he changed the pictures of people on the frame as well as the colors.

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Poem and Painting pairings for the Research Project

Please reply to this post with your choice of poem and painting from the following list of six pairs for this semester’s Research Project .  Look at the poems and paintings here:

1. “Starry Night ” by Vincent van Gogh (1889) and “The Starry Night” by Anne Sexton (1961)
2. “Girl Before a Mirror” by Pablo Picasso (1932) and “Before the Mirror” by John Updike (1996)
3. “Nude Descending a Staircase ” by Marcel Duchamp (1912) and “Nude Descending a Staircase” by X. J. Kennedy (1961)
4. “American Gothic” by Grant Wood (1930) and “American Gothic” by John Stone (1998)
5. “Vincent’s Bedroom in Arles” by Vincent van Gogh (1888) and “Van Gogh’s Bed” by Jane Flanders (1985)
6. “Mourning Picture” by Edwin Romanzo Elmer (1890) and “Mourning Picture” by Adrienne Rich (1965)

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Noble Savage

In the website http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Noble_savage, you will find everything you need to know about noble savage. It states that noble savage first appeared in 1672 in Dryden’s “The Conquest of Granada”  

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Hills Like White Elephants

The story is about a man and a girl waiting for the train to Madrid.  The two of them sits down by the store located next to the train station and are drinking beer till the train arrives.  The girl mentions that the hills look like white elephants but the man disagrees.  Then they start to talk about this simple operation that the girl will be having in Madrid.  As they converse, the girl is angry at the man and tells him to stop talking.  Then the train is about to come and the man gets up to move the baggage and comes back and asks if the girl is okay. The girl responds by saying that she’s fine.

I did not quite understand what this story was about so I searched for detailed summary of this story and found out that the girl and the man were couples and the girl was pregnant.  They assume that the operation is abortion and they are on their way to have the operation in Madrid. I did not know why the play was titled “Hills Like White Elephants” so I looked it up and found out that the hills made the girl foresee the birth of the baby and the color white represented the innocence and purity of the unborn baby.

References

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/990496/ernest_hemingways_hills_like_white.html

http://www.gummyprint.com/blog/hills-like-white-elephants-literary-analysis/

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Guernica

You can see much more detail by looking at the image of “Guernica” here or here, rather than on the photocopy I distributed in class.  You can also try looking online for other copies of it–there are various sites that show it.  If  you find a better copy, please let us know so we can look at it, too!

For homework, do a bit of online research.  Post a comment in response to this post in which you 1-describe what this source tells you about the painting, and 2-explain how you know you can trust this source.

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