Vincent van Gogh on Being Either Black or White
The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh (New York Graphic Society, 1958).One must be careful not to fall back on opaque black — on deliberate wrong — and even more one has to avoid the white of a whitewashed wall, which means hypocrisy and everlasting Pharisaism. I must tell you that with evangelists it is the same as with artists. There is an old academic school, often detestable, tyrannical, the accumulation of horrors, men who wear a cuirass, a steel armor of prejudices and conventions; Their God is like the God of Shakespeare’s drunken Falstaff, le dedans dune eglise [the inside of a church].