Vincent Van Gogh is remembered as one of history’s must successful designers. His designs, including the Starry Night and Sunflowers, have proven perenially popular, appearing on purses, umbrellas, scarves, inspirational posters, calendars, greeting cards, books, cereal boxes, pharmaceutical advertisements, and countless other products in the century after his death. Van Gogh’s designs, it would seem, have transcended the traditional relationship of contingency between design and product, where design is attendant to the product which bears it. It seems that these roles have been reversed by Van Gogh. The purse is secondary to the print of a cafe at night; the umbrella is nothing but a carrier for the print of a field at night.

It is tempting to see in the work of Vincent Van Gogh a design sensibility so satisfactory that design exists for the sake of design itself. It would be a folly to take this position however. For the work of Vincent Van Gogh is a product in itself: the product of culture. Van Gogh’s designs are evocative of intellect and a sort of bohemian sympathy. The irony inherent in his work, where concepts like the priceless, unique status of the original and the possibility that personal, subjective “expressiveness” may be understood objectively as “truth” by an observer are contrasted with industrial mass-production and the postulate of the possibility that personal, subjective “expressiveness” may be understood objectively as “truth” by an observer, shows Van Gogh as a forerunner to pop art and post-modernism.