In order to perfectly understand history of a country we must learn about the culture of the people who were living there during the time. Art is similar to this. There is a pattern in history's great artists where they are misunderstood by people of their time but later are revisited and their posthumous fame is incredible. What was happening during the time Van Gogh that was beyond the pail and caused him to not be famous until he was understood by younger generations?
If an artist is looking for fifteen minutes of fame they will jump right into what is popular at the time and have a short lived career and societies predecessors will not remember their name. With this said it is easy to assess that anyone who is considered to be truly great will not be tagged with the statement, "They were ahead of their time," just by coincidence.
Clive Belle says:
"In twelfth-century Europe a man might have been greatly moved by a Romanesque church and found nothing in a T’ang picture. To a man of a later age, Greek sculpture meant much and Mexican nothing, for only to the former could he bring a crowd of associated ideas to be the objects of familiar emotions."
He also mentions how the aesthetic emotion lies in personal experience, which is necessary to properly interpret a work of art. Wouldn't this be a contradiction if the personal experience felt by the artist was different than their future admirers? How would we know without the knowledge of the intention of the artist?
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