A challenging and riveting depiction of a great modern artist and his times.
This hugely readable (and for some contentious) book’s novelistic form draws together the daily events and behaviour that defined Vincent van Gogh’s character and the art for which he is famous. Always odd – isolated, awkward, argumentative – he had a pattern of violently reacting to people and ideas he did not agree with, and a lack of comprehension of the effects of his intensity on others became glaringly apparent early on.
Sacked from his uncle’s print dealing firm in The Hague (his younger brother, Theo, worked in the Paris branch for much of his career), van Gogh struggled briefly as an untrained teacher, first in Ramsgate, then in filthy, grime-coated London, starkly different from orderly Holland. Then, influenced by Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ, van Gogh determined to become an evangelical preacher, moving to the mining region known as the Borinage, near the Belgian border with France. Despairing at the unremitting poverty and grinding daily life, the peasants’ rejection of his attempts at preaching and his family’s shame at his failure, van Gogh experienced psychotic periods accompanied by self-neglect, culminating in his father’s unsuccessful attempt to place him in an asylum.
Yet a huge creative leap dragged him out of the abyss. He had always drawn assiduously, and avidly collected prints for study, but in 1885, influenced by Millet’s celebration of Dutch peasant themes, he finally began to paint, obsessively working on portraits of peasant women in their white Brabant bonnets, using bitumen as a background and brown bistre (made from beech soot) for the faces “painted with earth”.
In 1886, he moved to live with Theo in the liberating environment of Paris, where new theories about the vibrant power of complementary colours – red/green, blue/orange, yellow/purple – provided expression for the dynamic starbursts of van Gogh’s imagination. His letters capture vividly his new technique of juxtaposing Impressionist brushstrokes with the broad planes of colour found in Japanese prints. Explosions of paint covered his canvases, spreading onto the walls and furnishings of the Yellow House in Arles, where he had moved in the hope of setting up his own artists’ community. Desperate for human company, he invited Paul Gauguin to join him in late 1888, but when he finally arrived, he scoffed at van Gogh’s efforts, fleeing the scene when the latter slashed off his own ear and presented it to a prostitute.
Some of van Gogh’s most remarkable works come from the two-year period he spent in the asylum in Saint-Rémy, where he painted his fraught emotions into the flower gardens and olive groves between ongoing bouts of “darkness”. He wrote to Theo: “I have never been so peaceful as here. I have a small room with greenish-gray paper with two sea-green curtains with a design of very pale roses.” His original diagnosis of acute mania was finally named as a kind of “mental” epilepsy, a disease only recently identified.
While for much of the book the writers use van Gogh’s letters to unrelentingly expose every nuance of his strange behaviour, the mood changes in this last section, as if they (like us) finally understand the myriad influences – physical, social and psychological – that led this eccentric individual to create the brilliant and idiosyncratic art he did. In a last controversial passage, they challenge the popular mythology that the artist shot himself in the stomach in a wheat field in Auvers in 1890 before lurching home to die in his brother’s arms two days later. Strong evidence is presented indicating that the artist was the victim of a bully’s prank, allowing people to think his wound was self-inflicted to protect his young attackers.
This is a challenging and riveting depiction of a great modern artist and his times, and such is the book’s power I have already started reading it again. It is too large to include footnotes, but the background research can be accessed on the websites www.vangoghbiography.com and www.vangoghletters.org.
VAN GOGH: THE LIFE, by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith (Profile, $75).
Mary Kisler is senior curator of international art at Auckland Art Gallery and author of Angels & Aristocrats: Early European Art in New Zealand Public Collections.