2/3 agony, 1/3 absolutely spectacular art and historical context
Review of Van Gogh: The Life by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith
This is not an easy book to read. When I started it, I wasn't sure I would get through 900 pages: from childhood, Vincent van Gogh was horribly maladjusted and unhappy, starting a pattern of wild mood swings, feverish and doomed efforts to succeed in the eyes of his family, and breakdowns in all his relationships and undertakings. Perhaps worst, I had always romanticized him as a hyper-sensitive victim, someone like the Don McLean ballad of a heroic lonely genius. But, according to this (utterly convincing) interpretation, van Gogh was an extremely unpleasant, vicious, selfish loner, who alternately saw himself as a Christ-like figure or as a total failure whose only option to avoid shame was death.
After struggling to get my mind into this narrative (some 200 pp.) and with the somewhat florid prose of the book, I found myself completely trusting the authors, whose research in the details of van Gogh's life and times is nothing short of magnificent. From that point, it became a dazzling exploration of one of the most seminal periods in history, when a new art was born to embody the changes underway with the industrial revolution and the birth of the science of psychology.
Van Gogh was born into a rigid and narrow-minded family, with strictly enforced rules and oppressive expectations. His father was a country preacher and his mother a fearfully aspiring bourgeoise, both self-righteous and unquestioning of their beliefs. Each child was assigned a role to follow, and unfortunately for van Gogh, he fell into the role of black sheep, forever unable to satisfy their demands in the way that they wanted. This created a profound alienation that he never grew beyond. At the time, with mass urbanization underway and the traditional foundation of a religion-bound way of life on the way out, his father Dorus van Gogh was struggling to maintain a congregation in a bitter contest with modernity.
Dropping out of an expensive school, van Gogh entered his uncle's business of art sales. Here the pattern of all his subsequent undertakings emerged: rustic and unkempt, he made implacable enemies all around himself, particularly those in power, leading inevitably to ostracism and ruinous financial dependence on his family, all of whom were mortified with shame, rarely encouraging, and always condemning. In this way, he attempted and failed to enter a seminary to become a preacher like his father, exiled himself to the countryside to become a kind of vagabond evangelical, and finally found art. In each of these undertakings, he threw himself into them with a prodigious, obsessive energy that inevitably led to periodic nervous breakdown. All the while, he corresponded with members of his family in copious letters, first in recrimination and accusation from his side, then in pleading for forgiveness and money. To put it mildly, it is an agonizing spectacle, a downward spiral that only got worse with time.
After he abandoned religion and discovered art, which he undertook in his late 20s, the book becomes utterly fascinating. It completely succeeds at evoking the times. With the rise of the bourgeoisie, the demand for art objects soared, becoming a mass phenomenon for possession in normal households rather than only in palaces; with the advent of photography and the decline of religious sentimentality, movements in art emerged to meet new criteria: to display psychological subjects, visual experimentation to add something beyond realism, and new kinds of symbolism, to mention a few. It was the birth of modernism and van Gogh was smack in the middle of it.
Van Gogh spent a long period working isolated in the countryside on drawing, refusing to get into color. This was when he more or less mastered form, the proverbial 10,000 hours that it takes to enter a craft.
In his personal life, he took in a prostitute and her extended family – all at his brother Theo's expense – and announced he would marry her, to the horror of his family. It was one of many disastrous and embarrassing episodes where he sought to construct his imagined ideal of a family life, always ending in disillusion, rage, and breakdowns. He later abruptly left the woman, who committed suicide. The same was true of his many failed friendships, where he hoped to create a community of artists perhaps living together. He left Holland with syphilis, which could not have helped his psychological pathologies.
Once in Paris, van Gogh experimented with virtually all of the new movements and got to know the cutting-edge avantgarde artists of his time. This is great fun, not only for their personalities when they were starting out, but for the descriptions of what they were attempting to do. It is a dense introduction to the most amazing artistic invention. Van Gogh was a voracious reader and up on all the intellectual currents as they related to art, from Balzac and Zola to the philosophers, new critics, and historians, e.g. Michelet, all of which are densely summarized.
Though he seemed to have found a role for himself in his brother's milieu – Theo had taken Vincent's place in his uncle’s business and ran the most prestigious experimental art gallery in Paris – van Gogh suddenly wound up in Arles, inaugurating the phenomenally productive period with his experiments in color and the maturation of his style, though he met with no commercial success and remained dependent on Theo, financially and far more demandingly, psychologically. The authors offer a brilliant explanation of the many stages of his art, which added immeasurably to my understanding of it.
In terms of his career, though he worked for the most part in obscurity and under ever worsening mental deterioration, van Gogh was lucky to synchronize with the new awareness of psychology. The authors offer a fascinating interpretation that combines mythic pretension – the genius that expresses his art as a direct conduit to raw agony, emotion, and soul – with the practicality of how to build a career at the time. Simply put, a critic would find an artist and explain his corpus of work, earning money from their own publications and also allying himself with a gallery to help sell it for their cut.
One such critic, Albert Aurier, found van Gogh near the end of his life and began to extoll his work, bringing him a modest fame. Unfortunately, this resulted in few sales and the embarrassment of his family at the exposure of his mental illness. Van Gogh was aghast at the way he was portrayed and felt not enjoyment or even vindication, but oppressed by yet another role that was imposed on him. After his death, this was the kernel that led to his later fame as a tortured artist whose life became nearly as important as his art.
In such a long book, the authors also tried (or felt compelled) to introduce something new, an interpretation of van Gogh's death not as a suicide, but possibly as an accident. This may be the case, but we will never know, and I found this section a bit contrived. That being said, while the authors offer ample evidence to interpret the nature of van Gogh's mental illness, they never get mired in psychological jargon, beyond the contention that he was psychotic. It is up to the reader to decide whether he was bipolar, syphilitic, or damaged from his childhood treatment. I suspect it is a combination of all this. What is undeniable is the depth of their coverage, which is absolutely first rate. Though often critical and unflinching, their ideas never take away from the man and his wonderful achievements, but add new depth. This is a remarkable accomplishment for a biography, particularly one that is so long and detailed.
I was inspired by this book and will seek out van Gogh's work (and those of his influences and milieu) in the museums I explored as a child, with a fresh eye. They also highlighted the influences on van Gogh – Millet, Delacroix, Corot, Daumier – that made me hungry for new explorations.
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