Van Gogh: The Life by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith - review | Art and design | The Guardian
In and around Auvers-sur-Oise, 15 miles northwest of Paris, a number of large, discoloured reproductions of paintings by the artist most associated with the village have been planted on billboards to show how true a match they are to what's still there. These points on the Van Goghtrail include the church, the mairie, the café where Vincent lodged for the last two months of his life, and the cornfield by the cemetery in which he and his brother Theo lie buried side by side.
For well over a century the end story has been taken as gospel, all the more believable for being a tragedy advanced in such heartfelt paintings. There goes Kirk Douglas in the Vincente Minnelli adaptation of Irving Stone'sLust for Life, half out of his mind with crazy creativity and further maddened by crows. A shot rings out. He stumbles back to his digs, takes to his bed, smokes his pipe and a day or two later dies.
Time now, it's reasonable to expect, for an out-and-out corrective: a Van Gogh biographyexhaustive enough to recalibrate everything ever written by or about him. In a 10-year venture, involving teams of researchers and translators from the Dutch, Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith have assembled what amounts to a companion volume to their thumping great 1989 Jackson Pollock: An American Saga – the same length (900 pages plus) and equally cumbersome in ambition. The partners describe Van Gogh early on as "a congenital arranger" and, boy, are they arrangers too. Vincent's "tempest-tossed career", as they see it, was brief and curtailed, but that seems to have obliged them to compensate by picking their way through it with long-winded diligence. Wisely, rather than let the book sink further under the weight of footnotes, they've consigned these to a website.
Besides synthesising a century of Van Gogh scholarship, Naifeh and Smith fatten the narrative with disquisitions on social, literary and graphic influences and, above all, home background. Family is key. Practically everything that ever troubled Vincent is referred back to a forbidding father and mother and the pressures of a parsonage upbringing.
Moody, bookish, given to sudden enthusiasms and bouts of self-delusion, he made several false starts in young adult life. Initially he was set to take advantage of family connections, but a spell working for Uncle Cent, the leading art dealer, in The Hague, Paris and London, wasn't a success and Uncle Vice-Admiral Van Gogh hadn't anything to offer so unseaworthy a school leaver. Striking out as a teacher, he spent a couple of months in the Nicholas Nickleby role at a Dotheboys Hall-type school in Ramsgate ("a resort community on the English coast", N&S tell us). Then, inspired by Pilgrim's Progress, he turned evangelical but lost the plot.
From a family point of view Vincent was impossible, emulating the Prodigal Son one moment, or collecting birds' nests, or sloping off to dedicate himself to poverty and taking in a pregnant prostitute whom he threatened to marry. "She knows how to quiet me," he wrote, knowing full well that every extreme move he made provoked the family on whom he still depended to righteous despair. And then, daftest whim of all, there was the sudden fixation on drawing.
He was in his late 20s when, with what he himself described as "passion augmented by temperament", he took to art and began making extravagant demands on his younger brother Theo, who (thanks to Uncle Cent) was by then an up-and-coming dealer. Insisting with the fervour of a convert that besides being family he was a good investment, Vincent stressed that he was a sower now and needed seed. "I am ploughing in my canvases as they do on their fields," he wrote.
The letters to Theo are unique in art history; filled with an abundance of neediness, they number 1,000 or so, as many as the paintings he produced in less than 10 years, and almost as many as the drawings. Written at night to clear his mind of seizures of energy and exhaustion, they were, essentially, day-to-day final demands, calling for money, reassurance and materials.
"Metaphors mixed and morphed under the strain of his ardour," say Naifeh and Smith. That's because he was so dependent on selling his abilities to a brother who, for all his loyalty and devotion, couldn't be relied on forever. Two years of living together in Paris proved trying enough for Theo, and when Vincent cleared off to Arles, Theo was able to think for himself a little more. "He spares nothing and no one," he explained to his fiancée Jo Bonger.
For Vincent, struck with the dream of establishing a little artistic community in Arles, reality took the form of Gauguin, coaxed to join him but unpersuaded by the crisis talks he was subjected to day and night. "Between Vincent and Gauguin, the one a perfect volcano, the other boiling inwardly, a fierce struggle was preparing itself," N&S note. What happened then – Gauguin quitting and the incident of the mutilated earlobe – was breakdown. "All one can hope for is that his suffering is brief," Theo said, reporting back to Jo after a visit to Vincent in hospital. Preoccupied for the time being with his coming marriage, Theo didn't want to know. The correspondence languished. Vincent took to identifying with Robinson Crusoe and talked of dropping art and joining the Foreign Legion.
Bonger's first impression of her brother-in-law, when she met him in Paris 18 months later, surprised her. She saw "a sturdy, broad-shouldered man, with healthy colour, a smile on his face and a very resolute appearance". Was this the the man of the self-obsessed letters, whose pictures were piling up in her home and whose uncouth manners she had been warned about? Ten weeks later Vincent was dead. Everyone knows that he shot himself in the wheat field and did so because, being syphilitic, epileptic, manic, whatever, he felt he had to. However, in a 16-page, small-print "Appendix: A Note on Vincent's Fatal Wounding", the authors entertain the strong possibility that, far from taking his own life, the artist was halfway through a productive working day when a bullet entered his body, fired from a distance and at a low angle. Like Man Friday's footprint, this is a lone fact, a fact without context, a famous fact as immoveable as the arrow in King Harold's eye. But ever since the day he died there has been talk of an avoidance of the truth, with the artist's connivance.
In 1956, following the publicity around the release of Lust for Life, an elderly businessman called Rene Secretan came forward with an account of summer holidays in Auvers when he was 16. In July 1890 he and his brother Gaston kept bumping into this weird Dutchman. Bearding the tramp was something to do instead of just idling or fishing or playing cowboys around the place. (Buffalo Bill's Wild West show had been a hit not long before in Paris.) They put salt in his coffee and chilli on his brushes to watch him splutter, and paraded girls from the Moulin Rouge to get him going.
Secretan the juvenile sharpshooter in his buckskin tunic didn't actually confess to what would have been no doubt an accident, but he indicated that behind a farmyard dungheap in the Rue Boucher, a mile or so from the famous cornfields, a shot was fired and Van Gogh was hit: it was (apart from the grievous outcome) the sort of mishap that a generation or so later occurred on an average Just William afternoon. That the pistol, the painter's easel and his final canvases were never found suggests a cover-up. They were dumped maybe in the nearby river Oise. The Secretan brothers left the village that day.
On his deathbed Van Gogh is said to have said: "It is I who wanted to kill myself." How stoical he was, deflecting suspicions. His fatalism, or forbearance, can be parlayed into something like martyrdom. There was no suicide note. But illuminating though they are, even the letters are secondary to the paintings and drawings. Naifeh & Smith bang on about clumsy beginnings and the naive use by the lapsed preacher of a rigid perspective frame, but this is to treat the life as an accumulation of data. It seems their researches blinded them somewhat. For example, they don't think much of the way he drew hands.
Van Gogh's imagery – the sower, the digger, swirling sea, oceanic fields – was grounded in rhyme and rhythm. "I paint by heart," he said. "The brushstrokes come like clockwork." You can often count them: four or five strokes at a time landed on canvas or paper like heartbeats or drum tattoos. The alacrity was there, right through.
