Van Gogh
His Life and His Art
By David Sweetman
Illustrated. 391 pages. Crown Publishers. $30.
Vincent van Gogh
By Evert van Uitert, Louis van Tilborgh, Sjraar van Heugten, Johannes van der Wolk, Ronald Pickvance and E. B. F. Pey.
Illustrated. Two volumes: paintings, 292 pages; drawings, 336 pages.
Van Gogh
His Life and His Art
By David Sweetman
Illustrated. 391 pages. Crown Publishers. $30.
Vincent van Gogh
By Evert van Uitert, Louis van Tilborgh, Sjraar van Heugten, Johannes van der Wolk, Ronald Pickvance and E. B. F. Pey.
Illustrated. Two volumes: paintings, 292 pages; drawings, 336 pages. Rizzoli. $90.
A hundred years after his death, Vincent van Gogh has become one of the world's most famous artists. His paintings sell for astonishing prices that break records, and such well known canvases as ''Starry Night'' and ''Sunflowers'' have been reproduced so many times on post cards and calendars that people who have never set foot in a museum boast a familiarity with his work. His life, too, has assumed the lineaments of a myth in the popular imagination: he is regarded as the very embodiment of the artist maudit, tortured, impoverished and insane.
These two new works on van Gogh - David Sweetman's highly detailed biography and a sumptuous two-volume catalogue that was assembled to accompany this year's exhibitions of his work in the Netherlands - should do much to flesh out the man and the painter behind that popular myth. They are best read in conjunction with each other: while the precisely annotated illustrations in ''Vincent van Gogh'' chart the amazing accomplishments of his 10-year career, Mr. Sweetman's biography gives us an understanding of the artistic, psychological and religious forces that shaped his life and work. Both works draw heavily on van Gogh's own letters, in themselves one of the most eloquent and moving records of any artist's aspirations and frustrations.
What Mr. Sweetman's biography makes clear to the lay reader is just how rooted van Gogh's choice of vocation was in his own family history. He was introduced to the world of art by his Uncle Cent, a successful art dealer, and at the age of 16 began an unsuccessful apprenticeship in a gallery in The Hague. (His devoted brother Theo would later follow him into the business with considerably more success.) Seven years later, a deepening religious crisis helped precipitate van Gogh's dismissal from the gallery, and he determined to become a pastor like his father and paternal grandfather before him. He obsessively studied the Bible, embarked on a constant round of churchgoing and began cramming for the examinations necessary to join the ministry in the Netherlands. When it became clear that he had no chance of passing those exams, he set off to do missionary work among coal miners in Belgium.
There, he threw himself into his work with fanatic zeal, starving himself and giving away his clothes in an effort to emulate Christ. It was only when he was dismissed, by a stuffy clergyman who believed representatives of the church ought to embody solid bourgeois values, that van Gogh decided to devote himself to art. He was 27.
Of course, the deep spiritual hunger that animated his search for God did not disappear; it was translated into his paintings. The dazzling light that fills his canvases from Arles pulsates with a moral radiance, intimations that some divine pattern might be discerned in the seemingly random designs of nature. The images of the sower and the reaper that turn up again and again in his work not only serve as homage to his favorite painter, Jean Francois Millet, but also as symbols of the rhythmic cycles of birth and death. As the progression of color plates found in the first volume of ''Vincent van Gogh'' so clearly demonstrates, van Gogh's development as a painter progressed with astonishing speed. The stiff, conventional portraits of weavers, done in Nuenen, his hometown in the Netherlands, swiftly give way to the dark caricatures of ''The Potato Eaters,'' which in turn give way to the lighter, brighter landscapes done in Paris. Though the Pointillist influence of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac can be discerned in those Parisian canvases, it is soon superseded in the wonderful paintings from Arles by a wholly distinctive vision.
In the first years of his career, Mr. Sweetman observes, van Gogh displayed no natural talent. His ''main resources were singlemindedness and an insatiable capacity for hard work.'' He turned himself into an artist, ''day and night turning out innumerable rough, bad, hopeless sketches but gradually mastering control of eye and hand until he was able to subject both to his will. If 'genius' is perhaps the wrong word, then 'courage' must replace it, for he never took the easy path.'' Following van Gogh's wanderings from the Netherlands to Belgium, from Paris to Arles, from the asylum in St.-Remy to the final days in Auvers, Mr. Sweetman traces van Gogh's voracious absorption of artistic influences and his discovery of his own style. In the last months of his life, he points out, van Gogh began to demonstrate a nostalgia for the northern landscape of his childhood: the electric palette he had adopted in the sunny south of France was replaced by more somber colors, and many of the motifs he had first explored as an apprentice artist resurfaced in his work.
In July of 1890, after repeated suicide attempts, 37-year-old Vincent van Gogh shot and killed himself. Had he fallen into a state of irredeemable despair? Or was he simply suffering from another episode of anxiety and upset, perhaps medical from which he might have recovered as he had so often in the past. As Mr. Sweetman notes, theories about his state of mind revolve around two paintings of wheat fields done in his last days. One titled ''Wheat Field Under Clouded Sky'' is tranquil and serene; the other, titled ''Wheatfield With Crows,'' radiates an air of menace and fear.
''They are vast fields of wheat under troubled skies,'' van Gogh wrote his brother Theo, ''and I do not need to go out of my way to try to express sadness and extreme loneliness. I hope you will see them soon - for I hope to bring them to you in Paris as soon as possible, since I almost think that these canvases will tell you what I cannot say in words, the health and restorative forces that I see in the country.''
No comments:
Post a Comment