Making of van Gogh’s legend
As he begins to wrap up Van Gogh: A Power Seething, Julian Bell cuts to the chase in a narrative that’s been racing full-tilt from the beginning.
“Penultimate scene,” writes Bell dramatically, for no other approach to van Gogh seems imaginable. “High time to meet the female lead. Johanna van GoghBonger, more than any single person aside from Vincent and Theo themselves, was responsible for the iconic status that Van Gogh now possesses.”
Bonger, wary when it came to her wayward artist brother-in-law, yet indulging him his craziness, fashioned the scenario for van Gogh’s posthumous ascendancy to art stardom, initially by hoarding his work, waiting as its prices soared. Art always equalled money: van Gogh knew that math as well as anyone, always attuned to what his dealer brother Theo said the market wanted. But “Jo” Bonger, daughter of an insurance broker, saw that the emerging art business was not about finicky connoisseurs, Theo’s clients, but for international audiences who were looking for personal and social validation by being able to afford the stuff. Art became sexy. (I was in the New York room in 1987 when Sotheby’s sold van Gogh’s Irises (1889) for a then-record $53.9 million (U.S.) The giddy gasp from the crowd was akin to a collective orgasm.)
Bell, an established British artist whose grandmother was the painter Vanessa Bell, writes with a descriptive prowess in keeping with van Gogh’s own. The artist’s correspondence is the cornerstone of this biography as it remains “one of the great documents of 19th century literature,” says Bell. Here’s Bell depicting Vincent in hapless despair: “He has become a scuttling rat, a nesting bird” in the bleak surrounding landscape. Here’s van Gogh himself on the sublime: “Just as we take a train to go to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to go to a star.”
Bell, like van Gogh, writes to explain what painting won’t. After witnessing much of his own paintings destroyed in a fire in his studio in Lewes, England recently, Bell wrote in a piece for The Guardian that, “(t)he writer in me can’t help but note the reeling in my soul . . . I was struck by the way my fuzzy life had suddenly acquired definition.”
To other art historians, A Power Seething’s modest length might seem barely sufficient for the necessary footnotes that generally complete any van Gogh biography. For real heft, they might say, look to Van Gogh: The Life, Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith’s 900-page 2011 doorstopper. But Bell recognizes the place of his biography in an era of Internet scholarship where everything by and about van Gogh is available online thanks to Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum. Instead, he delivers sure-footedly through the mountains of data, a method followed elsewhere most notably by Evan S. Connell is his insightful, Francisco Goya: A Life (2004).
Bell gives us the familiar figure of the dishevelled young van Gogh, a failure on every front finding hope in painting and in establishing an artist’s heaven in southern France. Yet few dates are produced along the way and only a few titles. Broader themes are stripped to their bare bones. When it comes to sex, for instance, Bell quotes van Gogh himself on the pros and cons of art and having an erection.
The ultimate scene comes in the summer of 1890 when Vincent went out behind a barn in the countryside north of Paris, shooting himself in what was quickly described as a botched suicide attempt. Recent investigations suggest it might possibly have been murder by local boys. In the final hours of Vincent’s agony, — unnecessary as he might have successfully been treated by any country doctor — he was watched over by his weary brother Theo, riddled with syphilis, knowing that he himself had little time to live. After their deaths their legends came alive. Peter Goddard is a freelance writer. He can be reached at peter_g1@sympatico.ca