Van Gogh: The Life

To Vincent, his art was a record of his life more true, more revealing (“how deep—how infinitely deep”) even than the storm of letters that always accompanied it. Every wave of “serenity and happiness,” as well as every shudder of pain and despair, he believed, found its way into paint; every heartbreak into heartbreaking imagery; every picture into self-portraiture. “I want to paint what I feel,” he said, “and feel what I paint.

Theo thought he knew the answer: Vincent was the victim of his own fanatic heart. “There’s something in the way he talks that makes people either love him or hate him,” he tried to explain. “He spares nothing and no one.” Long after others had put away the breathless manias of youth, Vincent still lived by their unsparing rules. Titanic, unappeasable passions swept through his life. “I am a fanatic!” Vincent declared in 1881. “I feel a power within me … a fire that I may not quench, but must keep ablaze.

Vincent was the victim of his own fanatic heart. “There’s something in the way he talks that makes people either love him or hate him,” he tried to explain. “He spares nothing and no one.” Long after others had put away the breathless manias of youth, Vincent still lived by their unsparing rules. Titanic, unappeasable passions swept through his life. “I am a fanatic!” Vincent declared in 1881. “I feel a power within me … a fire that I may not quench, but must keep ablaze.” Whether catching beetles on the Zundert creekbank, collecting and cataloguing prints, preaching the Christian gospel, consuming Shakespeare or Balzac in great fevers of reading, or mastering the interactions of color, he did everything with the urgent, blinding single-mindedness of a child.

Vincent looked to images not just to be instructed and inspired, but, most of all, to be moved. Art should be “personal and intimate,” he said, and concern itself with “what touches us as human beings.

There is safety in the very heart of danger.

Long after the children had dispersed, they avidly exchanged books and reading recommendations as if no book was truly read until all had read it.

Vincent’s reading would eventually range far beyond the books approved by his parents. But these early exposures set the trajectory. He read with demonic speed, consuming books at a breakneck pace that hardly let up until the day he died. He would start with one book by an author and then devour the entire oeuvre in a few weeks.

Like the illustrated books of his childhood, he grafted words to images and images to words, insistently reshaping both to his narrative of reassurance. He paired pictures with poetry, sometimes transcribing lines from literature and scripture directly onto his prints to create collages of consolation. This process of layering words and images so gratified his manic imagination and his search for comfort that it would become his principal way of seeing and coping with the world.

Me pregunto por qué los brillantes puntitos del cielo no nos resultan tan asequibles como los puntos negros que llenan el mapa de Francia. Cogemos un tren para ir de Tarascón a Ruán, pero para llegar hasta una estrella hemos de morir. Sin duda, hay algo cierto en este razonamiento: no podemos alcanzar estrella alguna mientras sigamos vivos, igual que ya no podemos coger el tren una vez muertos. (Vincent Van Gogh, en una carta a tu hermano Theo).

Incomprehension gave way to impatience, impatience to shame, and shame to anger.

illiteracy that surrounded them. Anna and Dorus read to each other and to their children; the older children read to the younger; and, later in life, the children read to their parents. Reading aloud was used to console the sick and distract the worried, as well as to educate and entertain. Whether in the shade of the garden awning or by the light of an oil lamp, reading was (and would always remain) the comforting voice of family unity. Long after the children had dispersed, they avidly exchanged books and reading recommendations as if no book was truly read until all had read it.

Chavannes’s gigantic mural Inter artes et naturam (Between Art and Nature)

Puente levadizo y dama con sombrilla, MAYO DE 1888, TINTA Y TIZA SOBRE PAPEL, 60 X 31,9 CM © Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Ángeles, CA, USA.

«es mejor provocar un estallido, por enorme que sea, que estar en deuda con el mundo por preservarte».

PAUL GAUGUIN, 1891 (Illustration credit 34.1)

Finally

PARIS WAS IN AN UPROAR. IT WAS THE WINTER OF 1875 AND THE ART world was under attack by a rebellious cadre of young painters who styled themselves the Société anonyme (Anonymous Society), but whose enemies had stuck them with a range of dismissive labels including “Impressionalists,” “Impressionists,” and “lunatics.

the comfort of the infinite and never lost his taste for the poetic

Vincent set the pace in drinking: absinthe in the afternoon, wine with dinner, free beer at the cabaret, and his personal favorite, cognac, anytime. He used its sweet “stupefaction” to treat his inevitable winter depression, arguing that it “stimulated blood circulation”—increasingly important as the weather turned bitter cold. By the time he left Paris, he later admitted, he was well on the road to being a “drunkard” and an “alcoholic.

was] a stranger to himself.

Every year in late May, hundreds of pilgrims made the arduous journey across the salty marshland of the Camargue to celebrate the Festival of Saint Sarah, the servant girl who accompanied the Marys on their magical boat.

Vincent’s reading would eventually range far beyond the books approved by his parents. But these early exposures set the trajectory. He read with demonic speed, consuming books at a breakneck pace that hardly let up until the day he died. He would start with one book by an author and then devour the entire oeuvre in a few weeks. He must have loved his early training in poetry, for he went on to commit volumes of it to memory, sprinkled it throughout his letters, and spent days transcribing it into neat, error-free albums. He kept his love of Hans Christian Andersen, too. Andersen’s vividly imagined world of anthropomorphic plants and personified abstractions, of exaggerated sentiment and epigrammatic imagery, left a clear watermark on Vincent’s imagination. Decades later, he called Andersen’s tales “glorious … so beautiful and real.” —

that when we see the image of indescribable and unutterable desolation—of loneliness

On his side, Vincent felt increasingly thwarted, alienated, and rejected—a knot of feelings that characterized his later life just as pious resignation characterized his parents’. “Family,” he complained years after leaving Zundert, “is a fatal combination of persons with contrary interests, each of whom is opposed to the rest, and two or more are of the same opinion only when it is a question of combining together to obstruct another member.

«Trabajo solo, lucho por progresar en el arte y la vida».

quelque chose là-haut.

In an 1872 essay on poetry that both Vincent and Zola read, the philosopher Hippolyte Taine had described with astonishing prescience the imagery at the end of Vincent’s tortuous journey: Less a style, indeed, than a system of notation, superlatively bold, sincere and faithful, created from instant to instant, out of anything and everything in such a fashion that one never thinks of the words but seems to be in direct touch with the gush of vital thought, with all its palpitations and starts, with its suddenly checked flights and the mighty beating of its wings.… It is queer language, yet true even in its least details, and the only one capable of conveying the peaks and troughs of the inner life, the flow and tumult of inspiration, the sudden concentration of ideas, too crowded to find vent, the unexpected explosion into imagery and those almost limitless blazes of enlightenment which, like the northern lights, burst out and flame in a lyrical mind… Trust the spirit, as sovereign nature does, to make the form; for otherwise we only imprison spirit, and not embody. Inward evermore to outward—so in life, and so in art, which still is life … Poetry, thus conceived, has only one protagonist, the soul and mind of the poet; and only one style—a suffering and triumphant cry from the heart.

Todo el mundo le había rechazado, obstaculizado o se había opuesto a él.

Anna’s world was “a place full of troubles and worries [that] are inherent to it”; a place where “disappointments will never cease” and only the foolish “make heavy demands” on life. Instead, one must simply “learn to endure,” she said, “realize that no one is perfect,” that “there are always imperfections in the fulfillment of one’s wishes,” and that people must be loved “despite their shortcomings.” Human nature especially was too chaotic to be trusted, forever in danger of running amok. “If we could do whatever we wanted,” she warned her children, “unharmed, unseen, untroubled— wouldn’t we stray further and further from the right path?

In drawing a wall, he said, “the artist who must copy every small stone and each stroke of whitewash has missed his calling: he should have become a bricklayer.