It was on
a night of a Holy Thursday that I finished reading Steven Naifeh and Gregory Smith’s compelling biography of the renowned Dutch painter – ‘Van Gogh: The Life.’ I had spent
much of that evening in the City Centre attending a musical drama depicting the
Passion of the Christ with thousands of townsfolk. When I returned home, I
faced the last chapter of this engrossing book which had occupied me for weeks.
I had come to know the two protagonists– Vincent and Theo van Gogh– so
intimately that I was not looking forward to finishing the book. I was afraid of losing the warm company of the two brothers’ revealing story. Still, nothing
had prepared me to the great shock that I would actually feel upon the tragic
end of their story.
In the
musical drama I had attended that evening, Jesus Christ was condemned to
crucifixion by a bitter, unforgiving crowd and an acquiescent judge. In three
days, however, Jesus would triumph over death and arise from the grave. His is
a beautiful, reassuring story, with its message of love’s healing power that
could even trump death.
The story
of the two Van Gogh’s was an exact opposite of the comforting story that I had celebrated
that night. It is also a wonderful story of love – a fraternity of two young
men that sustained decades-long stormy trials and tribulations. But its ending is
devastating. It is a love that ends with the decimation of a whole family. First
dies Vincent from a gun wound, in the arms of his ‘Waarde Theo,’ which drives
the hitherto levelheaded Theo into a sudden cataclysm of craziness and eventual
death. It was heartrending to witness the unravelling of an enduring story of friendship
and brotherhood, chiseled into my mind through this elegantly narrated, 850-pages-long
biography. Unlike Christ’s, the death of the Van Goghs is one without
redemption, unless perhaps the fact of a total stranger like me reading their
story with misty eyes a hundred years hence would count as a restitution of
sorts.
Vincent van
Gogh was essentially the abandoned child who never got the chance to grow up. Indeed,
he was a quirky ‘strange boy’-- contrarian, unamiable and vehemently
uncompromising. On the plus side he was passionate towards ideals and people
whom he loved, with the capacity to galvanize the forces of his frantic heart
and towering mind to meet his goals. His heart would ooze tender kindness towards
the unfortunate, and at many points in his life he made extreme self-sacrifices
to lend a helping hand for a neglected soul. He was thus a born evangelist, and
it was only natural that he started out at young age into a career in the
Church. However, his overture to study theology and follow his father’s
footsteps foundered in the face of stringent university entrance requirements
which he failed after two years of hard study in Amsterdam.
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| Still Life with Bible (1885) |
Vincent van
Gogh failed not once, but in all of his endeavors without exception till the
tragic end of his life at the age of 38. Since his art almost never sold, he
was financially dependent on his family. His tumultuous life was punctuated
with endless failed relationships. Starting from his family ties to the
friendships he formed in the many countries where his wanderlust soul took him,
all of Vincent’s relationships suffered the same interminable fate of a quarrelsome
fall out. A lifelong history of professional and personal failures registered a
dark backlog in Vincent’s sensitive psyche. In his last years, he suffered
bouts of depression that bordered madness. The state of his life was so gloomy
that, looking back, Vincent described it as “shipwreck.”
I think two
events dramatically turned Van Gogh’s life to the worse. The first was his
parents' decision to send him out to a boarding school at the age of 11, which started
off young Van Gogh’s life on a perilous path. However impossible it might have
seemed, his contrarian personality would have stood a better chance of reforming
in the comfortable nest of his parent’s house. Unfortunately, he was torn apart
from the family he dearly loved, and forced into a communal life in which he
would inevitably become an outsider. His banishment into a boarding school sowed
in Van Gogh’s mind irrepressible feelings rejection which would haunt his relationship
with his family.
The second unfortunate
event in Van Gogh’s life was his delusional sojourn into the Borinage, the black
country of dreary coal mines in Belgium. Compared to the preceding adventures
that similarly ended up in failure, the jaunt into these godforsaken mines at
the age of 26 had a much worst effect of deteriorating the young man’s mental
balance. Vincent emerged from that black country no longer an unlucky,
idealistic adventurer whose innocent but misguided aspirations went awry.
Rather, he came out as a bitter person with a distorted world view, tormented
by his past rejections and unhinged by fear of future failure. The sleeping
devils in his mind came out rushing, setting off fires of bitter anger towards
his parents and guilt towards himself. For the rest of his life, he would build
endless ‘castles in the air’ to reclaim his nostalgia of a lost love, which
only led to more disappointment whenever the fantasies would go bust.
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Eventually
he moved to Brussels and started a career as an artist at the age of 27, which
lasted until his death ten years later. Although Vincent’s life tacked back to normalcy
thanks to his newborn dedication to art, the troubles of the past had left
indelible bruises in his mind. Moreover, Theo now took over their father as
Vincent’s financial care taker, thanks to his solid financial standing working in Paris for Goupil, a giant art-dealing business partly
owned by their uncle Cent. Vincent had already tried working for Goupil, first
in their branch in the Hague and then in London, but was found recalcitrant in
his work, which eventually led to his dismissal.
Vincent
considered Theo not only as his confidant, but also as a sort of a protégé. Their
relationship became complicated, however, when Theo outdid his brother by succeeding
with ease in the art dealing business in Paris. He quickly climbed up the
corporate hierarchy, cementing his status as the most favored sibling of their
family. Vincent's financial dependence upon his
younger brother was a twist of fate that would permanently alter the calculus of their
wobbly relationship. In later years, Vincent’s profligacy compounded with
Theo’s increasing financial cares to spawn incessant arguments in the brothers’
correspondences between Brussels and Paris.
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| Theo Van Gogh (1872) |
Still, the
bond between the two brothers withered all of this instability and Theo
remained not only his brothers sponsor, but also his only constant source of
intimate emotional support and professional advice. In fact, Vincent cast his work
as a joint project of the two brothers, which might not be far from truth
considering the intensity of Theo’s involvement that doubled roles of a
financier, professional adviser, market counsellor, collector and promoter of practically all of Vincent’s paintings. This arrangement suited the
otherwise desultory Vincent, motivating him to work hard as he tried to prove
to his brother that he is worthy of his salt. In spite of several fall outs,
including a persistent chill following Theo decision to marry Johanna Bonger,
their affinity and correspondences persisted.
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| The Starry Night (June 1889) |
The death
of Vincent embellished the ironies of the life he had lived. In his life,
Vincent was the rejected, degenerate child. In his death, he became among the
most recognized and cherished artists the world over. He lived a life of penury
and perpetual financial dependence. In his death, a single painting of him
would fetch tens of millions. In his life, he was detested for his person,
although his work occasionally drew praises from friends. In his death, it was
the dazzling story of his life that would eventually draw attention to his
work. Moreover, Vincent was the least sought after, and least recognized member
of the large Van Gogh family. He proved to be the most indispensable when his
death unleashed a domino of tragic deaths in the family, beginning from the
heartbroken Theo, to their young brother Corr in South Africa. As much as the
death of Vincent might have been tolerated, or even welcomed given all the
troubles he gave, the Van Gogh household must have been rocked to its bottom
upon the capitulation of the younger Theo. Theo, who was the antithesis of
Vincent for his dutifulness, had been a beacon to his family, and their indispensable financial beast of burden.
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| Starry Night over the Rhône (September 1888) |
The
posthumous fame of Van Gogh is a testimony of the value of authentic artistic
creativity, and our ability to recognize and cherish it. In his life as much as
in his art, Van Gogh was severely unpretentious, intent on unequivocally expressing
the subtlest hue of his feelings. As early as 1982, just two years into his
serous artistic undertaking, Vincent wrote that he wants to be remembered as
one who “feels deeply… tenderly -- notwithstanding my so-called roughness,
perhaps even because of it.” The triumph of this enduring vision is there for
everyone to see in the unmistakable roughness and yet forceful authenticity
that is a signature of Vincent’s paintings. His paintings reflect the whole
gamut of Vincent’s complex emotional experience – ranging from the dark,
sterile paintings of ‘The Potato Eaters’ and ‘Two Women on the Heath,’ to the
jovial, light-intoxicated vistas displayed in the paintings of wheat fields and
lush gardens from his later days in France.
As Vincent
once said: ‘Illusions may fade, but the sublime remains.’ His paintings indeed honestly
convey the sublime spirit that animated him and the dazzling intensity with
which he expressed it. The layers of color and texture of his relentless brush strokes
are enduring witnesses of his lustful passion for life. In the golden wheat fields of autumn decorated
by hovering birds, in the magical olive gardens, in the twinkling,
larger-than-life stars and moon, reflected on the Rhone and shining over the Place
du Forum of Arles, one can still sense the glimpse of that sublime, creative impulse
which Vincent used to express with a spur of exclamation: ‘Yes! Dat is het!’
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Wheat Field with Cypresses (1889)
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