Van Gogh: The Life [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

I read biographies almost exclusively. So when I first saw the fascinating "60 Minutes" piece on the new VanGogh biography I thought to myself, why do we need another book on VanGogh? Lots of books, movies, pop songs, dormroom posters - even Starry Night on the start-up screen on my celphone. Haven't we had enough of Vincent Van Gogh? Turns out we haven't. This may not be the first source on Van Gogh that I've ever seen but it is the first time I've ever actually met him.

This book was the fastest, freshest 800 and some pages I've ever read. So often, a biographer forgets that his subject did not LIVE as a subject of a book. (Ok, Washington did, but still...) So we get research, information, quotes, blah blah blah. But in VanGogh: The Life, I could feel Vincent experiencing his life as vividly as I experience my own.

We walk WITH Vincent through his powerful, wrenching life with writing that is immediate, facts that are fresh - even a little surprise about the alleged suicide - told with a psychological accuity that obliterates that tired 'tortured artist' cliche which has passed for VanGogh biography in the past. And you get a bonus master class in art history to boot! All presented with such a complelling, almost novelistic narrative, that Vincent's demise arrives nearly as a tragic surprise. Because you wind up knowing this guy and actually rooting for him. I felt real suspense reading a book about a man whose life was generally known to me. But still you will weep at his deathbed with the only other person who ever cared about him.

Oh... and if you're a fan of grown-up words and luxurious sentences - and I am - then just read this book for the experience of literature. When's the last time you got to do that? A PLUS!!

As an art history professor and author of a book on Van Gogh, I have spent many years researching the life, motives and actions of Vincent Van Gogh. I am convinced that he was a heroic man. He was a consistent champion of the underdog, and on numerous occasions took blame for the misdeeds of others. The idea that Vincent wanted to protect the boys who accidentally shot him is consistent with his personality. Emotionally and intuitively, Vincent's accidental shooting and his protection of the young boys makes perfect sense, and offers a far more reasonable conclusion to an extraordinary life--one that was from beginning to end selflessly devoted to the Gospel theme of loving another in place of oneself. To Vincent Van Gogh, it was about cherishing daily life in pursuit of eternal salvation, though his path to redemption was uneven and even at times tortured. And perhaps--as Naifeh and Smith have suggested in their book--this act of compassion in shielding those young boys from blame, and in preventing his brother Theo from further undue stress, may well have been a coup de grāce...a final effort to propel himself into the eternal life to which he had long aspired.

In my view, Van Gogh: The Life is a book any serious Van Gogh fan should own for the impressive amount of information that Naifeh and Smith present. For instance, the authors offer the reader a portrait of conventional Dutch social life in the nineteenth century and the complex and conflicted role Vincent played within that era. Other notable features of the book include an astute discussion of the importance of music in Van Gogh's aesthetic formation. Passages of the book are simply beautiful and noteworthy. A systematic framework for more study of his fascinating life has been provided by the almost interrogatory nature of this compilation--not surprising given the background of the authors.

Nonetheless, I recall an admonition that Van Gogh made about information gathering and the artist. Vincent said that it was the task of the artist to emphasize the obvious and eliminate the extraneous. Van Gogh: The Life underplays what is in my estimation crucial in grasping Van Gogh, namely his sacred view of life. This universal view shaped his thought process and as an artist guided his choices of subject matter. Van Gogh loved the uplifting message of forgiveness embodied in the Gospel message of Christ. This appears poignantly in his many overtly religious works which Van Gogh painted in the last months of his life such as: "The Good Samaritan", "The Raising of Lazarus", "The Pieta" and "The Starry Night" of 1889. This was a time in which Vincent said he had a "terrible need for religion."

According to Naifeh and Smith, the light of his faith had been extinguished at the time of this father's death in 1885; Van Gogh's quest for the sacred had effectively ceased. Yet the evidence of Van Gogh's own letters in the ensuing years cannot be dismissed. Treating the sacred dimension of Van Gogh as fundamentally pathological rather than as a universalizing world view strips his art and life of its transcendent meaning and message. My conviction about the role of the sacred in fully understanding Van Gogh is widely shared by other 21st century Van Gogh scholars who are part of a reappraisal of religious themes in art. Notable museum exhibitions have also stressed this concept by displaying the overtly religious works of Van Gogh, Gauguin, Delacroix and many other renowned figures in the canon of a Western art. The sacred embrace that emerges from Van Gogh's art, letters and life outshines his illness, and provides all humanity with eternal hope.

This book is absolutely magnificent! It paints an absolutely astonishing picture of van Gogh's mind, and life. The use of the letters is amazing, and the book is fascinating, incredibly moving (not least in showing how little appreciated Vincent was during his life), and inspiring, and very beautifully written.

The overview and insight that the authors provide and analysis of the letters is just extraordinary, as is the way that they use this to recreate his life and mind so incredibly vividly. They have also recreated his living conditions so well -- it's wonderful to know what is on his walls, for example. You get an unbelievably wide and detailed knowledge of Vincent's day to day life: for example, that he hates goodbyes and `would spend the rest of his life pre-empting them with precipitous flights.' They even let the reader find out more about Vincent through the form that his handwriting took.

The book paints superbly the relationship and contrast between Vincent and Theo (I love the detail that when Theo heard the birds sing, he was inclined to whistle along with them). It is brilliant on what the authors describe as the `asymmetrical embrace' and in particular the constant references back to their walk to Rijswijk. It's an incredibly moving relationship.

Although the book is long, it doesn't feel it at all - and this is also because it's so beautifully written. I love, among many other things, the very effective dramatic shifts, for example when Vincent's parents bundle him into a yellow carriage and drive him to boarding school. And there are terrific turns of phrase throughout. For example, where they write `Vincent was forced to seek companionship in the only place left to him - the past'.

The recurring themes are woven in brilliantly, too, for example the quote `Sorrowful yet always rejoicing' the sower, walking in the storms, Robinson Crusoe, inchoate families, and how his reading affected his mind and his work -- for example how he is influenced by Andersen and Dickens and Eliot. And at the same time as themes are recurring, it's wonderful to see the path in which his work emerges - not only through the wonderful images, but also in the text, in which various hints are planted, such as the early mention: `This promise of redemption was the comforting Truth in every moonlit night or starry sky'...

And as if this weren't enough ... all this is connected to a huge amount of fascinating history. Naifeh and Smith not only explain the development of art - for example, the simple but crucial point about tubes of paint liberating painters from their studios - but they also do a terrific job of situating Van Gogh in his time and place, for example when they describe how John Stuart Mill's ideas permeate through his letters; and when they observe that the Dutch were famous for their curiosity and close looking, inventing both the telescope and the microscope.

This wonderful biography provides an unbelievably rare - unique, surely -- insight into a mind; and into the mind of Vincent van Gogh!

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 70 reviews  4.2 out of 5 stars