Van Gogh grew up in the rural Dutch village of Zundert, near the Belgian border, where his father served as pastor to a Protestant congregation of approximately 130 households. In boyhood, Mr. Bell tells us, Van Gogh enjoyed exploring the countryside along the banks of the local streams. “His eyes would be drawn to a wren’s nest hidden in a heathland bramble patch, with its cone of stalks and leaves and moss, or to those of sparrows and thrushes in the hawthorns, or the woven hammocks of the golden oriole.” It was the transition from childhood to adult life that marked the beginning of Van Gogh’s uneasy wanderings. At 16, he went to work for his uncle, a partner in a major firm of international art dealers, but his enthusiasm waned during his six years on the job in The Hague, London and Paris. Feeling an upsurge of religious faith, he quit the commercial world to work as a teacher and lay preacher, hoping to become a minister like his father.
He began a course of preparatory study for divinity school in Amsterdam but abandoned the effort after just one year in order to pursue a career as a missionary in Belgium—at which he failed spectacularly. Dismissed by the evangelical council for overzealousness after he gave away all of his possessions and took to sleeping on bare floors, the misguided youth was sent home. His outraged father threatened to have him committed to an insane asylum.
Mr. Bell covers these early peregrinations in the space of a single chapter—an extraordinary feat—neatly setting up the fateful scene in which the “family headache,” as he aptly dubs Van Gogh, finally resolves at age 27 to take Theo’s advice and become an artist. Theo, a valued employee in the art-dealing uncle’s Paris office, was in a comfortable position to pay for this new undertaking and would be, to the very end, the sole source of financial support for his chronically unsuccessful brother. The sad truth is that Van Gogh sold only a single picture during his lifetime.
As the narrative switches to Van Gogh’s artistic career, the breakneck speed of Mr. Bell’s presentation becomes less satisfying. He writes so well and so knowledgably about matters of painting technique that one feels shortchanged not to be privy to more insights into Van Gogh’s development. When Van Gogh moves in with his brother in Paris and begins to absorb the lessons of French modernism, Mr. Bell offers a masterly discussion of how the artist learned to fuse line with color by studying the work of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901). It seems a shame not to have more extensive observations on craftsmanship, especially after Van Gogh moves to the French countryside and begins to paint the masterpieces for which he is principally known, such as “The Starry Night” (1889) and “Sunflowers” (1888), which don’t receive nearly enough discussion or analysis from Mr. Bell. The artist’s approach to painting nature is the essence of his contribution to Western culture.
The heightened colors, unusual perspectives and exaggerated forms that characterize Van Gogh’s work have the effect of making reality appear inhabited by unseen forces hovering at the very edge of perception. One imagines that this was how Van Gogh experienced the world when he closed his eyes and thought with his spirit, and if you have ever felt something affecting but difficult to describe when hearing a beautiful piece of music trail off into silence or seeing a richly plumed bird leap from a branch and suddenly take flight, you may understand the sensations that Van Gogh hoped to capture. Consider, for instance, a small painting from the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Dutch village of Otterlo, in which Van Gogh depicted the sun setting behind a row of pollarded willow trees. The viewpoint is low—half the painting is consumed by underbrush—but on the high horizon the yellow disk of the sun, from which vibrant brushstrokes radiate in every direction, dominates the composition like a beacon of celestial splendor.
By the time Mr. Bell gets to Van Gogh’s psychotic break and the notorious ear-cutting incident of 1888, he seems to be racing for the exits. His narration of the artist’s suicide in 1890 scurries by so quickly that one almost doesn’t realize what has happened. “That afternoon,” Mr. Bell writes, “out of sight behind some barns, Vincent fired the revolver. It was a bad shot. In effect, it killed his brother. Theo van Gogh would stumble around heartbroken after Vincent’s funeral for a further nine weeks before . . . being admitted into care for the tertiary syphilis that finished him off on January 25, 1891.” Given the gravity of the events, such brisk pacing comes across as somewhat callous.
Mr. Bell’s book is part of a series of short biographies from Amazon’s New Harvest imprint, in partnership with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. To a degree, the limits of this format undermine the utility of this much-needed popular introduction. Arriving in the wake of Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith’s controversial 953-page “Van Gogh: The Life” (2011)—in which the authors argue that Van Gogh did not commit suicide but was murdered—Mr. Bell’s 163-page book makes the tacit case that less is more. In some ways, it is, and readers who are daunted by a massive tome on Van Gogh may find much to like in Mr. Bell’s book, which covers the basics well and expounds no sensationalistic theories.
But Mr. Bell’s fundamental vision of Van Gogh’s identity is heavily indebted to the work of Messrs. Naifeh and Smith, whose demystified presentation of the artist did away with the popular notion of Van Gogh as a hypersensitive innocent too pure for this world. To a considerable degree, that image was derived from Irving Stone’s widely read, fictionalized Van Gogh biography, “Lust for Life” (1934), which invented dramatic situations and dialogue loosely based on Van Gogh’s correspondence. (“Lust for Life” was made into a successful Hollywood movie, starring Kirk Douglas, in 1956.) Marc Edo Tralbaut’s scholarly biography “Vincent van Gogh” (1969), similarly cast Van Gogh as a stereotypical peintre maudit in the romantic mode. Messrs. Naifeh and Smith revealed instead a stubborn, argumentative and often rude individual. In this they drew upon the profoundly authoritative and resoundingly boring academic biography of Van Gogh by the eminent Dutch art historian Jan Hulsker, published in 1985. There is a great deal of truth to the characterization—Van Gogh tested the patience of virtually everyone he ever met—but the underlying poignancy of the artist’s social ineptitude is not really explored sufficiently in any of the existing biographies.
Looking at Van Gogh’s correspondence, which has recently been published in a meticulously edited, multivolume edition by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, one sees, again and again, the artist’s frustration at being emotionally isolated from the rest of the world. “In the springtime a bird in a cage knows very well that there’s something he’d be good for,” Van Gogh wrote to Theo in June 1880. “He feels very clearly that there’s something to be done but he can’t do it; what it is he can’t clearly remember, and he has vague ideas and says to himself, ‘the others are building their nests and making their little ones and raising the brood,’ and he bangs his head against the bars of his cage. And then the cage stays there and the bird is mad with suffering.”
Perhaps the greatest tragedy of Van Gogh’s life was that someone who so truly loved people and yearned for personal contact had such a limited talent for intimacy. When meeting people face-to-face, Van Gogh often succumbed to rash impulses—making caustic remarks or acting out his passions without any thought to their effect on those around him. But when he took time to think matters over, exercise a measure of restraint and channel his energies along a carefully considered pathway, as when he wrote or painted, he was capable of brilliance. In a letter to Theo, Van Gogh once remarked that he felt obliged to express his most genuine moments of insight in drawings and paintings as a form of gratitude for the privilege of being alive, and it was in such acts of concentrated creativity that the painter truly became the person, one might say, he was always intended to be.
Vincent van Gogh understood his art as nothing less than a lifeline for his immortal soul, the elusive reason for his existence. The continued prominence of his work as a touchstone of cultural achievement may, in part, offer redemption for his struggles. His life is unquestionably art history’s most compelling story of misunderstood genius, and whether told in a book that is too fat or too thin, too speculative or too terse, his story will always be worth reading.
—Mr. Lopez is editor at large of Art & Antiques.
