Books you may not like: Vincent Van Gogh, The Life

If I sit and really think about it, public schools, of all things, really helped foster an interest in art.  I remember basically three pivotal moments in my schooling that really cemented a love of art.  My entire time spent with art in school couldn't have taken more than 117 hours of schooling out of the staggering 15840 I spent in grade school and college, and yet those 117 hours (a mere 0.74%!) have paid incredible dividends, adding a richness to life that goes well beyond the scant amount of time spent.  Opponents of teaching art in public schools, take note!

Anyway, here they are:

1. I remember being exposed to art for the first time, really, in the third grade, when every other week we were marched off to the art room for an hour.  And one of the paintings I remember seeing was Van Gogh's "The Bedroom in Arles" I don't what it was about it - maybe it was the colors, or the kind of skewed perspective, or the fact that we learned Van Gogh was so crazy that he cut off his ear and gave it to his girlfriend (which, to the mind of a third grader, was kind of cool, but why go through so much trouble just for some dumb girl with cooties), but I liked it, and I tucked it into the filing cabinet for later.  
2. I've mentioned in this blog many times my European History teacher's delegation of teaching art history to "Sister Wendy's History of Painting".  While I have often joked about this, I have to commend him for giving the task to more capable hands.  
3. At Virginia Tech, all science and engineering majors have to take a class called "Creativity and Aesthetic Experience", where basically the head of the theatre department learns us about theatre, art, and music, and we have to go and see some shows and concerts.  It was kind of silly, but it was welcome break from never ending math and it was here that I learned about texture and contrast in painting for the first time, only deepening my appreciation.  

There you go.  A smattering of arts education goes a mighty long way.  

Anyway, as my appreciation grew, I became more and more drawn to Van Gogh's work, and I have to count his landscapes, and even some of his still lifes, as some of my favorite pieces of art.  If I happen to come across one in a museum I can stand and look at it, transfixed, for fully...well, five minutes.  But in this day and age of tweets and instantaneous everything, five minutes sitting contemplating a painting is like an eternity.  You know, kind of like how one dog year = seven people years.  

I even came a little bit to idolize the man himself. My knowledge had deepened a little more - I knew that the had given his ear to a prostitute, not merely his girlfriend, and that he was totally reliant on his brother for money.  Still, I admired the way he seemed to give himself wholly to his art.  But that was about all.  I wanted to know a little more.

So it was natural then that I would pick up a copy of the latest Van Gogh biography, Van Gogh: The Life .  It reads wonderfully well, justifying the claim by many reviews that it practically reads like a novel.  The authors did an incredible job of breathing life in Van Gogh's life and times.  The book is also well illustrated though most of the illustrations are black and white.  Van Gogh painted so many works I found that sometimes I had to go to the Google or to another book I have on Van Gogh to see a particular work being discussed in the book.  

Well written as the book is, its a tough read because it is basically an 800 page study in human misery.  Van Gogh was an odd kid with a strange personality that his parents (a pastor in the Dutch Lutheran church and his very status oriented wife) did not take too well.  He was sent to a series of boarding schools in which he failed, and then the family used its connections to get him a job at Goupil art dealers, at which he failed several times.  He then tried to be a missionary but failed as that at well, and when studying to take entrance exams so that he could go to seminary and be a pastor like his father?  Guess what:  failed those too.  

Vincent's repeated professional failings, coupled with his odd behavior (drunkenness, cavorting with prostitutes, hanging out with the peasants) brought scandal on the family and finally he was basically ostracized.   

And that seems to be the source of Vincent's misery.  For some reason he just was unable to connect with people, he was unable to find a family, and he would try again and again to graft himself into someone's life.  But, as Sien Hoornik, Paul Gauguin, and host of others found out, he did it with such incredibly intensity that it was simply impossible to live with him for more than a few months.  By the end of his life, even the two penny whores of Arles would politely refuse the strange man's company.

What's doubly sad that is tragedy seemed to touch all of those he came into contact with.  One of Vincent's brothers was killed in the diamond mines of Africa; one of his sister's ended up in an insane asylum; one of the only women that seriously loved him nearly killed himself after both her and Van Gogh's family got in the way of the match; Sien Hoornik drowned herself at the age of 45.  

And then there's Theo Van Gogh, Vincent's younger brother, who was a success at Goupil and struggled all his life to support Vincent by sending him money, paints, canvases, and trying to sell his works through his art world connections.  Theo was the closest friend Vincent ever had, and yet their relationship was under constant strain from Vincent's never ending demands for money.  Theo and Vincent cavorted together in the whorehouses of the Parisian underworld and both of them contracted syphilis.  The disease drove Theo horrifically insane and he ended his life in a straight jacket and a padded room.  Were it not for Theo's marriage to Joanna Bonger, who did much to give Vincent the recognition in death that he had never had in life, Vincent's art work may have died with Theo.

The question I found myself asking as I read the book is:  was it all worth it?  Was the work left behind worth the price?  Is my five minutes of enjoyment worth a lifetime of unhappy toil?  I don't know.  But it's a dangerous question to pose, because it suggests that nothing is worth ceaseless Sisyphean task of living a life that all of us are engaged in, even if it is something that a good number of us engage in with more happiness and success than Vincent Van Gogh.  Then again, perhaps Van Gogh's work points to an answer.  Maybe it is our mission, our vocation, to pull something beautiful out of the jaws of life, steeped in suffering though it may be.