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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The definitive biography for decades to come.”—Leo Jansen, curator, the Van Gogh Museum, and co-editor of Vincent van Gogh: The Complete LettersSteven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, who galvanized readers with their Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Jackson Pollock, have written another tour de force—an exquisitely detailed, compellingly readable portrait of Vincent van Gogh. Working with the full cooperation of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, Naifeh and Smith have accessed a wealth of previously untapped materials to bring a crucial understanding to the larger-than-life mythology of this great artist: his early struggles to find his place in the world; his intense relationship with his brother Theo; and his move to Provence, where he painted some of the best-loved works in Western art. The authors also shed new light on many unexplored aspects of Van Gogh’s inner world: his erratic and tumultuous romantic life; his bouts of depression and mental illness; and the cloudy circumstances surrounding his death at the age of thirty-seven. Though countless books have been written about Van Gogh, no serious, ambitious examination of his life has been attempted in more than seventy years. Naifeh and Smith have re-created Van Gogh’s life with an astounding vividness and psychological acuity that bring a completely new and sympathetic understanding to this unique artistic genius.NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • The Washington Post • The Wall Street Journal • San Francisco Chronicle • NPR • The Economist • Newsday • BookReporter “In their magisterial new biography, Van Gogh: The Life, Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith provide a guided tour through the personal world and work of that Dutch painter, shining a bright light on the evolution of his art. . . . What [the authors] capture so powerfully is Van Gogh’s extraordinary will to learn, to persevere against the odds.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times“Brilliant . . . Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith are the big-game hunters of modern art history. . . . [Van Gogh] rushes along on a tide of research. . . . At once a model of scholarship and an emotive, pacy chunk of hagiography.”—Martin Herbert, The Daily Telegraph (London)
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Product details
Paperback: 976 pages
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reprint edition (December 4, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0375758976
ISBN-13: 978-0375758973
Product Dimensions:
6.1 x 1.8 x 9.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 2.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.6 out of 5 stars
354 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#76,082 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
The authors of Van Gogh: The Life, Steven Naifeh and Gregory Smith, set out to write the most complete life of Vincent Van Gogh as possible, and they have admirably succeeded. This is not a book for everyone. The detail will put off many people interested in Van Gogh but anyone who want the full picture will find the detail rewarding. This is not to say I did not skim through several pages. For me, the most interesting part of the biography is the years Van Gogh spent in France. The book was a profound experience as I got to know Van Gogh much more than through exhibition catalogues and shorter biographies that were not prone to analysis. For those readers, myself included, who knew the Time-Life and Hollywood version of Vincent Van Gogh, this biography opens up the subject as never before and one may not enjoy discovering the flesh and blood Vincent with all of his failings and strange personality.The authors have had access to far more information and were given access to a huge amount of archival material from Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum. They also benefited from a new, six-volume edition of Van Gogh’s letters. The result is a very readable and full portrait of Vincent Van Gogh and his family. The complexity of Vincent’s sometimes strained relations with his brother Theo are well detailed as well as Vincent’s inner life, his desperate hopes for an artist’s colony and his manic attacks. The descriptions of many of Vincent’s paintings provide wonderful insights and are beautifully written. Vincent Van Gogh. If you have an interest in exploring Vincent Van Gogh’s life in depth, this biography is all that you need.
Being a well researched and well written book, I found tremendous pleasure in reading it. Yet it was not an easy read, for there is little joy or humour to be found in van Gogh's life. This poor bloke had an extremely raw deal almost from cradle to grave. Reading of all his mishaps for almost 600 pages tended to dampen my spirits occasionally, especially knowing there is no happy ending. ( I read fragments of Wodehouse in between to counter the gloom.)Vincent was probably basically an introvert, but what made him almost impossible to get along with seemed to be his eccentricity, his shot fuse, his obstinacy, his obsessive nature and his general tendency to rub people the wrong way. at some time during a relationship. It was only his brother Theo, bless his saintly heart, who showed compassion and love for most of their adult lives.And yet, unappealing as his personality appeared to be, it also emerged from his copious letters that he was in fact also a sensitive human being with heartfelt remorse about the problems and disappointments he caused his parents . Despite his lack of formal schooling he emerged from his letters as a gifted writer and a reader of high quality (French) literature. In addition there can be no doubt about his formidable knowledge of painters and their paintings.Tragically, the first signs of some acknowledgement of the greatness of Vincent's art only appeared shortly before his death, and he himself was unsure whether it would last. As is well known, only one of his paintings was sold at that stage.The question remains: with his way of looking at life, with the mental illness that tormented him in his last year of life, would he have been really happy even if he became rich and famous during his lifetime?
This is not an easy book to read. When I started it, I wasn't sure I would get through 900 pages: from childhood, VVG was horribly maladjusted and unhappy, starting a pattern of wild mood swings, feverish and doomed efforts to succeed in the eyes of his family, and breakdowns in all his relationships and undertakings. Perhaps worst, I had always romanticized him as a hyper-sensitive victim, someone like the Don McClean ballad of a heroic lonely genius. But, according to this (utterly convincing) interpretation, VVG was an extremely unpleasant, vicious, selfish loser, who alternately saw himself as a Christ-like figure or as a total failure whose only option to avoid shame was death. Nonetheless, after struggling to get my mind into this narrative (some 200 pp.) and with the somewhat florid prose of the book, I found myself completely trusting the authors, whose research in the details of VVG's life and times is nothing short of magnificent. From that point, it became a dazzling exploration of one of the most seminal periods in history, when a new art was born to embody the changes underway with the industrial revolution and the birth of the science of psychology.VVG was born into a rigid and narrow-minded family, with strictly enforced rules and oppressive expectations. His father was a country preacher and his mother a fearfully aspiring bourgeoise, both self-righteous and unquestioning of their beliefs. Each child was assigned a role to follow, and unfortunately for VVG, he fell into the role of black sheep, forever unable to satisfy their demands in the way that they wanted. This created a profound alienation that he never grew beyond. At the time, with mass urbanization underway and the traditional foundation of a religion-bound way of life on the way out, his father Dorus Van Gogh struggled to maintain a congregation in a bitter contest with modernity.Dropping out of an expensive school, VVG entered his uncle's business of art sales. Here the pattern of all his subsequent undertakings emerged: rustic and unkempt, he made implacable enemies all around himself, particularly those in power, leading inevitably to ostracism and ruinous financial dependence on his family, all of whom were mortified with shame, rarely encouraging, and always condemning. In this way, he attempted and failed to enter a seminary to become a preacher like his father, exiled himself to the countryside to become a kind of vagabond evangelical, and finally found art. In each of these undertakings, he threw himself into them with a prodigious, obsessive energy that inevitably led to periodic nervous breakdown. All the while, he corresponded with members of his family in copious letters, first in recrimination and accusation from his side, then in pleading for forgiveness and money. To put it mildly, it is an agonizing spectacle, a downward spiral that only got worse with time.Once he discovers art, which he undertook in his late 20s, the book becomes utterly fascinating. It completely succeeds at evoking the times. With the rise of the bourgeoisie, the demand for art soared, becoming a mass phenomenon for possession in normal households rather than only in palaces; with the advent of photography and the decline of religious sentimentality, movements in art emerged to meet new criteria: to display psychological subjects, visual experimentation to add something beyond realism, and new kinds of symbolism, to mention a few. It was the birth of modernism and VVG was smack in the middle of it.VVG spent a long period working isolated in the countryside on drawing, refusing to get into color. This was when he more or less mastered form, the proverbial 10,000 hours that it takes to enter a craft. In his personal life, he took in a prostitute and her extended family - all at Theo's expense - and announced he would marry her, to the horror of his family. It was one of many disastrous and embarrassing episodes where he sought to construct his imagined ideal of a family life, always ending in disillusion, rage, and breakdowns. The same was true of his many failed friendships, where he hoped to create a community of artists perhaps living together. He left Holland with syphilis, which could not have helped his psychological pathologies.Once in Paris, VVG experimented with virtually all of the new movements and got to know the cutting-edge avantgarde artists of his time. This is great fun, not only for their personalities when they were starting out, but for the descriptions of what they were attempting to do. It is a dense introduction to the most amazing artistic invention. VVG was a voracious reader and up on all the intellectual currents as they related to art, from Balzac and Zola to the philosophers, new critics, and historians, e.g. Michelet, all of which are densely summarized. Though he seemed to have found a role for himself in his brother's milieu - Theo had taken VVG's place in his uncle business and ran the most prestigious experimental art gallery in Paris - VVG abruptly leaves and heads to Arles, inaugurating the phenomenally productive period with his experiments in color and the maturing of his style, though he met with no commercial success and remained dependent on his brother, financially and far more demandingly, psychologically. The authors offer a brilliant explanation of the many stages of his art, which added immeasurably to my understanding of it.In terms of his career, though he worked for the most part in obscurity and under ever worsening mental deterioration, VVG was lucky to synchronize with the new awareness of psychology. The authors offer a fascinating interpretation that combines mythic pretension - the genius that expresses his art as a direct conduit to raw agony, emotion, and soul - with the practicality of how to build a career at the time. In other words, a critic finds an artist and explains his corpus of work, earning money from their own publications and also allying himself with a gallery to help sell it. One such critic, Albert Aurier, found VVG near the end of his life and began to extoll his work, bringing him a modest fame (though few sales and to the embarrassment of his family at the exposure of his mental illness). VVG was aghast at the way he was portrayed and felt not enjoyment or even vindication, but oppressed by yet another role that was imposed on him. After his death, this was the kernal that led to his later fame as a tortured artist whose life was as important as his art.In such a long book, the authors also tried (or felt compelled) to introduce something new, an interpretation of VVG's death not as a suicide, but possibly as an accident. This may be the case, but we will never know, and I found this section a bit contrived. That being said, while the authors offer ample evidence to interpret the nature of VVG's mental illness, they never get mired in psychological jargon, beyond the contention that VVG was psychotic. It is up to the reader to decide whether he was bipolar, syphilitic, or damaged from his childhood treatment. I suspect it is a combination of all this. What is undeniable is the depth of their coverage, which is absolutely first rate. Though often critical and unflinching, their ideas never take away from the man and his wonderful achievements, but add new depth. This is a remarkable accomplishment for biography, particularly one that is so long and detailed.Highest recommendation. I was inspired by this book and will seek out VVG's work (and those of his influences and milieu) in the museums I explored as a child, with a fresh eye. They also highlighted the influences on VVG - Millet, Delacroix, Corot, Daumier - that made me hungry for new explorations. There is no greater tribute to a book's success!
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