Review by New York Times Review
AS A FLEDGLING ARTIST, Vincent van Gogh hired a carpenter to build a perspective frame: a wire-grid window. He used it to draw the Dutch countryside, his eyes darting between his pencil and the views through the frame. A few years later, van Gogh suffered a spate of psychiatric crises that sent him to an asylum in Saint Rémy, France. There his bedroom's barred window doubled as a new perspective frame, albeit one with only verticals, through which he sketched the wheat field below. This "wrenched him out of orthodox perspective," Julian Bell writes in "Van Gogh: A Power Seething," a new biography as brief and intense as his subject's Me. A painter as well as a writer, Bell takes full measure of van Gogh's use of this imposed device. His skewed panorama "made plain his own tangential, leftsided relation" to the land, "even while thrusting the stuff of the crop dynamically forward." It was a breakthrough. In what could easily be the book's epigraph, Bell writes: "The painter may be in hell, but painting is still heaven." The author gets up close not only to the artist but also to the social animal. A 30-year-old lout with no money, no job and no plan, van Gogh retreats to his parents' home. There he is perceived, he tells his brother Theo, as a "large, shaggy dog ... with wet paws" who scares his own father. The shouting begins. A few years later, van Gogh severs part of his own left ear. But Bell refuses to view van Gogh as a madman or martyr, quickly asserting that he would rather focus on the "astonishing paintings and letters" than on the "lump of bloody gristle to which a social misfit is no longer attached." "Van Gogh" gives readers what we would get from a knowing interlocutor fresh off a walk - or rather six walks (there are six chapters) - with a master colleague. Bell probes van Gogh's work, artist to artist. What did van Gogh learn from Rembrandt and Hals? What painting options lay before him as he arrived in Paris? Why did he take up self-portraiture? What did painting mean to him at various times of his life? Unlike most artists' biographers, Bell rarely gives titles and dates. Nothing feels fixed in art history. The author frequently quotes from van Gogh's correspondence, mostly the more than 600 letters to Theo. The book flags only when the two are living together in Paris and fewer letters exist. Van Gogh writes beautifully about his own life and art, but his words don't always match what he painted or what he did. Bell works the gaps, poring over a drawing, scanning the artistic horizon, backtracking to make a connection, delivering an irreverent aside. This book is to comprehensive biography as memoir is to autobiography. In fact, "Van Gogh" is dwarfed by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith's 900-plus-page "Van Gogh: The Life" (2011). Leaving sleuthing and psychological heavy lifting to them, Bell interprets; the result is captivating. Peering into van Gogh's art, he perceives a "frantic internal bubbling, driven by a heat from below." It boiled over into what people call madness. Yet painting, that joy, tapped into this vortex, and made it, in Bell's judgment, the deep source of a rushing and reeling and mode-jumping art that binds what ostensibly does not belong together. Witness the hyperconnectivity of the transcendent "Starry Night." We all end our lives with a deficit, van Gogh once told Theo, "yet, yet, one feels a power seething inside one, one has a task to do and it must be done." PATRICIA ALBERS is the author of "Joan Mitchell, Lady Painter: A Life." She is working on a biography of the photographer Andre Kertesz.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 25, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
Van Gogh was as expressive in his now famous letters as he was on canvas, and writer and artist Bell profoundly relates to both aspects of Van Gogh's creativity. In this astutely and poetically distilled biography, Bell draws us into Van Gogh's life and consciousness as he chronicles the artist's struggles with familial and societal expectations and offers fresh and intimate insights. We first meet Van Gogh as a boy enthralled by nature and buffeted by emotional storms, the oldest son of a rural Dutch pastor in a family cursed by psychochemical ill luck. As an adult driven by ill-focused zeal, Van Gogh couldn't conform to the demands of his extended family's art-dealing business, nor, when he tried to heed his spiritual calling, could he stick to church teachings, particularly when it came to women. His loyal brother, Theo, steered reeling and staggering Vincent to art, which proved to be the perfect vehicle for his wild quest for beauty, humaneness, and the divine. Bell describes with glorious acuity the rapid artistic evolution of this self-taught genius propelled by a peculiar inner seething, celebrating with unique fluency Van Gogh's rapturous vision and the visual electricity of his masterpieces. A vividly illuminating portrait both for readers versed in Van Gogh and those who are newly curious.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In the sixth installment of New Harvest's Icons series, painter and author Bell (Mirror of the World) brings his insight as a fellow artist to the life and work of Vincent van Gogh in a condensed, accessible primer on the renowned artist. Bell traces Van Gogh's shiftless youth from apprenticeship at his uncle's art emporium, a failed attempt at priesthood, and his move to Paris and discovery of pointillism, to his subsequent mental breakdown, the severing of his ear, the creation of The Starry Night while institutionalized, and his suicide. Providing astute commentary on Van Gogh's work, Bell declares the early Miners in the Snow "earnestly ambitious," and the more accomplished painting Quinces, Lemons, Pears and Grapes a "single resounding chord of yellow played out on various vegetal instruments." He also illuminates the artist's famously prickly personality, the grumbling and begging of money from his long-suffering brother Theo, as well as excerpts from letters exhibiting a deep and poetic sensibility. For a more exhaustive account, as the author notes, there are plenty of sources. This quick but thorough read provides a fulfilling overview of the artist. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Painter and art historian Bell (Mirror of the World: A New History of Art, 2010, etc.) brings an artist's sensibility to this distilled, intimate biography of Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890).Drawing largely on the artist's letters to Theo, his younger brother and confidant, the author traces the trajectory of van Gogh's life: failed jobs at his uncle's art galleries in the Hague, London and Paris; failed efforts to become a minister or evangelist; a rebuffed marriage proposal; and squalid affairs with prostitutes. "One sometimes gets the feeling, where am I? what am I doing? where am I going? and one starts to grow dizzy," he wrote to Theo in the midst of his theology studies. Finally, at 27, with Theo's encouragement and financial support, van Gogh turned to art. Although his life story may be familiar, what distinguishes Bell's elegant rendering is an astute perception of his artistic vision and shimmering descriptions of his work. After producing "hard-hacked, heavily hatched, jagged and severe" lines in his 1883 drawings, van Gogh discovered the potential of oil. "The brushwork," Bell writes of the 1885 paintings, "accelerated and turned skittery and rhythmic." After moving to the south of France, van Gogh felt a new "licence to aestheticize.Confronting for the first time the southern waves, he found wild new colors coming at him. He longed, he wrote to Theo, to "express the love of two lovers through a marriage of two complementary colours, their mixture and their contrasts, the mysterious vibration of adjacent tones." For the author, the artist's recurring breakdowns, which so frightened his parents that they wanted to institutionalize him and which ended in bouts of delusion and mania, suggest bipolar illness. His "frantic internal bubbling," after all, seems of a piece with the "inner seething" that infused him with both desperation and power. A graceful, empathetic, deeply probing portrait. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
