Van Gogh and the artists he loved

Steven Naifeh, 1952-

Book - 2021

"To us, Van Gogh's paintings look utterly unique. His vivid palates and wildly interpretive portraits are unmistakably his--yet however revolutionary his style may have been, it was actually built on a strong foundation of paintings by other artists, both his contemporaries and those who came before him. Now, drawing on Van Gogh's own thoughtful and often poetic comments about the artists he venerated, Steven Naifeh gives a gripping account of his deep immersion in their work. We see Van Gogh's gradual discovery of the subjects he made famous, from wheat fields to sunflowers. We watch him copying the colors used by one artist, experimenting with the thick layers of paint on canvas used by another, all vividly illustrated... with 275 paintings by Van Gogh and a variety of other major artists, positioned side by side. Thanks to the vast correspondence from Vincent to his beloved brother Theo, Naifeh is able to reconstruct Van Gogh's artistic world from within. Observed in eloquent prose that is as compelling as it is authoritative, Van Gogh and the Artists He Loved enables us to share the artist's journey as he established his own audacious, influential, and widely beloved body of work"--

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Subjects
Published
New York : Random House [2021]
Language
English
Main Author
Steven Naifeh, 1952- (author)
Other Authors
Vincent van Gogh, 1853-1890 (-)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
xxxvi, 408 pages : color illustrations ; 26 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 387-393) and index.
ISBN
9780593356678
  • Religion
  • Peasant life
  • The downtrodden
  • The Hague school
  • Romanticism
  • The Barbizon school
  • English art and the graphic
  • Japonisme and Japanese prints
  • The female sitter
  • Still life
  • Literature and the French novel
  • Academic art
  • Impressionism
  • The art of the Petit boulevard
  • The sea
  • Living in Vincent's mind
  • Afterword: Van Gogh and his legacy by Ann Dumas.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Pulitzer Prize--winning biographer Naifeh (Jackson Pollock) offers a captivating look inside the mind of Vincent van Gogh (1853--1890) through the artists who inspired him. Propelled by a "wide-ranging curiosity drew him to one artistic and intellectual movement after another," the Dutch painter's omnivorous taste led him to study numerous works of artistic expression. Drawing primarily from Van Gogh's correspondences with his brother Theo, Naifeh lucidly traces the painter's relationship with everything from 17th century works by Rembrandt (who, like Van Gogh, had a penchant for "obsessively" painting himself) to experimenting with the Pointillist dots of Georges Seurat (which, Naifeh writes, "freed Van Gogh from the unforgiving linearity of realism") to his fascination with Japanese woodblock prints in the mid-1880s. Further enriched with images of prints that Van Gogh himself owned and annotated--including Vase with Flowers (c. 1875) by French painter Adolphe Monticelli, which, Van Gogh wrote, encapsulated "in a single panel the whole range of his richest and most perfectly balanced tones"--the book allows readers to glimpse the lessons the artist drew from prototypes when executing his own vivid works, including his famous Sunflowers and Green Wheat Fields, Auvers (1890). While illuminating the life of one of the world's most significant artists, this also sheds a broader light on the fascinating nuances of the creative process. (Nov.)

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Review by Library Journal Review

With his late husband, Gregory White Smith, Naifeh wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning Jackson Pollock: An American Saga and four other New York Times best sellers, including Van Gogh: The Life. Here, Naifeh shows that while Van Gogh was a groundbreaker, he actually built on the work of artists he admired, ranging from Jean-François Millet to Claude Monet to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Color illustrations throughout juxtapose works by these artists with Van Gogh's, representing 275 paintings altogether.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A celebration of one of the world's greatest artists and the works that inspired him. As Naifeh notes in the introduction to this handsome, photo-heavy book, Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) "never saw himself as a revolutionary artist." His work "built on a strong foundation of the art that had come before him," and he made "his own very personal versions of their paintings." In this companion volume to Naifeh's 2011 biography, Van Gogh, the author describes the ways in which van Gogh's forebears and contemporaries had a profound impact on his work. Throughout the book, which is divided into chapters that highlight the schools and movements that influenced van Gogh and the subjects he painted, Naifeh places another artist's work and van Gogh's on facing pages to demonstrate the unique variations. Among the examples, the author shows that Jacob Hendricus Maris' Two Girls at the Piano "made such an impression" that it led to van Gogh's more vivid Marguerite Gachet at the Piano, a "boldly brushed painting, thick with impasto"; that Monet's Fishing Boats at Étretat influenced Fishing Boats on the Beachat Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer; and more. Naifeh amply quotes from van Gogh's letters to his brother, Theo, a body of analysis so profound that Naifeh calls it "a literary masterpiece in its own right." The book is occasionally repetitive. More than once, for example, the author notes that Dutch painter Anton Mauve encouraged van Gogh to master the art of drawing the figure by drawing still lifes and plaster casts, but van Gogh resisted. But as excuses for collecting paintings between the pages of a book go, this is a good one, with learned explanations, dozens of beautiful reproductions, and an especially moving essay about the author and his husband of 40 years, scholar Gregory White Smith, who died in 2014, and their love of art. An accessible, heartfelt introduction to van Gogh's work and life. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Religion No one needed the balm of religion more than Vincent van Gogh. From childhood, he fixed on the image of Christ as both sorrowing and the comforter of sorrows. This was the image enshrined forever in his imagination by an engraving of Ary Scheffer's Christus Consolator that hung in his father's parsonage throughout his childhood--as far as we know, the first work of art to enter his consciousness. Illustrating a passage from the Bible ("I have come to heal those who are of a broken heart"), it became one of the favorite religious images of a nineteenth century fixated on images of innocent suffering: A radiant but sad Christ sits surrounded by supplicants prostrated by pain, oppression, and despair. He opens his hand to reveal the wounds he received on the cross, a reminder of his own suffering. The message was clear: Suffering brings one closer to God. "Sadness does no harm," wrote Van Gogh's father, the pastor Theodorus, "but makes us see things with a holier eye." In many of the rooms that Van Gogh rented throughout his early life, he hung religious illustrations on almost every wall, image after image, mostly of Jesus, until "the whole room was decorated with biblical images and ecce homos," a co-worker named Paulus Görlitz recalled many years later. On almost every image Van Gogh wrote the same inscription from 2 Corinthians: "Sorrowful, yet always rejoicing." At Easter, he surrounded every print of Christ with palm branches. "I was not a pious person," said Görlitz, who roomed with Van Gogh when they worked together as booksellers in Dordrecht in 1877, "but I was moved when I observed his piety." Görlitz remembered Van Gogh's telling him, "The Bible is my solace, my support in life. It is the most beautiful book I know." That same year, at the age of twenty-four, Van Gogh moved to Amsterdam, where he set out to become a Dutch Protestant pastor like his father, whom the family called Dorus. It was an arduous career choice. Before he could begin any theological studies, he first had to be admitted to a university, and that required years of academic training, including studies in Greek and Latin. Van Gogh was determined to do it in record time. "May God grant me the necessary wisdom to end my studies as early as possible," he wrote with impatience, "so that I can perform the duties of a clergyman." The subject of religion was not included in his preparations for the university entrance exam, but he could not resist it for long. Soon he was studying the Bible straight through yet again, somehow finding time in his busy language studies to make long lists of parables and miracles and arranging them in chronological order, in English and French as well as Dutch. "After all," he explained to Theo, "it is the Bible that is essential." Van Gogh meanwhile pursued his language studies with an intensity that exceeded even his usual fervor for new endeavors, applying himself "with the tenacity of a dog that gnaws a bone," as he put it. But there were signs of trouble right from the start. The work did not yield readily to Van Gogh's ardor. "It does not come to me so easily and quickly as I could wish," he admitted to Theo, praying for a lightning bolt to restore his conviction. It did not take long for inspiration to strike. During the pivotal summer of 1877, Van Gogh heard a sermon by a Dutch Reformed minister named Eliza Laurillard on the parable of the sower, and it showed him how he might combine the great consuming passion of his life--family reconciliation through religion--and the great consoling preoccupation of his life: art. "Jesus walked in the newly sown field," Laurillard began. Using simple, vivid imagery he portrayed a Christ not only embodied in nature, but also intimately connected with the processes of nature (plowing, sowing, reaping), and inseparable from the beauty of the natural world. Other preachers, including Van Gogh's father, had declared the "divineness of Nature." But Laurillard went further. Finding beauty in nature was not just one way of knowing God, he proposed--it was the only way. And those who could see that beauty and express it--writers, musicians, artists--were God's truest intermediaries. This was an electrifying new ideal of art and artists. Before, art had always served religion: from the ubiquitous emblem books that taught children moral lessons, to the devotional prints that hung in every one of Van Gogh's rooms. But Laurillard preached a "religion of beauty" in which God is nature, nature is beauty, art is worship, and artists are preachers. In short, art is religion. "He made a deep impression on me," Van Gogh wrote, as he returned again and again to hear Laurillard preach. "It is as if he paints, and his work is at the same time high and noble art." But Laurillard's ideas on art and religion were not enough to propel Van Gogh into the ministry--ultimately, his titanic efforts to follow in his father's footsteps would fall far short. He failed to get through the rigorous academic training required of a Dutch Protestant minister in the nineteenth century; he failed to establish himself as a religious missionary in the desolate mining country of southern Belgium; he failed even to keep a job as a colporteur--a lowly dispenser of free Bibles. And, as it would throughout his life, his failure to measure up to his family's expectations would cause him to reject his family's faith. In 1881, Van Gogh asked his widowed cousin Kee Vos to marry him. This precipitated a huge conflagration with his parents, who sympathized with their grief-stricken niece's horror at the idea of becoming entangled with their deeply troubled son. So Vincent struck back in the most powerful way he could: by denouncing religion. Religion would "ring hollow," he declared to Theo, "if one had to hide one's love and were not allowed to follow the dictates of one's heart." If religion required a repudiation of the heart, then he would sooner repudiate religion. "I really don't care for all that twaddle about good and evil, morality and immorality," Vincent wrote to Theo in the aftermath of the thwarted marriage proposal. As the decade wore on, Van Gogh would veer further and further away from traditional religion, first personally and then artistically. His antagonism toward it would reach its height in 1888, at the same time that his friend Émile Bernard began to introduce Catholic imagery into his art. Fired by the Symbolist debates in Paris, Bernard arrived in the art community of Pont-Aven on the coast of Brittany in April of that year with a portfolio of mystic religious images in one hand and a Bible in the other. Paul Gauguin, the leader of the Pont-Aven artists, received the new ideas openly, and soon both men were busily planning works to plumb the Good Book's deep well of mystery and meaning. After such a warm reception from Gauguin, Bernard must have been shocked by the storm of protest that greeted his ideas in faraway Arles, where Van Gogh now lived. "How small-minded the old story really is!" Van Gogh wrote to Bernard. He railed against "that deeply saddening Bible, which arouses our despair and indignation, which seriously offends us and thoroughly confuses us with its pettiness and infectious foolishness." Only the figure of Christ survived Van Gogh's wrath. But he belittled Bernard's ambition to capture Christ's image as "artistic neurosis" and ridiculed his chances of succeeding. "Only Delacroix and Rembrandt have painted the face of Christ in such a way that I can feel him," he scoffed. "The rest rather make me laugh." Van Gogh continued to inoculate himself against the world of spirits and superstitions that surrounded him, even undertaking, in July 1888, to reread the complete works of the religious skeptic Honoré de Balzac. But the influence of the artists he respected was too strong, the obsession from the past too deep and unsettled, to resist for long. In September, in a moment of deep despair, Van Gogh turned to the most consoling image he knew: Christ in the Garden. Van Gogh tried painting the image twice, but scraped away the paint both times. Late that same month, he tried again to capture this vision of immortality in paint. "I have the thing in my head," he wrote, "a starry night; the figure of Christ in blue, all the strongest blues, and the angel blended citron-yellow." But yet again he failed. Crushed a second time by the weight of an image too heavily freighted with the past--"too beautiful to dare to paint"--Van Gogh took a knife and "mercilessly destroyed" the canvas. Excerpted from Van Gogh and the Artists He Loved by Steven Naifeh All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.