Reading notes (2021, week 18) — On authenticity, what data can’t do, and the keys to Van Gogh’s paintings
By: Mark Storm
Tags: Van Gogh, Authenticity, Zeitgeist, Art, Philosophy

After settling in the genteel Dutch village of Bussum, where she opened a boardinghouse, Jo “matter-of-factly […] identified the two responsibilities that Theo had given her. ‘As well as the child,’ she wrote, ‘he has left me another task — Vincent’s work — getting it seen and appreciated as much as possible.’

Having no training in how to achieve this, she began with what was at hand. In addition to Vincent’s paintings, she had inherited the enormous trove of letters that the brothers had exchanged. In Bussum, in the evenings, with her guests taken care of and the baby asleep, she pored over them. Nearly all, it turned out, were from Vincent — her husband had carefully kept Vincent’s letters, but Vincent hadn’t been so fastidious with the ones his brother had sent him. Details of the artist’s daily life and tribulations — his insomnia, his poverty, his self-doubt — were mixed with accounts of paintings he was working on, techniques he experimented with, what he was reading, descriptions of paintings by other artists he drew inspiration from. He often felt the need to put into words what he was trying to achieve with color: ‘Town violet, star yellow, sky blue-green; the wheat fields have all the tones: old gold, copper, green gold, red gold, yellow gold, green, red and yellow bronze.’ Repeatedly he sought to explain his objective in capturing what he was looking at: ‘I tried to reconstruct the thing as it may have been by simplifying and accentuating the proud, unchanging nature of the pines and the cedar bushes against the blue.’ He described his harrowing mental breakdowns and his fear of future collapses — that ‘a more violent crisis may destroy my ability to paint forever,’ and his notion that, should he experience another episode, he could ‘go into an asylum or even to the town prison, where there’s usually an isolation cell.’

[…]

By the end of her first year on her own — living with Vincent’s paintings and his words, reading deeply, immersing herself from time to time in these gatherings — Jo had experienced a kind of epiphany: Van Gogh’s letters were part and parcel of the art. They were keys to the paintings. The letters brought the art and the tragic, intensely lived life together into a single package. Jo would have appreciated the view of the French Impressionists she had met in Paris that the notion of following rules on how and what to paint had become impossibly inauthentic, that in a world lacking a central authority an artist had to look within for guidance. That was what Monet, Gauguin and the others had done, and the results were to be seen on their canvases. Bringing an artist’s biography into the mix was simply another step in the same direction.

The letters also pointed to the audience Vincent had intended. Vincent, who once sought a career as a minister and lived among peasants to humble himself, had desperately wanted to make art that reached beyond the cognoscenti and directly into the hearts of common people. ‘No result of my work would be more agreeable to me,’ he wrote to Theo, quoting another artist, ‘than that ordinary working men should hang such prints in their room or workplace.’ Vincent’s letters and paintings seemed to reinforce Jo’s own longstanding convictions about social justice. As a girl, influenced by Sunday sermons, she longed for a life of purpose. Just before agreeing to marry Theo, she visited Belgium, and the minister whose family she was staying with took her to see the living conditions of workers at a nearby coal mine. The experience shook her, and helped fuel what became a lifelong dedication to causes ranging from workers’ rights to female suffrage. She counted herself as one of the ‘ordinary’ people Vincent had written of, and she knew that he had considered himself one as well. After consuming her tortured brother-in-law’s words alone in her guesthouse one night during a storm in 1891, with the wind howling outside, she wrote in a letter, ‘I felt so desolate — that for the first time I understood what he must have felt, in those times when everyone turned away from him.’

She was now ready to act as agent for Vincent van Gogh. One of her first moves was to approach an art critic named Jan Veth , who in addition to being the husband of a friend was at the forefront of the New Guide circle. Veth was outspoken in his rejection of academic art and in promoting individual expression. At first, though, Veth dismissed Vincent’s work outright and belittled Jo’s efforts. He himself later admitted that he was initially ‘repelled by the raw violence of some van Goghs,’ and found these paintings ‘nearly vulgar.’ His reaction, despite his commitment to the new, gives a sense of the shock that Vincent’s canvases engendered at first sight. […]

Jo found Veth’s reaction disappointingly conventional. He must also have said something disparaging about a woman seeking to enter the art world, because she complained to her diary after an encounter with him: ‘We women are for the most part what men want us to be.’ But she realized his importance as a critic and believed that his openness to new ideas meant that she could persuade him to appreciate the paintings, telling her diary, ‘I won’t rest until he likes them.’

She pressed an envelope full of Vincent’s letters on Veth, encouraging him to use them, as she had, as a means to illuminate the paintings. She didn’t try to come across like an art critic but instead poured her heart out to the man, trying to guide him toward the shift in thinking that she felt was needed to perceive a new mode of artistic expression. She explained to Veth that she had begun reading the correspondence between the brothers in order to be closer to her dead husband, but then Vincent stole his way into her. ‘I read the letters — not only with my head — I was deep into them with my whole soul,’ she wrote to Veth. ‘I read them and reread them until the whole figure of Vincent was clear before me.’ She told him that she wished she could ‘make you feel the influence that Vincent has had on my life. … I’ve found serenity.’

Her timing was good. The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga later characterized the ‘change of spirit that began to be felt in art and literature around 1890’ as a swirl of ideas that coalesced around two poles: ‘that of socialism and that of mysticism.’ Jo saw that Vincent’s art straddled both. Jan Veth was among those trying to process a shift from Impressionism to something new, an art that applied individualism to social and even spiritual questions. He listened to Jo and came around. He wrote one of the first appreciations of the artist, saying that he now saw ‘the astonishing clairvoyance of great humility’ and characterized Vincent as an artist who ‘seeks the raw root of things.’ In particular, Jo’s effort to bring her brother-in-law’s life to bear on his art seems to have worked with Veth. ‘Once having grasped his beauty, I can accept the whole man,’ the critic wrote.”

Also other critics at first resisted the idea of looking at Vincent’s life and work as one, only to give in. “When they looked at the paintings, they saw not just the art but Vincent, toiling and suffering, cutting off his ear, clawing at the act creation. They fused art and artist. They saw what Jo van Gogh-Bonger wanted them to see,” Shorto writes.