Vincent Van Gogh: life, art, and influence

Van Gogh

In Search of Illumination: An Analysis of the Life and Work of Vincent Van Gogh

If, as Richard Williamson (2010) says, art is a skill and that skill is the "expression of the soul," Vincent Van Gogh's artistic productivity (leaping into life in the final decade of his own) may tell us much about the soul of the man. With an oeuvre of over 2000 works Van Gogh's artistic passion matched the intensity of his religious fervor. Religion and art were, essentially, the basis of Van Gogh's life. And the history of his life is, in a way, a history of modern Europe; in another way it is a history of the prelude to 20th century modern art; and in another way it is a lesson on the loss that Europe had suffered when it broke with its medieval heritage, renounced its metaphysics, and became a world of skepticism and Hegelian dialectic. This paper will analyze the life and artwork of Van Gogh and show how it was both part old world and part new.

Background

Born into a Dutch Reformist family in 19th century Netherlands, Vincent Van Gogh was, from the age of reason, determined to be a missionary for the Protestant church. Indeed, his biographer Julius Meier-Graefe (1933) tells us that Vincent "inherited" from his father "a burning desire to enter the Church," which greatly shaped the first 25 years of his life (p. 3). The confines of Protestantism, however, were perhaps too brutally constricting: Van Gogh's passion was of an ascetic quality that might have had more in common with the counter-Reformist Ignatius than with the Lutheran sensibilities that had taken root in north Germany. Ignatius, for example, believed in the efficacy of supernatural grace and formed the Jesuit order that would become the leading light of missionary activity for the Catholic Church in the modern world. Luther, on the other hand, denied the efficacy of supernatural grace, and instead initiated (more or less) the "advent of the Ego" (Garrigou-Lagrange, 1938, p. 6). The purity with which Van Gogh's art reflects nature should, if anything, indicate the purity of his religious conviction before he traded his religious zeal for artistic pursuit: the two were, after all, products of the same intensity of soul and imagination that drew Van Gogh to the old world Word of God and to the new world forms of artistic expression like the Impressionism he found in Paris in 1886. Van Gogh, like all artists, was a child of his age and a child of tradition. The tradition was distinctly Christian -- but Protestant (which was the first step away from tradition and toward modernity). Nonetheless, as his 1888 sketch The Sower reveals, the divine narrative never left his consciousness -- and his art appears to be an attempt to find the thread of that narrative in nature, where Protestantism had essentially cut it.

The Romantic Age had, after all, produced an inclination to elevate Natural Man: Rousseau did so in his philosophical writings; Shelley did so in his poetry (and his wife wrote an account of the consequences of such in Frankenstein), and Van Gogh's contemporary Paul Gauguin did so with his own life and work. Gauguin gave up the ease and comfort of 19th century Victorian society to live and paint among the natives of the Third World in Tahiti. W. Somerset Maugham would chronicle a fictional rendering of the enterprise of Gauguin in a later novel titled The Moon and Sixpence, which lauded the artist's determination to cast off the shell of modern civilization for the "hard, gemlike flame" that Walter Pater (1868) was convinced could be found in Nature. Says Maugham (1919) of his fictionalized Gauguin: "The greatness of [the man] was authentic"(p. 1). His greatness, however, also showed the unfortunate consequence of his enterprise -- specifically, that Nature was not enough. The religion of the old world, of course, had filled the gap between Nature and Pater's "gemlike flame" with the concept of sanctifying grace, a proceed of the Triune God and a necessity for all souls that sought to possess the "flame." The new world of Romantic/Enlightenment doctrine and Protestant ethic, however, was self-reliant: its most passionate souls sought the "flame," like Shelley, Pater, Gauguin, and Van Gogh -- but few of them came to good ends. Shelley drowned at sea, leaving behind him a wake of corpses and scandal; Gauguin died in exile with a prison sentence for political malfeasance hanging over his head; and Van Gogh died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. For each, the "flame" proved unattainable -- none had recourse to the grace which the medieval world had made so readily available.

Perhaps the greatest and most perfect painter of all-time, Jan Vermeer -- at least according to Paul Johnson (2007, p. 7) -- was another Dutch Reformist who lived two centuries prior to Van Gogh. Perhaps even more so than Rembrandt, Vermeer possessed a skill for realism and detail that was the pinnacle of Dutch artistry. (The American Norman Rockwell would in the 20th century revive this kind of realism -- but with more American sentimentality and less European subtlety.) Vermeer, however, had also married outside his Protestant religion to a woman of Catholic heritage -- and had himself adapted to the claims of the Catholic religion and its store of grace at a time when all of Europe was rather accustoming itself to the Peace of Westphalia, which in 1648 had ended the bitter Thirty Years' War and ushered in the era of religious liberty. The evocative poses and perfect renderings evinced by Vermeer reveal a calmness of soul, which the moderns that followed failed (in a sense) to effect: the steady and unflinching gaze of Vermeer and his perfect hand showed a world that was at once imbibed of both nature and grace -- the two elements permeate his work, as much as they do in Rembrandt's (whose use of chiaroscuro -- the technique of boldly contrasting light and dark -- was, unlike Vermeer's, more in the tradition of Leonardo and Caravaggio). What Van Gogh would prove to have in common with his Dutch ancestor Vermeer, however, was a brilliant flare for color scheme. Vermeer's use, for example, of the ultramarine pigment -- a rare and pricey blue -- is one of the most characteristic elements of his paintings (Janson, 2011); and Van Gogh would come to possess such lively color toward the end of his brief career.

Early Years: Religious Zeal

Of course, before Van Gogh would ever begin to take his artistic talent seriously and pursue it as a career, he first forced himself to undergo years of religious trial in which he dedicated himself to the service of God in missionary pursuits. Van Gogh's early life is marked by a kind of wanderlust whose orientation was religious, but whose path was blocked by the very religion Van Gogh attempted to follow: that which Van Gogh sought -- the "flame" of faith and the supernatural charity of Christ -- was harrowingly absent in the Protestant catechism. His desire to share in the sufferings of the men he evangelized was viewed by his parents and those he sought to convert as "eccentricities" (letter from Reverend Van Gogh to Theo, 12 Feb 1879). Van Gogh would have made a better Franciscan than a Protestant -- but his course did not steer in that direction. Aware of his family's disapproval, Van Gogh sank within himself and distanced himself from their influence:

To the family, I have, willy-nilly, become a more or less objectionable and shady sort of character, at any rate a bad lot. How then could I then be of any use to anyone? And so I am inclined to think the best and most sensible solution all round would be for me to go away and to keep my distance, to cease to be, as it were. What the moulting season is for birds - the time when they lose their feathers - setbacks, misfortune and hard times are for us human beings. You can cling on to the moulting season, you can also emerge from it reborn, but it must not be done in public (Van Gogh, Letter to Theo, July 1880).

What amounted to a genuine desire for conversion was viewed instead as pathology. To draw him back into the world, his brother Theo encouraged him to invest his religious zeal in art. Van Gogh's artistic fervor had never diminished (from when it had first manifested itself in his childhood, along with his religious fervor), and the idea presented an avenue that Protestantism did not: the expression of soul.

Van Gogh himself appeared to understand this in 1882. A succession of failures in his academic pursuits to become a studied clergyman, and his inability to enter into the business world, each pointed toward the one thing Van Gogh could do with mastery: sketch:

My not being fit for business or for professional study does not prove at all that I am not fit to be a painter. On the contrary, if I had been able to be a clergyman or an art dealer, then perhaps I should not have been fit for drawing and painting, and I should neither have resigned nor accepted my dismissal as such. I cannot stop drawing because I really have a draughtsman's fist, and I ask you, have I ever doubted or hesitated or wavered since the day I began to draw? (Van Gogh, Letter to Theo, April 1882).

That he was a talented artist was undeniable. Yet, art was no substitute for religion, and, further still, art was no direct avenue to sanctifying grace. Van Gogh's increasing sense of alienation and feeling of despair would continue unabated -- evidenced by he and his brother Theo's inability to live together for long; the inability of his dream of an artists' collective (the artistic equivalent of a kind of monastic community) to come to fruition; the failure to secure a marriage for himself; the severing of his ear. Nonetheless, he continued to cling to his sense of the divine. While in Arles, he did a number of portraits that satisfied his soul's thirst for purity: by his own account, the portraits were indeed "the only thing in painting that excites me to the depths of my soul, and which made me feel the infinite more than anything else" (La Mousme, National Gallery of Art, 2011).

What Van Gogh discovered, however, as he resumed his wanderings, now with an artistic orientation, was a new direction in artistic expression. Van Gogh has been called the "father of expressionism" (Vincent Van Gogh's Critical Reception) -- but this title would never have been his had he not discovered Impressionism in Paris in the 1880s.

Later Years: Artistic Zeal

Yet, as Paul Johnson (2003) notes, Van Gogh -- like Cezanne -- was often dissatisfied with his own work, a factor that Johnson argues contributed to his increasingly debilitated mental state: "It is possible that both his emotional need, to share in the sufferings of the poor, and his artistic drive, would have found more fulfillment if he had ignored Impressionism and worked with the other great force operating in painting at this time, naturalism" (p. 607). Van Gogh's The Old Church Tower at Nuenen (1884) may serve as an example of the kind of painter he might have become had he been drawn to naturalism -- but it is difficult to imagine Van Gogh as an artist who could effect the kind of calm, subdued vision of the natural world, which was not evident in his own soul. What Van Gogh longed for and sought to express in his art was unity (or disunity where he found it -- for example, in The Night Cafe) with the divine. He had failed to achieve it in religion -- he sought, therefore, to embrace the explosive, dynamic, colorful, and overwhelming manifestation of the divine and the human in the natural world. Color was, for him, an expression of "inner feelings" -- an expression that had to be captured instantaneously. Thus, Impressionism became his mode.

The record of Van Gogh's thoughts is preserved in the epistolary correspondence which transpired between him and his brother Theo. Of all the members of his family, Theo was the closest to Vincent -- but even their relationship was strained at times. The letters often give an account Van Gogh's struggles to find his way in life -- as nearly everyone considered him wayward: but as his artwork and his earlier religious zeal testify, the way was always present before him. The 20th century would testify to that much more than his own time. The lack of recognition may have dissatisfied him -- but it is doubtful that he was ever interested in fame. Two years before he finally determined to pursue painting in earnest, his heart was still set on becoming a preacher -- and what his 1778 letter to Theo shows is the spirituality that occupied him above and beyond all else. Van Gogh's life was in pursuit of grace -- whether through religion or art:

Anyone who lives an upright life and experiences real difficulty and disappointment and yet is not crushed by them is worth more than one for whom everything has always been plain sailing and who has known nothing but relative prosperity. For who are the most obviously superior to us? Those who merit the words: "Labourers, your life is sad, labourers, your life is full of suffering, labourers, you are blessed." It is they who bear the marks of "a whole life of struggle and labour borne unflinchingly." It is right to try to become like that. So we go on our way, "by the grace of God unwearied." As for me, I must become a good preacher, who has something to say that is right and is of use in the world, and perhaps it is as well that I should spend a relatively long time on preparation and be securely confirmed in an unwavering faith before I am called to speak to others about it (Van Gogh, Letter to Theo, April 1878).

Faithfulness was ever his predilection. Since he could not find the words -- or the Institution -- to express this in preaching, he would take up the struggle to express it in pictures instead.

The Old Church Tower at Nuenen and the Church at Auvers-sur-Oise

After primarily limiting himself to sketchings and drawings for a year, Van Gogh finally began to paint in real earnest in 1881 -- he was 28. His early attempts at painting bear little resemblance to his later paintings -- at least in color scheme. The subject matter is consistent, but the representation in the years before he was influenced by Impressionism in 1886 was highly literal and realistic. His 1884 Old Church Tower at Nuenen, for example, is a far cry from the colorful and lively Church at Auvers, painted the year of his death in 1890. The former is made of cold, muted colors. It is as though Van Gogh were attempting to follow in a style that were not his own -- one in which he was compelled to divorce himself from his subject and paint it at an objective remove. Dull browns, grays, blues, and blacks serve as the color spectrum. The brushwork is less flowing. And the woman is adorned in a black, melancholy dress.

The 1890 painting, however, is different in every regard: the brushwork is flowing dramatically: the colors are sharp and intense with vivid blues, bright reds, yellows and greens. The woman in the foreground is happily adorned in white and green, and the church itself appears to be alive. In a letter to his sister he describes his painting thus:

I have a larger picture of the village church - an effect in which the building appears to be violet-hued against a sky of simple deep blue colour, pure cobalt; the stained-glass windows appear as ultramarine blotches, the roof is violet and partly orange. In the foreground some green plants in bloom, and sand with the pink flow of sunshine in it. And once again it is nearly the same thing as the studies I did in Nuenen of the old tower and the cemetery, only it is probably that now the colour is more expressive, more sumptuous (Van Gogh, Letter to Wilhelmina, June 1890).

The composition is entirely original and dynamic and reveals the soul of the man who painted it: one who was capable of discerning the beauty of both nature and grace -- even if he could find no place for himself in the one and failed to fully possess the other.

In a sense, Van Gogh shows a remarkable kinship to another impressionistic master -- the Spanish-contracted El Greco. El Greco's paintings invoke a color dynamic and religiously-themed subject that, if not directly proportionate to Van Gogh, at least serve as some sort of precedent: whereas El Greco was unique in his depiction of elongated saints and Spanish towns, Van Gogh was unique in his depiction of commonplace settings and men and women of common class.

The Yellow House

Van Gogh's sojourn in Arles in a rented yellow house, which he would depict on canvas in his typically thickly-applied, brightly colored 1888 painting, would end in a kind of portentous delirium. Gauguin's visit, and Van Gogh's increasing reliance upon the Frenchman, proved a misstep. Gauguin's insufferable pride and Van Gogh's instability and need of friendship and acceptance were dangerous combinations, and the latter paid the price.

As his brother Theo reported from the hospital to which Van Gogh was taken after severing his ear reported, Vincent might not have come to such a pass had he found a real confidante -- or, better yet, a spiritual confessor: "Had he once found someone to whom he could pour his heart out, it might never have come to this" (Gayford, 2008, p. 286). The fact that he had none is exemplified in his mother's response to the news of her son's mental breakdown: "The best thing, she felt, would be for Vincent to die" (Gayford, p. 288).

Vincent, however, did not die that year. In fact, he recovered from his collapse quite quickly: "He informed his brother that he hoped soon to start work again on the orchards of spring. To Gauguin he sent a message of mingled affection and reproach" (Gayford, p. 291). Yet what appeared to everyone else as a matter of madness only temporarily gone into remission was, to Vincent himself, no matter of importance whatsoever. He questioned the necessity of his brother Theo's visit altogether. In this instance, it appears that those around him were correct. Van Gogh was back in the hospital before long, "suffering from a state of complete over-excitement, a veritable frenzy in which he spoke incoherent words and failed to recognize the people around him" (Gayford, p. 295). Apparently, he suffered from "auditory hallucinations in which he heard reproachful voices [and] was in the grip of a fixed idea that the people around him were trying to poison him" (Gayford, p. 295). His state of mind was troubled -- but the doctors had no cure: Van Gogh's madness was of a nature that Plato had divined many centuries back -- and for which he had expressed the following prescription: "If head and body are to be well, you must begin by curing the soul" (Kyziridis, 2005, p. 43).

The old world cure that likely would have benefited Van Gogh was, however, not at hand -- it had been done away with through three hundred years of Protestantism. The church that Van Gogh had longed to be a part of and from which he had been turned away was a bastardized expression of the medieval spirituality that had unified Europe (at least religiously) for nearly a millennium. Van Gogh's vision was clear and lucid -- what was engulfed in the throes of passion was his soul, which he bared, stark and cold in his Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear (1889).

Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear

In the background of his Self-Portrait is a copy of one of the Japanese prints he fell in love with while in Paris. The prints to Van Gogh were models of beauty and pristine purity that inspired him to reflect in Impressionistic style what his soul sought to gain through religion. Opposite the print and framing the other side of Van Gogh's head is a cross, with its arms bent and extended upward as though pleading to Heaven for clemency. Apparently it is the top portion of his easel -- but the symbol is there all the same. The expression on the artist's face is benign.

As Jan Hulsker (1980) notes, "every color used to paint Van Gogh's person and clothing finds its pair in his surroundings: the purple of his hat couples with the window, his yellow skin couples with the wall, his overcoat and eyes pair with the landscape in the painting on the wall, and the white of his bandage complements the sketch behind him." The colors of course unify schematically the subject (Van Gogh) with the surroundings -- but in another sense, one can view the 1889 Self-Portrait (one of nearly three dozen completed over his brief career) as an attempt by the artist to see himself as one who finally -- disfigured and bandaged -- fit in with the world which had no place for him. Here he now saw himself clearly, wholly, and directly -- and the portrait that he produced is both cold and warm, negative and positive, troubled and content. The bandage may represent his spiritual defect, while the hat and coat may figure as symbols of the protection against the elements his disfigurement has won him: just as Peter severed the ear of the soldier who came to arrest Christ, who subsequently healed the soldier and effected his conversion, Van Gogh may have been attempting to effect the same kind of spiritual directive. Certainly this was Gauguin's take of the incident of self-mutilation: describing Van Gogh during his stay in the hospital in Arles, Gauguin commented: "His state is worse, he wants to sleep with the patients, chases the nurses, and washes himself in the coal bucket. That is to say, he continues the Biblical mortifications" (Gayford, p. 284).

Gauguin's perceptive qualities were surely in his possession when he made the statement, which attests to the nature of Van Gogh -- the desire to suffer as the poor suffered, to sleep as the sick slept, to do penance as the penitents did had never left. His passion was to unite himself with the sufferings -- not of Christ, whom the modern world had essentially rejected along with everything else medieval -- but of the common man, an explicitly 19th century kind of Romanticism. Albeit, Van Gogh's desire was augmented by his deep religiosity, which never left him -- but as Protestantism basically had taught him, unity to Christ was impossible, especially since Luther had taught against supernatural grace. Therefore, the best Van Gogh could do was offer himself to the sufferings of the poor. Here was his problem: he found himself in a world of hurt that was at once alive and beautiful and at the same in terrible need of sanctification, which -- Luther had preached -- was not forthcoming.

Van Gogh was an old soul trapped in a modern world. Two years later he would put a gun to his chest and expiate his offenses.

The Potato Eaters

The first painting of Van Gogh's to be considered a masterpiece is his Potato Eaters (1885), a portrait in earthy tones of a family who has worked to provide its own sustenance, which it now consumes at the dinner table. The subject is essentially Protestant -- it is soaked in the theme of self-reliance, toil, hardship, and suffering. Yet there is no mention of Christ, to whom the old world would have united its sufferings, and without those same sufferings were worthless. Protestantism, having rejected Christ (but kept the "ethics") had essentially knocked away the foundation of its own belief-system. Without the Church to dogmatize, religion was "religionless" (Williamson), and Van Gogh's Potato Eaters reflects exactly this sentiment: it is a portrait of a weariness itself -- without relief; their world exists in a dungeon, lit only by the small lamplight of faith that burns overhead -- yet the scene is squalor, dinginess, and hopelessness -- a reflection, perhaps, of Van Gogh's soul as it struggled to maintain the light of faith.

Of the painting he wrote to Theo in 1884 that "it is a glimpse into a very grey interior…I wanted to convey a picture of a way of life quite different from ours, from that of civilized people. So the last thing I would want is for people to admire or approve of it without knowing why" (Van Gogh, Letter to Theo, April 1884). These, accordingly, would be the very same reasons the painting would ultimately find approval among the artistic community -- but as part of Van Gogh's oeuvre, it is his most Protestant piece -- a work obsessed with self-reliance.

Imperial Fritillaries in a Copper Vase

Van Gogh's old world soul, however, would find fullest expression once landing in Paris. After a year of being in the company of other Impressionists like Paul Signac -- and being in a city that itself so filled with history, Catholicity, and romance -- Van Gogh's soul appeared to brighten: his 1887 painted bulbs are the reflection of spirit that has found something fresh and intense. The orange-red bulbs and off-set by the pointillist backdrop of blue. The copper vase brilliantly brings the whole work to life, reflecting a seemingly new light in Van Gogh's life and style. Here in Paris he was at home. One may wonder at the new light that is reflected here. But according to "the painter Emile Bernard…Vincent was courting "La Segatori," the Italian owner of the Tambourin cafe on the boulevard de Clichy, and used to give her paintings of flowers, "which would last forever" (Fritillaries, Musee d'Orsay, 2006).

Whether Van Gogh was painting Fritillaries for a love interest or for his own does not take away from the fact that Van Gogh's spirit was now alive with an intensity that was as bright and fervent as his religious soul had been a decade earlier. However, his heart was not content to stay in the city: thus he traveled to Arles to study and paint the scenes and images that had inspired The Potato Eaters -- only now the same scenes and settings would be bright, alive, soulful -- and overwhelming.

The transfer to Arles, of course, set the stage for his breakdown -- but that same magic that inspired his painting to come to life may have also inspired his desire to leave Paris. After all, it was that city that inspired him to paint "what he considered to be 'the ugliest thing I have done,' which he called The Night Cafe, and said: 'These reds and greens show the terrible passions of human nature.' The blacks and browns showed 'the evil darkness in the cafe,'" (Johnson, 2003, p. 607). The agitation in Van Gogh's documentation of Parisian nightlife is proof of his inability to harness the effect he most desired to achieve -- grace. Thus, a return to the poor of the countryside was in order -- for here was the only place his education had taught him that the beauty of the fritillaries could be matched by the decency of a climate. Of course, it was wishful thinking.

The end came for Van Gogh in July 1890.

His biographer Julius Meier-Graefe gives a heart-breaking account of his final words to Theo, who came instantly word arrived that Vincent had shot himself. Had the doctors who operated on him exercised caution, infection might not have set in. Infection was what killed him as he sat talking with his brother hours before he passed. The conversation is illuminative of the spiritual sorrow that engulfed Van Gogh -- the artistic representation of which is captured at the same time in Wheatfield with Crows, a lonely, windswept scene in which the wheat is whipped about like the waves of the sea under a dark, tormented sky. Crows, like phantom spirits afflicting the soul, fly in between heaven and earth -- the only intermediaries. Van Gogh's life and work are summed up perfectly in this landscape painting: his was a search for a supernatural love, which he never found. Meier-Graefe recounts this admission in detail as Van Gogh gave it to Theo hours before dying:

I was ready to love anyone and everyone. Isn't it odd that no one, of the many whom I have met, liked me? You may think that it is rather pretentious to say so, but honestly there was not one. Not even you, Theo, although you have done everything for me. Why did you do it? You will say that is another of those questions to which only I expect an answer, and that decent people are satisfied by deeds. But you see, that is just my disease, that I lack this decency which everyone else possesses. I know very well that you wanted to love me and that tomorrow you will love me terribly, so much so that it may kill you. But as long as I was there you only put up with me. You were always glad when I turned my back. There was something that made you prickle all over when I arrived. Come, admit it! I couldn't understand it either, because I could not even manage to suppress the external and superficial things which made you prickle and tingle (p. 230).

The soliloquy ends with a reflection on Christ -- which is a fitting meditation for the man who wanted nothing more in life than to know, love, and serve the God of the old world -- the God who was stricken from the new. The love he sought in others and failed to find was nothing other than the supernatural love of Christ, which Protestantism could not effect, and which he himself could not confect either. However, when his soul departed from his body, over 2000 reflections of it remained on the Earth -- his artistic oeuvre: his paintings, sketches, and letters.