Van Gogh: The Life by Steven Naifeh (PDF)

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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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Editorial Reviews: Review “The definitive biography for decades to come.”—Leo Jansen, curator, the Van Gogh Museum, and co-editor of Vincent van Gogh: The Complete Letters“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)“A tour de force . . . an enormous achievement . . . Reading his life story is like riding an endless roller coaster of delusional highs and lows. . . . [A] sweepingly authoritative, astonishingly textured book.”—Los Angeles Times“Marvelous . . . [Van Gogh] reads like a novel, full of suspense and intimate detail. . . . In beautiful prose, Naifeh and Smith argue convincingly for a subtler, more realistic evaluation of Van Gogh, and we all win.”—The Washington Post“Captivating . . . Winners of the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for their biography of Jackson Pollock, [Naifeh and Smith] bring a booming authorial voice and boundless ingenuity to the task and have written a thoroughly engaging account of the Dutch painter. Drawing on Van Gogh’s almost uniquely rich correspondence . . . the authors vividly reconstruct the intertwined stories of his life and his art, portraying him as a ‘victim of his own fanatic heart.’ . . . Their fine book has the potential not only to reinvigorate the broad base of popular interest that Van Gogh already enjoys but to introduce a whole new generation to one of art history’s most remarkable creative spirits.”—Jonathan Lopez, The Wall Street Journal“Could very well be the definitive biography . . . In it we get a much fuller view of Van Gogh, owing to the decade Naifeh and Smith spent on research to create this scholarly and spellbinding work. . . . How pleased we should be that [these authors] have rendered so exquisitely and respectfully Van Gogh’s short, intense, and wholly interesting life.”—Roberta Silman, The Boston Globe“This generation’s definitive portrait of the great Dutch post-Impressionist . . . [The authors’] most important achievement is to produce a reckoning with Van Gogh’s occasional ‘madness’ that doesn’t lose sight of the lucidity and intelligence—the profound sanity—of his art.”—Richard Lacayo, Time About the Author Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith are graduates of Harvard Law School. Mr. Naifeh, who has written for art periodicals and has lectured at numerous museums including the National Gallery of Art, studied art history at Princeton and did his graduate work at the Fogg Art Museum of Harvard University. Together they have written many books on art and other subjects, including four New York Times bestsellers. Their biography Jackson Pollock: An American Saga won the Pulitzer Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. It also inspired the Academy Award–winning 2000 film Pollock starring Ed Harris and Marcia Gay Harden as well as John Updike’s novel, Seek My Face. Naifeh and Smith have been profiled in The New Yorker, The New York Times, USA Today, and People, and have appeared on 60 Minutes, The Oprah Winfrey Show, Larry King Live, Charlie Rose, and the Today show. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. chapter 1 Dams and Dikes Of the thousands of stories that vincent van gogh consumed in a lifetime of voracious reading, one stood out in his imagination: Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Story of a Mother.” Whenever he found himself with children, he told and retold Andersen’s dark tale of a loving mother who chooses to let her child die rather than expose him to the risk of an unhappy life. Vincent knew the story by heart and could tell it in several languages, including a heavily accented En- glish. For him, whose own life was filled with unhappiness, and who forever sought himself in literature and art, Andersen’s tale of maternal love gone awry possessed a unique power, and his obsessive retellings protested both a unique longing and a unique injury. Vincent’s own mother, Anna, never understood her eldest son. His eccentricities, even from an early age, challenged her deeply conventional worldview. His roving intellect defied her limited range of insight and inquiry. He seemed to her filled with strange and “starry-eyed” notions; she seemed to him narrow-minded and unsympathetic. As time passed, she liked him less and less. Incomprehension gave way to impatience, impatience to shame, and shame to anger. By the time he was an adult, she had all but given up hope for him. She dismissed his religious and artistic ambitions as “futureless wanderings” and compared his errant life to a death in the family. She accused him of intentionally inflicting “pain and misery” on his parents. She systematically discarded any paintings and drawings that he left at home as if disposing of rubbish (she had already thrown out virtually all his childhood memorabilia), and treated works that he subsequently gave her with little regard. After her death, only a few of the letters and works of art Vincent had sent her were found in her possession. In the final years of his life (she outlived him by seventeen years), she wrote to him less and less often, and, when he was hospitalized toward the end, she never came to visit, despite frequent travels to see other family members. Even after his death, when fame belatedly found him, she never regretted or amended her verdict that his art was “ridiculous.” Vincent never understood his mother’s rejection. At times, he lashed out angrily against it, calling her a “hard-hearted” woman “of a soured love.” At times, he blamed himself for being a “half-strange, half-tiresome person…who brings only sorrow and loss.” But he never stopped bidding for her approval. At the end of his life, he painted her portrait (from a photograph) and appended a poem with the plaintive question: “Who is the maid my spirits seek / Through cold reproof and slanders blight?” anna cornelia carbentus married the Reverend Theodorus van Gogh on a cloudless day in May 1851 in The Hague, home of the Dutch monarchy and, by one account, “the most pleasant place in the world.” Reclaimed from sea-bottom mud containing the perfect mix of sand and clay for growing flowers, The Hague in May was a veritable Eden: flowers bloomed in unrivaled abundance on roadsides and canal banks, in parks and gardens, on balconies and verandas, in window boxes and doorstep pots, even on the barges that glided by. Perpetual moisture from tree- shaded ponds and canals “seemed every morning to paint with a newer and more intense green,” wrote one enchanted visitor. On the wedding day, Anna’s family sprinkled flower petals in the newlyweds’ path and festooned every stop on their route with garlands of greenery and blossoms. The bride made her way from the Carbentus house on Prinsengracht to the Kloosterkerk, a fifteenth-century jewel box on an avenue lined with linden trees and surrounded by magnificent townhouses in the royal heart of the city. Her carriage passed through streets that were the envy of a filthy continent: every windowpane freshly cleaned, every door recently painted or varnished, every copper pot on every stoop buffed, every lance on every bell tower newly gilded. “The roofs themselves seem to be washed each day,” marveled one foreigner, and the streets were “clean as any chamber floor.” Such a place, wrote another visitor, “may make all men envy the happiness of those who live in it.” Gratitude for idyllic days like these, in idyllic places like this-and the fear that they could all be lost in a moment-shaped Anna Carbentus’s life. She knew that it had not always been this way, either for her family or for her country. In 1697, the fate of the Carbentus clan hung by a single thread: Gerrit Carbentus, the only member of the family to come through the wars, floods, fires, and plagues of the previous hundred and fifty years alive. Gerrit’s predecessors had been swept up in the panoramic bloodletting of the Eighty Years’ War, a revolt by the Seventeen Provinces of the Low Countries against their brutal Spanish rulers. It began, according to one account, in 1568 when Protestant citizens in towns like The Hague rebelled “in a cataclysm of hysterical rage and destruction.” Victims were tied together and heaved from high windows, drowned, decapitated, and burned. The Spanish Inquisition responded by condemning every man, woman, and child in the Netherlands, all three million of them, to death as heretics. For eighty years, back and forth across the placid Dutch landscape, army fought army, religion fought religion, class fought class, militia fought militia, neighbor fought neighbor, idea fought idea. A visitor to Haarlem saw “many people hanging from trees, gallows and other horizontal beams in various places.” Houses everywhere were burned to the ground, whole families burned at the stake, and the roads strewn with corpses. Now and then the chaos subsided (as when the Dutch provinces declared their independence from the Spanish king in 1648 and the war was declared over), but soon enough a new wave of violence would wash over the land. In 1672, the so-called Rampjaar (Year of Catastrophe), little more than a generation after the end of the Eighty Years’ War, another fury boiled up from the tranquil and impeccable streets of The Hague as crowds swept into the city center, hunted down the country’s former leaders, and butchered them to pieces in the shadow of the same Kloosterkerk where Anna Carbentus would later celebrate her marriage. But neither war nor these paroxysms of communal rage posed the greatest danger to the Carbentus family. Like many of his countrymen, Gerrit Carbentus lived his entire life on the edge of extinction by flood. It had been that way since the end of the Ice Age, when the lagoon at the mouth of the Rhine began to fill up with rich, silty soil that proved irresistible to the first settlers. Gradually, the settlers built dikes to keep the sea at bay and canals to drain the bogs behind the dikes. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the invention of the windmill made it possible to drain vast areas, truly large-scale land reclamation began. Between 1590 and 1740, even as Dutch merchants conquered the world of commerce and established rich colonies in distant hemispheres, even as Dutch artists and scientists created a Golden Age to rival the Italian Renaissance, more than three hundred thousand acres were added to the Netherlands, increasing its arable landmass by almost a third. But nothing stopped the sea. Despite a thousand years of stupendous effort-and in some cases because of it-floods remained as inevitable as death. With terrifying unpredictability, the waves would top the dikes or the dikes would crumble beneath the waves, or both, and the water would rush far inland across the flat countryside. Sometimes the sea would simply open up and take back the land. On a single night in 1530, twenty villages sank into the abyss, leaving only the tips of church spires and the carcasses of livestock visible on the surface of the water. It was a precarious life, and Gerrit Carbentus, like all his countrymen, inherited an acute sense, a sailor’s sense, of the imminence of disaster. Among the thousands who died in the battle with the sea in the last quarter of the seventeenth century was Gerrit Carbentus’s uncle, who drowned in the River Lek. He joined Gerrit’s father, mother, siblings, nieces, nephews, and first wife and her family, all of whom perished before Gerrit turned thirty. Gerrit Carbentus had been born at the end of one cataclysmic upheaval; his grandson, also named Gerrit, arrived at the beginning of another. Starting in the middle of the eighteenth century, across the Continent, revolutionary demands for free elections, an expanded franchise, and the abolition of unfair taxes merged with the utopian spirit of the Enlightenment to create a force as unstoppable as war or wave. It was only a matter of time before the revolutionary fervor hit the Carbentus family. When troops of the new French Republic entered Holland in 1795, they came as liberators. But they stayed as conquerors. Soldiers were billeted in every household (including the Carbentuses’); goods and capital (such as the family’s gold and silver coins) were confiscated; trade withered; profits disappeared; businesses closed; prices soared. Gerrit Carbentus, a leatherworker and father of three, lost his livelihood. But worse was yet to come. On the morning of January 23, 1797, Gerrit left his house in The Hague for work in a nearby town. At seven that evening he was found lying on the side of the road to Rijswijk, robbed, beaten, and dying. By the time he was carried home, he was dead. His mother “insanely hugged the lifeless body and let a stream of tears flow over him,” according to the Carbentus family chronicle, a clan diary kept by generations of chroniclers. “This was the end of our dear son, who was a miracle in his own right.” Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐This is among the best biographies I’ve read. You will be amazed with the level of detail covering every aspect of the painter’s life.Van Gogh’s father was a pastor in several towns in Holland during his youth. I was surprised to learn that he had lived in the coal district of Belgium, the peat harvesting region of Holland, in London and Paris. He painted his most of his famous paintings while living in Arles, France, and others while hospitalized in Saint-Remy.Vincent was versed in much of the contemporary literature of his time. He admired the paintings of Millet and had a tumultuous friendship with Gauguin.During his entire life he was unable to form meaningful relationships with anyone, including his family. His brother Theo kept Vincent afloat financially.He struggled to find an artistic style that suited him. He started with drawings, moved on to watercolor, and finally landed on the oil painting for which he is immortalized.He painted during the last 10 years of his short life. Most of his acclaimed paintings were executed during his final three years. In the end he painted furiously to keep his mind focused outwardly so he didn’t disintegrate.After reading this book you will be able to look at most of his canvases and assess where he was in his arduous journey, both in time and location, when he painted them. The many color plates of his significant works are worth the modest cost of this book.I kept hoping that Van Gogh would enjoy some acknowledgement of the importance of his paintings before he died. In his final year an art critic began complementing his works, but Vincent could not accept even this faint praise.The mystery of his early death at age 37 in Auvers, France is documented in the appendix and is elucidating.The authors employ a broad vocabulary; they do not shy away from using the most appropriate words…..lucubration, tenebrous, Manichean, etc.At 868 pages this is a significant undertaking. When I finished this biography, I regretted that my journey through the life of this great artist had ended.Fred Dotzler

⭐I was enthralled with this actually heartbreaking life of Vincent Van Gogh from beginning to end, despite all the details from his and his family’s letters. This was an incredible undertaking. However, there were times – especially during the rendition of his childhood and young adulthood where I felt that the authors were unsympathetic toward what I might guess was possibly autism. Yes, I’m sure he was difficult, but it seemed to me that his parents had no compassion ar all for Vincent and the authors took the parents’ point of view. This changed as the book went on and by the end they seemed much more compassionate. Despite what I perceived as the negative attitude toward this difficult child, I found that I loved him from the start. I always liked Vincent’s art, but now I feel that I can see his soul in his paintings and drawings. Incredibly well researched book packed wirh detail and yet never boring.

⭐I don’t know why anyone would call this book a hagiography. I was concerned for quite some chunk of the book that the authors might have overstepped the bounds of propriety in their close examination of the van Gogh family. I was also concerned that they might be peering into Vincent’s psyche with too much confidence in their own analytical powers, which I don’t consider to be their forte. However, eventually the talents, knowledge, determination and sense of greatness within the confounded, ever-struggling Vincent begin to build, and his terrific straining to produce the corresponding results becomes a key feature of this biography. Then come the careful descriptions of how Vincent painted, which I deeply admire and appreciate. I used this book laboriously, like a textbook, frequently referencing the images and other clarifying information online.

⭐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?

⭐I still haven’t finished this book. I read it in bits. Very hard going, a bit like van Gogh’s life. Full of facts and figures. Detailed about his tempestuous life. I am a van Gogh fan and have been since the 1960’s and hoped this might shed other light on his life, which it does. But it is hard going. Be prepared for the long haul. But, don’t not read read it if you like van Gogh!

⭐Excellent read, dare i say, the doomed cliche of divine talent an eggshell mind. Misunderstood, tortured, a man of profound humility and kindness to others, virtues sadly forgotten and eclipsed by his fabled talent.

⭐I’ve been a fan of Van Gogh since my early 70’s art school days, so I assumed I knew most things about him. Wrong. This is a truly wonderful (and wonderfully written) account of his whole life. Many insights here I hadn’t considered before. It really brings his full character to life. On Kindle the text is very well presented. (I’ve never thought of Kindle a a media for illustrations). Highly recommended.

⭐I found this book extremely interesting and informative. As an art historian who has lectured for many years on this period and on Van Gogh, I found plenty of new information and facts which corrected my previous impressions. For example the fact that Van Gogh returned several times to Arles in 1889 after being committed to the asylum at St Remy, and of course the possibility that Van Gogh did not actually commit suicide, but was the victim of an accidental shooting which he decided to keep secret to protect those involved. There is no better account of Van Gogh’s life in existence and this will become the standard biography. There some faults in particular the length of the book and certain amount of editing would have helped reduce its size by maybe a couple of hundred pages. There is repetition which a good editor could have cut out. However overall a great book and a great achievement

⭐it took me the whole summer to read… every page is quality text content structure mature clean and informative and inspirational too… no one could have done better than you too… please take over picasso from JR… picasso deserves you… and have you considered twombly too

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