We are in a transition stage between a mechanistic concept of man and an amalgam of both the rationalistic and what you could call the mystical or spiritualistic concept of him. . . . The work of art, the great work of art, is going to be that work which finds space for the two forces to operate.
Arthur Miller, interview 1958, p. 173.
The Wagnerian replacement of religion with Art is typified by a Dutchman: Vincent Van Gogh. He has become a Christ-figure of art appreciation, tormented for the bourgeois’ sin of not buying his paintings when he was alive, and now redeemed in dollars. Vincent was a poet in paint, a self-educated sophisticate. He read novels and journals of opinion ravenously in four languages, taking themes for paintings directly from them, and wrote letters in three of the languages often and well, especially to his equally sophisticated art-dealer brother Theo. Thanks to his literary bent he is the most word-described of 19th-century painters, at any rate per year of artistic activity.
The Van Gogh of popular myth is the tortured artist, his allegedly chronic madness and his actual suicide casting a shadow back on his art, as he feared it would. Had he not started to have attacks of a supposed mental illness in December of 1888, and especially had he not committed suicide in July of 1890, but lived out a normal span like Monet or Cézanne, we would have more of his art, with the same qualities—which were technical developments, not effusions of madness—at a lower price per painting, unhyped by the Romance of his illness and death. The productions of Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton have suffered, and in Romance benefited, from a similar overemphasis on their alleged or actual mental illnesses. According to modern psychiatric dogma, suicide just is crazy. Anyone in the United States who threatens suicide can be committed to a mental institution against her will.
In Van Gogh’s case the overemphasis of his alleged mental illness began six months before his death with an article in Le Mercure de France by the young critic Albert Aurier, seeing madness and greatness in “the isolate.” Van Gogh wrote to Aurier thanking him for praising the paintings, though trying to show him that this was no isolated madman holding the pen, or the brush, but a man of normal mind who was a competent and thoughtful artist.[1]
The myth, however, has been unstoppable. It fits well the late-Romantic, wannabe-aristocratic notion of the mad artist, as in Kirk Douglas’ riveting but nutty performance in the movie Lust for Life. Saul Bellow, speaking of Delmore Schwartz in Humboldt’s Gift, attributes the attitude to the prestige of business and technology in America: “the weakness of the spiritual powers is proven by the childishness, madness, drunkenness, and despair of these martyrs. . . So poets [and other artists] are loved, but loved because they just can’t make it here.”[2]
The mad-artist idea is not confined to capitalist America. Herbert Read in The Meaning of Art (1931) spoke of Van Gogh’s letters: “Here is a veritable Painter’s Progress, but with no Celestial City at the end of it, only chaos and dark despair—the madness and self-inflicted death of a genius in a cold and uncomprehending world.”[3] A sidebar in the section about the Van Gogh Museum in the Eyewitness Guide to Amsterdam (1995) gives “An Artist’s Life” in 72 words: fully 40 of them concern his illness.[4] Among the Dutch, speaking to themselves, it is a similar tale. De Millenium Top-40, giving sketches of the 40 “greatest” Dutch people of all time, ranked Vincent 13th and entitled the sketch, Zelfmoordenaar die bleef leven, “a suicide who continued to live.” It devotes over half of its 360 words to a bizarre comparison of van Gogh with Nietzsche gone mad allegedly from syphilis, a comparison said to be minder gek dan het lijkt, “less crazy than it seems,” and a still more crazy one with the “suicidal artist-politician” Adolf Hitler.[5]
If a great novelist died at age 37 of heart disease brought on by lack of temperance in diet no one would think to retell 55 percent of her artistic story as a battle of the waistline. Dylan Thomas did die at 39, apparently from drinking. But no one interprets his poetry as being a result of his boozing. Indeed, from age 31 to 39 he wrote a total of eight poems.[6] No doubt the myth of audacity added to his fame, post-mortem—his last words are supposed to have been, “I have just drunk eighteen double whiskeys in a row. I believe that’s a record.” We seem to want these cults to flourish.
Van Gogh’s main illness was said at the time to have been epilepsy, which has not been classed with paranoia and the like for quite a while. He did also appear to have a few psychotic breaks, though it is easy in psychiatric diagnosis to be wrong. A Dr. Peyron wrote in May of 1889 that he had “acute mania with hallucinations of sight and hearing.” Peyron was the same doctor who the following autumn told Vincent’s brother Theo that the disease was a form of epilepsy.
Van Gogh’s troubles are more consistent with George III’s disease, that is, inherited porphyria, an accumulation in the body of self-produced porphyrin, a chemical involved in the transport of oxygen to the cells, exacerbated by his drinking, especially of absinthe. Acute attacks sometimes bring on anxiety and other behavior disturbances, and are painful. Whatever Van Gogh had during that year and a half, it was episodic, with long intervals of quite ordinary health in which he continued, as he had done before the illness came on, to develop his art with his usual thoughtfulness.
Van Gogh was a difficult person, lonely yet enthusiastic, inclined to turmoil in relationships. But in seeming contradiction he was a cheerful and enterprising Dutchman, too. Everyone “knows” he sold only one painting in his lifetime, “The Red Vineyard” (1888), though an economist observes that in fact he “sold” a great many more—to other painters in trade for their paintings which did have a cash value in the market. In 2004 a collective of artists chosen by critics initiated just this scheme for old-age insurance: give to the collective a few works when you’re unknown and then get a pension on the basis of all the artists’ now more valuable work when you’re old. Nonetheless Van Gogh’s lack of worldly success would have depressed anyone so hopefully intent on “the art of the future,” a phrase he drew from a manifesto by the commercially more savvy Wagner.
The myth classifies Vincent with lunatics, or at best with suffering humanitarian poets romanticized, and sees in his controlled swirls of impasto in his late works the Mad Artist. But to believe this you have to believe a psychiatrism finding madness everywhere. He was ill for only those last 19 months, and then I repeat only from time to time. Vincent’s sister-in-law, who knew him well, believed that “fear of the illness that was threatening him, or an actual attack” precipitated his suicide.[7] Suicide was in 1890 a reaction minder gek dan het lijkt to a dread disease without a cure, increasing in severity.
He was prudent about the illness except for his continued heavy drinking. He cooperated in finding asylums that would protect him so that he could work in peace between attacks. Psychiatrists have a name for such cooperativeness, “insight,” commonly lacking in people attracting their attentions. From the depths he never writes letters or tries to paint. People with epilepsy describe a fog on the brain persisting long after an attack. Porphyria to repeat is also episodic. After each recovery, Ronald de Leeuw the former director of the Van Gogh Museum notes, “he writes clearly, rationally and with a marked lack of sentimentality about his illness.” Above all “he studiously refuses to grant mental illness any positive influence on artistic creation.”[8]
Van Gogh’s illnesses did not make his art. They blocked it.[9] In his estimation sex did, too. He declared in a letter of June 1888 to his young artist friend Émile Bernard: “Painting and fucking a lot don’t go together, it softens the brain. Which is a bloody nuisance.”[10] His art certainly did not derive from his madness, or from his sexual activity, or from his bodily pains, or from his drinking. He painted when he was well and sober. His art had nothing to do with being sick.
What is this insistence on the mad, alchoholic artist? Such a man (always a man) is above all imprudent. He does not plan. He can’t handle money. He injures himself. The bourgeois is known as a seeker of safety—this against the fact of risk in a commercial life. The Mad Artist rejects safety. The myth is an anti-bourgeois faith in the autonomous human spirit—this against the opportunities for expression in a commercial life. Who is in love with the myth? Sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie.[11]
Compare the attitude towards Van Gogh the anti-bourgeois bourgeois with that towards the most despised artist of modern times, Norman Rockwell—despised that is by the clerisy. Rockwell’s scenes of middle-class life are loathed for their warmth. Sentimental? Of course, rather like the sentimentality reflecting a loving regard of El Greco’s Assumption of the Virgin or of Van Gogh’s Irises. What outrages the clerisy in Rockwell is his embrace of bourgeois American life—that and his commercial success and his long, sober, boring life: he is the opposite of Van Gogh in every way except his sentimentality and his bourgeois values and his lack of esteem among his high-art contemporaries.
In his painting Van Gogh was not foolish or mad. There is even doubt, by the way, about the circumstances of the ear-cutting-off. A German art historian, Rita Wildegans, claims that Gauguin did the ear-cutting, and that Van Gogh was covering up for his friend by claiming that he himself did it. Vincent, as non-religious people say, was spiritual. He sought Faith and Hope, but substiuted art for religion. Van Gogh was canonized, I have noted, at the peak of Art as religion, the age of high modernism, Picasso to Pollock.
By the time of his best painting he was no longer the intense young Christian seeking after sainthood he had once been. Yet he was still, de Leeuw writes, a “struggling seeker after God”: “Whether his particular concern was religious or artistic, he invariably cultivated his inner universe and confidently sought the eternal in the temporal.”[12]
Explaining in the letter to Bernard in June of 1888 mentioned above how he painted one of his many studies on Millet’s The Sower he speaks of the technical details (”the rest of the sky is chrome yellow 1 and 2 mixed”), noting that “I couldn’t care less what the colors are in reality.” Post Impressionism came to be more and more about the arrangement of colors on a flat surface. He then declares to Theo his search for Faith and Hope, tying them to a particular aesthetic project: “I am still enchanted by snatches of the past [his Faith], have a hankering after the eternal [his Hope], of which the sower and the sheaf of corn are the symbols. But when shall I get around to doing the starry sky, that picture which is always in my mind?”[13] “I keep hoping,” he wrote to Theo in September, “to express hope by some star.”[14] Hope, hope, hope. Thus his Starry Night (June, 1889). The very painting that is supposed to show him as the Mad Artist turns out to have been not a crazy effusion but a project long conceived, worked on repeatedly, planned carefully before his first illness, and achievable only when well.
One of his two last paintings was Wheatfield with Crows, “hankering after the eternal,” is shadowed by birds of ill-omen. Yet, writes Denise Willemstein and the staff of the Van Gogh Museum, “this theory is probably incorrect as the subject is traditional. . . . Moreover, in his final letter to Theo, dated 25 July, Vincent ordered new paint, suggesting that he still had many plans for new paintings.”[15] He shot himself two days later. Vincent was not the sort of non-bourgeois, non-Dutch brother to waste long-suffering Theo’s money on a gesture.
Johan de Meester wrote a newspaper article about the painting six months after Vincent’s death. It emphasized, as he put it in a letter to Andries Bonger, Vincent’s brother in law, “the side that interested me most as a pessimistic psychologist.” Bonger wrote back politely but firmly, “I have not considered Vincent `a sick man’.”’ He rejected de Meester’s comparison of Vincent with Claude, the painter and suicide in Zola’s novel L’Oeuvre (1886).
Zola was advancing the theories of the doctor and criminologist Cesare Lombroso that men of genius were mentally ill—for example, epileptic.[16] Medicine in its initial decades of real science seemed to wish to redefine virtually everyone as sick. It is the theme of Freudianism. In April 1887, before Vincent had fallen ill, Theo himself had written of the Zola novel, “before I read it, I also thought according to the criticism that Vincent had much in common with the hero. But that is not so. That painter was looking for the unattainable, while Vincent loves the things that exist far too much to fall for that.”[17] A later Dutch painter, Jan Sluyters, wrote about it this way in 1953:
His paintings have nothing strange, mysterious, or abstract about them. They are the most natural impressions of a perfectly healthy temperament. . . . People—how well I know it—have often written about mental disorders, etc., etc., but of these so-called nervous disorders I have discovered no trace in his entire oeuvre. . . . He shows . . . the usual things of daily life. . . fanatically, yes!—but naturally.[18]
In another letter to his brother in the year of miracles, 1888—again before the attacks—Van Gogh confessed to “a terrible need—shall I say the word—of religion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars.”[19] His art became Art, a simulacrum of Religion like others put forward as the sea of faith receded. The simulacra since Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn have been more or less in sequence Beauty, Literature, History, the Nation, Spiritualism, Science, Progress, Evolution, the Future, the Race, the Revolution, Struggle, the Suburban Family, Technology, Peace, Wall Street, and the Environment. Van Gogh’s was the movement of a faithful spirit aiming at great things, as humans keep faithfully hoping.
“I can well do without the good Lord in my life and also in my painting,” Van Gogh wrote a few weeks before the paint-the-stars letter, “but, suffering as I am, I cannot do without something greater than myself, something which is my life—the power to create. . . . I want to paint men and women with a touch of the eternal, whose symbol was once the halo, which we try to convey by the very radiance and vibrancy of our coloring.”[20] He suffered spiritually, not mentally: he had no attacks yet.
The other of his last two paintings, Tangled Roots, could equally have been a suicide note. But the putative illness of his suicide, or the rational plan of his suicide, or the momentary impulse of his suicide in the face of a new attack of porphyria, is of no help in understanding the bulk of his art, for example, Starry Night. Sometimes a suicide note is just a suicide note.
And Van Gogh was of course bourgeois. An educated Dutchman who worked from age 16 like his brother as an art dealer could be no other. He wrote in French when in France, as he did to Theo. In the usual businesslike Dutch way with commercial languages he was also completely fluent in English—he gave his first sermon in England in English—and could read German well. He was the son of a Dutch Reform pastor and the nephew of three other art dealers. Holland’s pastors are dealers, too. His father managed the farms of pioneering Protestants in the Catholic south of the Netherlands.
And so Vincent made the case for his sacred ends in profane terms, expressing as simple Prudence his hopes for a very grand Studio of the South. To his brother, who supported him apparently gladly and was paid in pictures to obviate the appearance of a peasantly handout, he wrote with prudence that if Gauguin were to join him in Arles the enterprise would have low costs and would make money. “You always lose by being isolated. But you might think it’s a good idea that we share expenses, set an amount of, let’s say, 250 francs per month, if every month, besides and apart from my work, you get a Gauguin. Provided that we do not exceed that sum, wouldn’t it mean a profit?”[21]
Compare his scheme for the leading Impressionists to pool some of their market-valued paintings to support “a whole battalion of artists who have been working in unremitting poverty,” for example that same V. van Gogh.[22] These are natural terms to use in pitching an idea to a businessman in 1888. An aristocrat in the same activity, like Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, only son of the Comte de Toulouse and on his mother’s side as well coming from one of the grandest families in France, would deign to talk this way to no one. And a peasant would merely beg the noble lord’s indulgence, or claim his due, inarticulately. Only a bourgeois would offer words and reasons and calculations in support of transcendence. The Vincent of Romance is above all anti-bourgeois, “making no concessions to his bourgeois surroundings.”[23] But that’s not Van Gogh.
* * * *
In other words, we humans, even we bourgeois humans, cannot get along without transcendence—faith in a past, hope for a future, justified by Larger Considerations. If we don’t have religious hope and faith we’ll substitute hope and faith in Art or Science or National Learning. If we don’t have Art or Science or National Learning or Anglicanism we’ll substitute fundamentalism or the Rapture. If we don’t have fundamentalism or the Rapture or the local St. Wenceslaus parish we’ll substitute our family or the rebuilt antique car. It’s a consequence of the human ability to symbolize, a fixture of our philosophical psychology.
We might as well acknowledge it, if only to keep watch on transcendence and prevent it from doing mischief, as did once a Russian hope for The Revolution and as now does a Saudi Arabian faith in an Islamic past. The Bulgarian-French critic, Tzvetan Todorov, who has seen totalitarianism, warns that “democracies put their own existence in jeopardy if they neglect the human need for transcendence.”[24] Michael Ignatieff put it well: “The question of whether . . . the needs we once called religious can perish without consequence . . . remains central to understanding the quality of modern man’s happiness.” [25] Evidently the answer is no. There are consequences and there will be more. That is not a reason to return to the older sureties. It is a reason to take seriously the transcendent in our bourgeois lives.
The text above is an excerpt from The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, the first volume of Deirdre McCloskey’s trilogy on the ethical and historical origins of modern prosperity.
[1] Van Gogh, “Letter to Aurier,” early Feb., 1890, p. 195-197 in Stein, Van Gogh.
[2] Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift, quoted in Kirsch, “Get Happy,” 2004, p. 91.
[3] Read, Meaning of Art, 1931 (1968), p. 202.
[4] Pascoe and Catling, Eyewitness, 1995. Jan Hulsker, ed., The Mythology of Vincent van Gogh, 1993 treats the bizarre story of van Gogh’s postmortem fame.
[5] Van Baar and Kok, De Millenium, 1999, pp. 32-33. Nietzsche’s syphilis, by the way, appears to be still another mad artist/scientist myth. He seems to have had in fact a slow-developing brain tumor.
[6] Kirsch, “Get Happy,” 2004, p. 92.
[7] Johanna van Gogh, quoted in van Gogh, ed. Leeuw, Letters, p. 509
[8] Van Gogh, ed. Leeuw, Letters, p. 509, xix.
[9] Van Gogh, ed. Leeuw, Letters, p. 365.
[10] Van Gogh, ed. Leeuw, Letters, p. 365
[11] John McCloskey has helped me with these ideas, as with many others.
[12] Van Gogh, ed. Leeuw, Letters, 1996, pp. x, xi.
[13] Van Gogh, ed. Leeuw, Letters, 1996, p. 3262f.
[14] Van Gogh, ed. Leeuw, Letters, 1996, p. 395.
[15] Leighton, ed. 100 Masterpieces, 2002. Plate 75, “Wheatfields with Crows,” text by Willemstein.
[16] Stein, ed., Van Gogh, 1986, pp. 246, 257f., compare de Meester’s article of March 1891, p. 261ff in Stein, ed.
[17] Stein, ed., Van Gogh, 1986, p. 107, italics his.
[18] Stein, ed., Van Gogh, 1986, p. 374.
[19] about September 29, 1888, (van Gogh,Verzamelde Brieven #543, p. 321), quoted in Druick and Zegers, Studio of the South, 2001, p. 138, underlining in French original.
[20] van Gogh,Verzamelde Brieven #531, quoted in Druick and Zegers, Studio of the South, 2001, p. 138.
[21] 28 May 1888, quoted in Druick and Zegers, Studio of the South, 2001, p. 108. Contrast by the way Aurier’s praise for ‘the isolate.’
[22] Van Gogh, 1883-1890, Letters, p. 342f.
[23] Van Baar and Kok, De Millenium, 1999, p. 32.
[24] Todorov, Hope and Memory, 2000, p. 32.
[25] Ignatieff, Needs of Strangers, 1984, p. 21.