A Yearning for Order

...Although he briefly adopted a pointillist style himself, Van Gogh's emotionalism and his burning desire to create an art for the people had little affinity with the young Seurat's scientific meticulousness...

...I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things...

...The unhappier Van Gogh's personal life grew, the more convinced he was that he had discovered the symbolic properties of colors...

...His third suicide attempt a few months later—with a gun —was a success...

...Théo found home life with Vincent "almost unbearable, and wished the artist "could go live by himself...

...I paint infinity," he wrote to Théo...

...Thanks to an uncle's help, in his late teens he was employed for a time by the Paris-based art dealership Goupil and Company in its Hague and London galleries...

...At this point Van Gogh had to evade the attempts of his good-natured father to put him away for lunacy...

...After a brief confinement in an asylum in Saint Rémy, he began to paint his forthright portraits of Postman Roulin and Paul Gachet (a physician and art collector who watched over him...

...Out of both deference to his brother and his own desire to be released from the pressures of Paris, Vincent departed in 1888 for Aries in the south of France...

...By 1880, his religious enthusiasm having declined, he finally resolved to devote himself to art...

...In Aries Vincent found the strength to reject Seurat's classicism...

...This latest and finest of the many books on the great painter contains all the answers that can be put into words—along with 16 small yet very good color plates, including two by contemporaries who deeply influenced his art, Seurat and Gauguin...

...Yet, deploring the fact that "all my work is now founded on Japanese art," he longed for a return to the coal pits of Borinage...

...Rather, as a neophyte missionary he went to preach to impoverished mineworkers, initially in Belgium's Borinage region—one of Europe's industrial horror spots—and later in the dismal Dutch province of Drenthe to the north...

...Even with their intense hues, a yearning for order can be discerned in what would prove to be his last pictures...

...Whether Théo ever saw the artist's masterpiece of his early "Dutch" period, the very dark, Rembrandtesque Potato Eaters (1883-85), is unclear...

...Sweetman's balanced biography of Van Gogh portrays an artist who spent his career desperately searching for a way out of thetrend toward theabstract...

...Toward the end of his 36th year he tried twice to kill himself by swallowing his paints...

...His first real escape from home, though, did not take place until he was almost 25, and he still had no idea of becoming a painter...

...After joining Théo in Paris in 1886, Vincent was exposed to Seurat's pointillism, which moved him to lay in his colors more freely...

...There he became enchanted by (in his words) "the Zouaves, the brothels, the adorable little Arlesiennes going to their first Communion, the priest in his surplice who looks like a dangerous rhinoceros, the people drinking absinthe...

...Van Gogh had bitter fights with his drawing masters, and consequently endured artistic isolation...

...But one must love with a lofty and serious intimate sympathy, with strength, with intelligence...

...He did not know that his paintings were beginning to attract interest in Paris...

...Whatever the case, like all except one of Vincent's pictures, it went unsold during his lifetime...

...Reviewed by Seiden Rodman Author, "The Eye of Man, " "Where Art is Joy" What does Van Gogh's art mean to us today...

...Vincent was born into a middle-class Dutch family in 1853...

...Writing to Bernard, Gauguin bemoaned Vincent's lack of appreciation for Raphael, Ingres and Degas, and pronounced his adherence to Daumier, Théodore Rousseau and Millet intolerable...

...He wished they could be hung next to the pictures of his friend Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in Paris, he said, so that their "sunsteeped, sun-burned quality, tanned and air-swept, would show up still more effectively beside all that face powder and elegance...

...Sweetman cogently explains why even those who had a taste for works by Jean-François Millet and Jules Adolphe Breton, whom Van Gogh strove to emulate, did not like the painting: "By distorting the perspective, by creating the very crudest features of his subjects, by making them stare into the void in so disturbing a way, Vincent had deliberately undermined any possibility of associating this meal with a form of peasant Mass...

...Love a friend, a wife, something—whatever you like—you will be on the way to knowing more about Him...

...Van Gogh felt he had failed...

...Sweetman thinks that Vincent's increasingly unruly behavior and dependence on absinthe were connected with his partial conformity to the new Paris art scene, where he was competing with the likes of Paul Gauguin, Camille Pissarro and Emile Bernard...

...soon he was undergoing the excruciating cures for gonorrhea and syphilis...

...all like creatures from another world...

...Beyond that, he stands as the spiritual progenitor of all subsequent art in which the tortured personality of the artist is paramount...

...and one must always try to know deeper, better, and more...

...But his discovery of Japanese prints, and the long hours he spent contemplating Rembrandt's Jewish Bride in Amsterdam, did give him inklings that his palette could be lightened...

...It also contains the following prescription by Van Gogh...

...In both places Van Gogh's eccentric behavior, ill-fitting clothes, and literal interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount ensured that his church superiors would consider him mad and that children would follow him in the streets, jeering and throwing rocks...

...Van Gogh suffered his most crushing blow when Gauguin arrived in Aries for a short visit and was not impressed with the paintings he saw...

...that is what I say to myself...

...To keep his sanity, Vincent drew scenes of the terrors of the coal pits in his idle hours, and he painted a little, using his fingers to mold the colors...

...Those who are put off by the reference to God can substitute "humanity" without losing much of what Van Gogh had in mind...

...At the time he was producing such great canvases as those depicting the Café PAlcazar—whose acidgreen pool table he surrounded with violent yellows and reds—and his own yellowroom...

...That says nothing about the matter of artistic form but a great deal about content...

...AndDavid Sweetman'shighly readable biography shows how the artist tried to put his prescription into practice...

...He had an ally, however, in his younger brother Théo (a junior partner with Goupil), who truly loved him and had some idea of his talent...

...It is thus ironic that Van Gogh ended up being considered the father of virtually every modern art movement: Fauvism, Expressionism, Abstraction itself...

...On his own," comments Sweetman, "Vincent was forced to reinvent the wheel, trying to solve for himself all the problems most artists have encountered since time began...

...Prostitutes were his only female companions...