Vincent Van Gogh

Photograph of the 13 year old Vincent Van Gogh

Vincent Van Gogh, The Open Bible, 1885

I'm going to do something a little bit different with Vincent Van Gogh that I hope will be fresh and productive. The textbooks lump him in under the meaningless category of "Post Impressionism." The only point to that term so far as I can tell is to provide a chapter break between the Impressionists and the artists who came after them. The textbooks usually describe Van Gogh's work as coming out of Impressionism, that his work is a very personal refinement of the Impressionist brushstroke and the bright optical colors of the Impressionist palette.
And yet, among the 650 or so of his surviving letters, the artists' names that appear most frequently are not Monet, Renoir, or Degas. Van Gogh repeatedly and enthusiastically praises the works of artists like Lhermitte, Von Uhde, and the now almost forgotten Dutch art star of the day, Jozef Israels. His highest praise is reserved for his great hero among contemporary artists, Millet. Van Gogh will make many variations on paintings by Millet in the course of his life.
Van Gogh comes right out of those artists of the Christian Left who placed the content of the Christian faith among the poor, who shared the belief of so many radicals and reformers that God specially privileges the prayers and witness of the poor and outcast. In many ways, Van Gogh's work is the culmination of all those artists who protested the brutality and degredation brought by industrialism.

The last thing Vincent Van Gogh wanted was to be the Van Gogh of popular legend; the tragic neglected genius, the brilliant lunatic who cut off his ear. Van Gogh wanted to be a great public figure like the great authors who were his heroes, Leo Tolstoy and Victor Hugo. He wanted to do in visual art what they did in literature, and to play a similar public role. He truly believed with all his heart that art had the power to redeem the world broken by modern experience.
The painting above very candidly records Van Gogh's sense of vocation. A huge open Bible dominates the picture, probably his father's (he was a Protestant pastor). Van Gogh, who was 32 when he painted this, felt a strong calling to the ministry. There is another element in this picture complicating that desire to follow in his father's footsteps. Next to the Bible is a tattered paperback copy of Emile Zola's La Joie De Vivre. Vincent Van Gogh pointedly distances himself from the antimodernism expected of ordained clergy of the day. He believed that God dwelt not only in the sacred text of the Bible, but out there in the world, the real world of modern experience that we all share.

I intend to spend some time with Van Gogh and discuss him as a major religious artist, even though conventional religious subject matter rarely appears in his work (when it does, it is always as a copy of another artist's work). I will discuss some works beyond the famous Sunflowers and Starry Night that might not be quite so familiar.