Van Gogh Revisited

By Norman Corwin on December 8, 2009 7:37 AM

Years ago, I had the privilege of writing a screenplay for MGM about the life and work of Vincent Van Gogh. It started out to be based on Lust for Life, a novelized biography of Van Gogh written by the late Irving Stone.

The best-selling book introduced the painter to America and was responsible for a great upsurge of awareness of this foreign painter. But I felt that Vincent’s frequent luminous letters to his brother Theo were a much truer quarry from which to draw, and I persuaded John Houseman, the film’s producer, that the screenplay should concentrate on that source.

MGM was a rich studio, and under executive producer Dore Schary, it had the wisdom to engage John Rewald, a European expert on Van Gogh’s work, as technical adviser. Through him and various journals, including those of Vincent’s contemporaries Paul Gauguin and Emile Bernard, and also Vincent’s letters to Theo, I thought I came to know all of the paintings and preened myself on that assumption.

I have been corrected. It took Van Gogh: The Complete Paintings, a splendid recent book by Rainer Metzger and Ingo F. Walther, ordained by famed publisher Benedikt Taschen, to awaken me to the fact that I was familiar only with perhaps less than half of Van Gogh’s oeuvre. And things of which I had been ignorant kept surprising me. (But don’t get me wrong - Lust for Life is still a good picture. Its script was nominated for an Academy award, Anthony Quinn won an Oscar for his portrayal of Gauguin, Kirk Douglas thought it the best of his roles and Vincent Minnelli rated it the finest of the many pictures he had directed.)

I recently watched on television a fine documentary about epilepsy, which is not insanity. Thousands of people had have it, including Julius Caesar, Socrates, Plato, Prince John and Muhammad, all of whom were far from crazy.

There was definitely a diagnosis of epilepsy in Van Gogh’s case and no alienist remanded Vincent to an insane asylum - he recommended it for himself. My point is that Van Gogh was not a crazy painter. The vast majority of his paintings are as sober as a bishop going into a service.

It is true that much of Van Gogh’s work betrays infirmities of mind, vision and nature, including the religious fanaticism of his youth, the self-amputated ear, epilepsy and other trials of mind and spirit. I realized that most Americans, because of the paintings with which they are familiar, think of him as a total victim of neuroses. His canvases often approach fantasy, his self-portraits of painful intensity, including one featuring a bandage over his missing left ear and several other paintings in which his eyes betray implications of derangement.

What surprised me in the welter of reproductions in the Taschen book is the number of canvases that are totally sane, untainted by idiosyncrasy, where stars don’t look like exploding fireworks, where trees are composed and symmetrical, where even old shoes have dignity and architectural features are composed and assertive.

One of the puzzling things about Vincent is that he was not drawn more often to marine or aqueous subjects that he handled with mastery. Every person who has ever seen his drawing of fishing boats on the beach at Saintes-Marie has fallen in love with them and would like to clamber into one, and there is also in the book a knockout “Beach at Scheveningen in Stormy Weather” canvas that is powerful enough to impel the reader to book a flight to the Netherlands, put on a nice dry raincoat and turn up at the edge of the foam.

We all know, through the text and illustrative choices made by the authors of the book, that most of Vincent’s canvases hang today outside of the United States, in museums of Europe and Asia and on the walls of private owners around the world. He is heavily represented, of course, in his home country, the Netherlands. There are bulging collections in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Otterlo and his native Neunen. But they also exist in Antwerp, Zurich, Arles, Cologne, Milan, St. Petersburg, Winterthur, Essen, St. Remy, Moscow, Auvers, Cardiff, New York, Paris and Japan.

An anomaly appears late in the Taschen book - a small snapshot of Theo Van Gogh, the faithful brother who kept Vincent alive and painting and who died only months after Vincent shot himself in a wheat field. It is the only portrait I have ever seen of Theo, a crude snapshot, and its source is not indicated. The strangest thing about the absence of Theo’s handsome face is that Vincent, who painted many portraits of himself (15 full-page self-portraits in this book alone), likenesses of his mother, father, sister, five of his postman Roualt in Arles, one of the postman’s wife, various people close to him (including Trabuc, an attendant at a hospital in St. Remy) and incidental characters like a Zouave soldier and a lady at a piano, yet Vincent appears to have never painted a single portrait of Theo, the closest to him of anybody in his life.

There are at least two atrocity stories in Vincent’s log. One is that he sold only one painting in his life - “the red vineyard,” to Anne Boch, a fellow painter who paid only $50 for it; the other is a Japanese art lover who paid more than $30 million for one of Vincent’s iris paintings long after the painter was dead.

The Taschen book is, in my opinion, the best yet done about Vincent. Taschen, who specializes in painters, opened a bookshop in Beverly Hills, at 354 N. Beverly Drive. It is a long, narrow store, chock full of books about painters. Students from foreign lands and their art professors would do well to stop in. So would the rest of the population of greater Los Angeles.

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