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Painting for the Posterity? In the realm of creativity there has never been anything comparable to poetry, fiction writing, painting, music, philosophy, and architecture. By their very nature all these, probably with the exception of architecture, were individual-centred. What is notable about most of them is, more often than not, the progenitors worked poignantly, lived and died in penury, and their progenies or products gained in popularity, when they were dead and gone, became world renowned, to be sold to the highest bidder at mind-boggling prizes, to adorn palaces, drawing rooms, and coffee-tables of the rich and snobbish. Marie Correlli in The Sorrows of Satan wrote, “A genius thrives in a garret and dies in a palace…” While this is true, the history of Art reveals that many a genius not only lived in garret, but also died in it amidst its agonies, leaving behind their fond and laborious creations to palaces, and other places of pomp and splendour. The life and works of Dutch painter, Vincent van Gogh, fit well into this category. The harpies of civilisation and culture-vultures let go many of the geniuses like him unknown and unrecognised in their lifetime and exhumed them later to the pleasures, fancies, and snobberies of the leisure class. Why this has been so should be a conundrum to the connoisseurs of Art, leave alone the rest of society. One might even wonder if Art is also shrouded in the sordidness of the politics of the times, more so, when in the fast unfolding “knowledge and market driven society”, and its concomitant commodification of knowledge and creativity a M.F. Hussain could recently sell 100 of his paintings for Rs. 100 crores at one go, which no painter could have even dreamt of about a century ago. The names Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh should suffice to cause qualms among many of us. Among others, W. Somerset Maugham in The Moon and Six Pence sketched Gauguin, though satirically and in a legendary manner, tugging, torturing, and distorting the image of the painter; and Irving Stone in Lust for Life portrayed Van Gogh. Dawn and morning Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) was born in the Van Gogh family in a small Dutch village. He had an extraordinary gift for drawing even when he was only eight. This gift bloomed in his youth. He seldom developed any enduring relationship with anyone, save his younger brother, Theo van Gogh. This was perhaps the reaction of a disgruntled genius toward a crude and cruel mankind, which treated him badly. Van Gogh and Theo were strongly attached to each other from childhood. In fact, it was Theo’s affinity, attachment, patience, love and understanding that supported Van Gogh in his persistent struggle to express on canvas. Theo loved his brother so deeply that shortly after Van Gogh’s death his frail health failed and he followed Van Gogh to rest by his side. Theo preserved all the letters of Van Gogh, the numerous sketches that he sent along to illustrate them, and his paintings. It is mainly using these (available in collected volumes, which are a feast to both eyes and mind) that Van Gogh has been placed on a pedestal for his posterity. Storm and stress At the age of 16 Van Gogh started his career as an art-dealer, his family’s profession. A “lost-love”, when he was twenty, left him depressed, and desolate. This, an “unkindest cut”, and a turning point in his life, possibly swerved and lurched him to the trajectory of creativity (though not necessarily by storing up his sexual energy and turning it into prose and poetry as Bernard Shaw had probably done). At the age of 23, Van Gogh turned into an evangelist, and worked among the coal miners of the Borinage in Belgium, where he found salvation as a parent-figure nursing the sick, suffering, and the wounded, and in some sense practised the ideal of the Jesus upon the Cross. However, he was dismissed from evangelical work as his extremities were seen incompatible with the “canon” of the Church Council that “a person who neglected himself could not be an example to others”. Though Van Gogh started drawing rough sketches as early as 1878 in Brussels, and resumed this in the Borinage, it was only after his dismissal from evangelical work that he took up drawing seriously. And, at the age of 26 – as Paul realised in his late thirties -, Van Gogh realised that he was cut out for a particular vocation, and the creative impulse in him impelled him to painting, though this was a continuous journey through agony and anguish. More often than not, he was unable to paint well or eat well as he was frequently afflicted by penury and starvation. However, Theo, who by this time secured a permanent job, assisted him in word and deed, and remained extremely good and helping to him. At the age of 28, another unrequited love with a cousin widow hurt him even more. Van Gogh was so well with and close to her. Yet he was in earnest to win her heart through her four years old son whom he loved deeply. But a stern “NO” from her shattered him. Shortly after this trauma, Van Gogh took under protection a destitute (who, going by descriptions, was coarse, ugly, and approaching confinement) and her children. This was partly out of pity, and partly for filling the deep void in him caused by his cousin, and his longing for a wife and child all his own. He lavished his pent up love and energy on her and the children, particularly the youngest one. This liaison deprived him of the love and sympathy of many who looked down upon him as a reprobate. Vincent, however, continued this newfound relationship for nearly a year hoping to own them. But he was forced to part with them with pangs as he was in heavy debts and could not continue to live so any longer. Even then, while parting, he made all possible provisions for them. Van Gogh in Paris The characteristic of Van Gogh’s paintings was he loved harsh, coarse, and crude colours, which he painted with streaky, brush strokes. At Antwerp, the place of his second sojourn in painting, he was attracted by Japanese prints and soon adopted a more colourful palette. In the third phase of his creative life, he moved to Paris, where he got acquainted with Paul Gauguin. Here his painting became freer, and his colours grew fresher and more throbbing. The intense need for Sunshine later made him move to Arles in Provence, where he painted for the rest of his life. He found this place so pleasant and sunny that he persuaded Gauguin to join. However, their incompatibility of temper did not keep them together long though they still liked each other (their relationship itself is an interesting part of Art history). Like Gauguin who took some time to discover what he actually wanted to paint, which he did when he settled at Tahiti, Van Gogh took some time to know what exactly he wanted to paint, and this he knew at Arles. In his sojourns as a painter, his paintings at the Brabant village of Nuenen conveyed an obsessive vision of coarse and crude peasant life in black and brown. At Antwerp he adopted a more colourful palette as a result of his love of Japanese prints; in Paris he emulated the clarity and freshness of Claude Monet and Georges Seurat. At Arles, a place so congenial to his work, with his innate love of Nature, and the burning Sun high above, his artistic gifts flowed out so freely that he painted easily and intensely. His major works of genius were painted in the two and a half years that he spent here. He expressed the violent emotions aroused in him by the glorious spring blossoms, the wheat fields at harvestine under the burning Sun, the inebriating richness of the autumn, the glorious beauty of the gardens and parks, and the human face, using most simple and personal means (his Self-Portrait, Portrait of Postman Roulin, The Night Café, The Poet’s Garden, The Sunflower, The Starry Night, etc.). Here his creative genius became so inexhaustible, that he himself said: “I have a terrible lucidity at moments; these days when the Nature is so beautiful, I am not conscious of myself anymore, and the picture comes to me as in a dream”, and exclaimed rapturously: “Life is enchanting after all…” He painted what he felt as much as what he saw; but painted the expressions of his own feelings and tried to convey the torture of his soul, rather than the images of what he saw. His canvases exhibit extremism with a hallucinatory tinge. Journey’s end The pangs Van Gogh passed through persistently to project his singularity, exacerbated by penury and starvation sapped his juice. This, his unrequited love, lust for life, craving for recognition, all had a cumulative effect on him. In a sad and murderous mood, after a violent quarrel with Gauguin, Van Gogh cut off his own right ear and presented to the courtesan of a brothel (the versions on this vary). He was soon taken to hospital. Though he recovered shortly, his life became more traumatic. His neighbours, who looked at him now with suspicion and fear, petitioned the mayor that it was dangerous to leave him free, and he was again sent to hospital. This whole affair affected him so badly and caused recurring attacks. After this, he did not have the courage to start a new studio, and thought it best to go to an asylum. On the evening of July 27, 1890, possibly under extreme depression Van Gogh shot himself in the groin [of all the places why groin?] and died at the age of 37. The paintings he did for nearly a year when he was in the asylum were not the same buoyant, works he had done earlier. Here his palette was more sober, and the harmonies of his paintings passed into a minor key. Posthumously, many have written about Van Gogh. His malady has been variously interpreted as insanity, epilepsy, psychopathic psychogenic attacks, and so on. Some Art historians believe that his madness was only an overlay on his genius, but for which he would not have splashed on canvas his pent up emotions and artistic gifts, and would have probably continued as a peddler of painted pieces. However, no post-mortem can bring out his complexity without penetrating deep into his life, and personal and social ambience. The necessity to love and of being loved, which is seen in any normal individual, was so intense in Van Gogh that the absence of these, and the frustration caused for want of recognition of his artistic gifts for which he craved, hurt him deeply. Van Gogh was seldom seen abnormal save when he cut off his ear. In a sort of stupor caused by liquor and the excessive heat of Arles, the thought lurking on his sensitive mind of his inability to give a gift to the woman who asked for it might have persuaded him to cut off his ear and present it to her. He was self-willed and self-confident till the end. He himself claimed more than once that he had a “bent for greatness”, his work would be recognised later, and people would write about him when he is dead and gone. Van Gogh was most modest, compassionate and self-suffering, for whatever bad that had happened in his life, he accused him and none else. He was a painter of the proletariat (not in the Marxian sense!), and drew inspiration from the peasants, the toiling, the poor and the wretched (see for example, The Potato Eaters). He did not belong to the aristocracy or the ivory towers. The storm and stress in life had broken his nerves before he reached his journey’s end, and what was seen abnormal in him was the cumulative effect of many emotional and environmental stirrings and thrusts. To conclude, whatever humanity has done to elate this artist posthumously is only for their self-consolation, with no expiatory effect. It still remains true that mankind looked at Van Gogh’s art gallery through blinkers, saw his works dull when he was alive and longing for recognition and saw them great only when they fancied to take off their blinkers And, as Irving Stone wrote, “The hundreds of thousands of dollars that have been exchanged for Van Gogh’s paintings since his untimely end can hardly assuage the conscience of mankind that chose to ignore a sensitive soul crying out for recognition”. PS. The Van Gogh Museum at Amsterdam, housing the works of several other artists as well is a moving testimony to this. [The four sub-titles Dawn and Morning, Storm and Stress, Van Gogh in Paris, and Journey’s end, are borrwed from Romain Rolland’s four volumes (John Christopher series), under the titles Dawn and Morning, Storm and Stress, John Christopher in Paris, and Journey’s End.]