Van Gogh: The Life

This exceptionally well researched and written biography is an incredible read. I’ve been an admirer of Van Gogh’s work my entire life. Now I understand the man more completely. This amazing read goes into great depth behind Van Gogh’s life, struggles, and work. Just an amazing book to know Van Gogh more completely.

This is a phenomenal biography of Vincent Van Gogh. I knew very little about him before reading it--now I feel like I know a lot. What a sad life he led, rebelling against his family's values, draining his brother's finances dry and then demanding more, attacked by bouts of severe mental illness. I came to really care about him as a person and wished his life could have been happier. We learn so much about him, and the book is very readable, well-paced, fascinating. Did he cut off his ear to impress a woman? Did he commit suicide? Hm. Better read the book to find out!

As an art history professor and author of a book on Van Gogh, I have spent many years researching the life, motives and actions of Vincent Van Gogh. I am convinced that he was a heroic man. He was a consistent champion of the underdog, and on numerous occasions took blame for the misdeeds of others. The idea that Vincent wanted to protect the boys who accidentally shot him is consistent with his personality. Emotionally and intuitively, Vincent's accidental shooting and his protection of the young boys makes perfect sense, and offers a far more reasonable conclusion to an extraordinary life--one that was from beginning to end selflessly devoted to the Gospel theme of loving another in place of oneself. To Vincent Van Gogh, it was about cherishing daily life in pursuit of eternal salvation, though his path to redemption was uneven and even at times tortured. And perhaps--as Naifeh and Smith have suggested in their book--this act of compassion in shielding those young boys from blame, and in preventing his brother Theo from further undue stress, may well have been a coup de grâce...a final effort to propel himself into the eternal life to which he had long aspired. In my view, Van Gogh: The Life is a book any serious Van Gogh fan should own for the impressive amount of information that Naifeh and Smith present. For instance, the authors offer the reader a portrait of conventional Dutch social life in the nineteenth century and the complex and conflicted role Vincent played within that era. Other notable features of the book include an astute discussion of the importance of music in Van Gogh's aesthetic formation. Passages of the book are simply beautiful and noteworthy. A systematic framework for more study of his fascinating life has been provided by the almost interrogatory nature of this compilation--not surprising given the background of the authors. Nonetheless, I recall an admonition that Van Gogh made about information gathering and the artist. Vincent said that it was the task of the artist to emphasize the obvious and eliminate the extraneous. Van Gogh: The Life underplays what is in my estimation crucial in grasping Van Gogh, namely his sacred view of life. This universal view shaped his thought process and as an artist guided his choices of subject matter. Van Gogh loved the uplifting message of forgiveness embodied in the Gospel message of Christ. This appears poignantly in his many overtly religious works which Van Gogh painted in the last months of his life such as: "The Good Samaritan", "The Raising of Lazarus", "The Pieta" and "The Starry Night" of 1889. This was a time in which Vincent said he had a "terrible need for religion." According to Naifeh and Smith, the light of his faith had been extinguished at the time of this father's death in 1885; Van Gogh's quest for the sacred had effectively ceased. Yet the evidence of Van Gogh's own letters in the ensuing years cannot be dismissed. Treating the sacred dimension of Van Gogh as fundamentally pathological rather than as a universalizing world view strips his art and life of its transcendent meaning and message. My conviction about the role of the sacred in fully understanding Van Gogh is widely shared by other 21st century Van Gogh scholars who are part of a reappraisal of religious themes in art. Notable museum exhibitions have also stressed this concept by displaying the overtly religious works of Van Gogh, Gauguin, Delacroix and many other renowned figures in the canon of a Western art. The sacred embrace that emerges from Van Gogh's art, letters and life outshines his illness, and provides all humanity with eternal hope.

Loving reading this book. Gives so much insight to the life of Van Gogh in all aspects. His childhood and brief adulthood, his family, nomadic lifestyle and familial exile. Highly recommend to anybody interested in him.

My wife and I went to the Van Gogh Museum soon after it opened in 1973. It is still perhaps the most interesting museum we have ever visited. That's because it had--what is today called--a "back story." You can view his paintings in chronological order, against the backdrop of what most would admit is the folklore of Van Gogh. Based on a decade of research and collaboration with the museum, this book fact-checks and synthesizes those stories into a compelling analysis of how Van Gogh 1) failed in every career endeavor, 2) painfully and begrudgingly gained the respect of other Impressionist painters while selling only one painting, 3) could create masterpieces in hours, and 4) left a decade's worth of work that soon became wildly popular and priceless. The other comments focus on the circumstances of his death. True, there is little in the book about that, but really his whole life reflected his inability to get along with local townspeople and how gangs of boys tormented the hobo in their midst. The book is absolutely a psychological study of Van Gogh's fears, motivations, hopes and dreams, but the authors also do a wonderful job of showing how all that lead to bizarre behaviors that turned so many against him. One wonders whether he would have discovered a new kind of art without the mental and physical mockery swirling all around him. This collaboration also suggests the direction that art, history, libraries and museums may be heading in the future. The Van Gogh Museum is now promoting Vincent and Theo's letters on their website so anyone can interpret them and decide for themselves what may have driven such an original artist. With so many resources--drawings, paintings, letters, outside experts--available to them, there's no telling how they may be able to make Van Gogh come to life as new media become available. I can imagine walking past those paintings again with this information projected and playing all around you. In the meantime, Van Gogh: The Life does a wonderful job of suggesting how a sick and obsessed individual could invent a whole new way of seeing the world. Edit - Added June 23, 2012: Since posting my original review above on Amazon, I've gotten into doing more reading and posting reviews. With a broader appreciation of the reviews now, I came back 6 months later to look at what later reviewers have been saying about Van Gogh: The Life. I wanted to add to my original review on the topic so many have raised since -- Why did the authors treat Van Gogh so badly in their interpretations and analysis? I too love Van Gogh's art, the way he saw life, and captured his subjects so quickly in such an original way. Some experts have written that people love Van Gogh because he believed in himself, refused to compromise, and only after death was recognized for his genius ... that so many of us want to have greater success in life and be recognized for it and, thus, Van Gogh becomes a symbol and a role model to so many. It strikes me that when people look to role models with reverence as they do Van Gogh, that he's not allowed to be a person who's just not nice. Some have pointed out that he sounds nice in his letters, so how can he not be a good person? In response to this, I would ask how can someone who has a totally original view, who gets no support except from his brother, who never gets positive feedback, who never (except once apparently) sells a painting NOT be a difficult person to live with? I am also a huge fan of Frank Lloyd Wright for similar reasons. He had an original way of seeing architecture that was organic, growing out of the environment in which it was placed. Wright didn't design buildings and features that looked cool. Rather he came up with treatments that aligned with their surroundings. He simply followed that principle throughout his life to build structures that seem like they just couldn't have been envisioned by anyone at that time. He too never compromised, even though critics and even many of his clients rebelled at his ideas. Unlike Van Gogh, Wright was hugely successful and recognized for his genius probably for 50-60 years of his life. He essentially walked out on his family as he became more successful, he was seen as egomaniacal and his living situation inspired one of his servants to kill a number of people on the compound with an ax. I guess he wasn't such a nice person either. But not being easy to live with doesn't make him any less of a genius. When the authors and the Van Gogh Museum see the conflict that they've stirred up, they must be delighted to have gotten readers to passionately discuss and react to their artist 120 years later. They've gotten people to speculate about how possible psychological afflictions, substance abuse, creative vision, and life experiences all contributed to his work and legacy. I don't see that as character assassination ... they've provided a dialogue to get people thinking.

Moving, detailed and full of information to follow up on. VERY thorough.

Hermoso Libro, muy interesante. Aprendes mucho sobre la vide del artista. Totalmente recomendable.

辞書を引くのももどかしく、夢中になって読んだ。なによりも文章がいい。外連味がなく、ゴッホへの愛情を感じる。なんとしても理解し尽くしたいという情熱を感じた。巧みな文章と熱い情熱が、私を夢中にさせた。

bonsoir je viens d'acheter ce livre pour les fêtes de noel à une amie c'est une biographie compléte de van gogh. avec des photographies de ses oeuvres.il faut aimer la peinture impressionniste.c'est un livre intéressant car il contient des annexes pour comprendre pourquoi Vangogh a voyagé. c'est un livre utile pour un professeur de dessin et intéressant pour faire un exposé ou présenter Van gogh a des enfants en synthétisant l'essentiel.

Un libro excepcional , después de leer otras biografías da Van Gogh ésra me parece la mejor. La recomiendo a toda persona interesada en la cultura , en especial, la pintura.

Very nice book but a little too heavy for my wife to read in bed ;-) Today is Tuesday, thank you