this world was never made -- Vincent’s birthday

Time to talk about Vincent again, so close to his birthday. He’d be right around one fifty if he was still around. He left early, and his peculiar life story has come to embody our ambivalent attitudes toward art, or maybe our attitudes have conveniently adopted him. There have been several movies, each with a slightly different Vincent, but generally he’s thought of as tortured, just plain crazy, with some sort of savant’s ability to paint. That might be wrong. 

Somebody floated the notion recently that he didn’t really commit suicide by shooting himself in the torso, three days to die, but that he took the blame for boys who had teased him with a gun and shot him accidentally. It also might turn out that having a drunk roommate who owned a samurai sword, Gauguin, could cause one to lose an ear, and he might have taken the blame for that, too, at a cost to his own reputation. Simply being generous and forgiving isn’t quite the crazy we like in our movies, but you can sorta see it in his work. 

The letters between the brothers, Vincent and Theo, a big bound book, chronicle the weird symbiosis between the commercial side and the creative, the yin-yang of art in one family. Theo, the art dealer, tipped the tea cup while Vincent burned in squalor and they wrote letters back and forth. In a certain respect they exploited each other, trading for life’s essentials right out at the existential edge, times were tight. Theo vicariously lived a creative life through Vincent’s almost tedious descriptions of applying the paint, and Vincent received a few bucks for art supplies and ate beans with the rest. This is fertile ground for screenplays but they both had personal motives and may have each embellished, conned, and persuaded once in a while.

More to the point, I say more to the point, would be to look at the work, itself. It’s probably the case that in general crazy people don’t paint, or at least wouldn’t paint with oils since it’s a fairly organized activity. Vincent didn’t during periods of confusion, but when he felt brilliant and crystal clear he made paint transmute directly into tangible poetry. No one else, maybe ever, has been able to cause color and texture to resonate so deeply in an ordinary person’s brain, a perpetual knot of viewers in front of his paintings in any museum. I wouldn’t attempt to explain how this works -- no one could. A person needs to use their own eyes in front of his actual paintings for his century-old admiration and respect to really make sense.

So he didn’t sell stuff. In the long run that’s not the final test. He painted from the heart and that meant more to him. Turns out the public loved him from the time his work was finally seen, shortly after his death. It was the dealers, his brother included, who rejected his work and refused him space in a gallery. They wanted something smooth and predictable, like that painting of the berber souk they sold last week. The market isn’t fond of originality still, and the typical gallery director is more interested in who else sells it and what it sold for than in what it looks like, whatever it is. Vincent couldn’t, or wouldn’t, please them.

Somehow he left just at the point of being discovered, suddenly to be hailed as a genius and expected to appear at social occasions, openings -- black tie, nails trimmed, wearing cologne. I don’t think he killed himself, that his aim was that poor, but I do think he took the center cut and left the fat, committed his turmoil and joy to canvas and moved on. Each day when the Van Gogh Museum opens in Amsterdam people from all over the planet are standing in line, a long line. They’ll forget how much his paintings are worth once they’re in there, and see things differently when they come out. Happy BD VVG.