Van Gogh's Progress: Utopia, Modernity, and Late-Nineteenth-Century Art (review)

Van Gogh's Progress: Utopia, Modernity, and Late-Nineteenth-Century Art. Carol Zemel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Pp. xxii + 316, 14 color plates, 146 b/w illustrations. $45.00.

Surely no other modern artist has received the same degree of public adulation and persistent interest as Vincent van Gogh. His brief but psychologically tumultuous life, his letters, his illnesses, his failed romances, his lack of commercial success, his self-mutilation, and his suicide produce a virtual template for the romanticized and sentimental myths of the misunderstood artist-genius, the artist as secularized Christ figure, that have been a dominant component of popular Western art reception at least since the eighteenth century. Van Gogh has been the subject of best-selling novels and hit songs, films on his life are major box office successes, books and posters reproducing his art proliferate. At the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, as at exhibitions elsewhere, long lines of visitors jostle daily to pay their entrance fees and to view the glass-enclosed icons and relics representative of their adulation. Indeed, when considered in association with the production and sales of catalogues and other souvenir items, but even more with what the museum and exhibition tourists spend at hotels, restaurants, and other related businesses, the exhibitions of Vincent van Gogh's art become a significant contributor to the commercial life of the cities where they take place. In van Gogh, the failed artist resurrected for posterity, it would seem art and commerce have melded into an inseparable unity.

Art historical scholarship too has nourished, and been fed on, this artistic-commercial Vincent cult. It has generated multiple oeuvre catalogues, each more precise and voluminous than its predecessors, each more discerning in applying the evidence of his letters to determine the exact date, or even hour, when a particular work was produced, and in rejecting forgeries, which are themselves a sign of public recognition. This cult has caused his unique genius to be celebrated critically and subjectively in innumerable monographs, and it has made his tortured psyche and its apparent symptoms the objects of unending investigation. Ironically it has also made it difficult for scholarship that fails to contribute to the established adulatory personality cult to find appropriate publication venues. Reproduction rights and costs have risen consistently to levels beyond the means of most scholars and noncommercial presses. The mass market demands sumptuously illustrated books with grand color plates often accompanied by minimal, repetitive texts, and a market saturated with these has little room or patience for more modestly illustrated, more seriously scholarly books. In a very real sense van Gogh's popularity threatens to undermine further critical historical understanding and evaluation of his art.

The book under review also has its color plates, but they are modest in size, grouped together in the center, almost as if they were the publisher's concession to marketing demands. This is not a book one purchases for its grand display of overly saturated color images, although it has ample black-and-white reproductions that accompany the text's argument. It is, however, an extraordinarily well designed book, the type one takes pleasure in picking up, leafing through, noting the paper and typeface, and enjoying the physical act of reading, as befits the tradition of fine book publishing that its more splashy competition seldom matches. Beyond such aesthetic considerations, however, this is a major, insightful alternative reading of the work of Vincent van Gogh that avoids the various hagiographic approaches but does not deny van Gogh his individual voice, which, indeed, is given a renewed presence that demands that we revise our own vision as we contemplate his well-known images.

Carol Zemel's scholarship consistently has run counter to the commercialized adulation that I have briefly described, although her finely crafted, eminently readable prose also confirms her sympathy with both van Gogh's person and his art. Her desire for an...