Perhaps Jesus made me a painter for people who aren’t born yet. This line, spoken to a priest charged with assessing Vincent for possible release from the asylum in Saint Remy where he has been interred after a latest bout of his illness, seems to me central to the director’s vision. With more than a century of art market hindsight, it’s an easy enough line, although I do not know for sure if the artist ever said it. It feels unrealistically self-confident.
Reading Vincent’s letters to his brother Theo, intellect and erudition shine through, certainly financial worries and an inability to find love, but self confidence? No. I wouldn’t say so.
There is more than one reference to Christ in the film, including pictorial ones. Jesus himself, Van Gogh tells the priest, wasn’t famous until forty years after his death. Well maybe but that’s not a line guaranteed to get you out of the asylum in France in 1890.
The artist himself wrote:
‘’…on no account would I choose the life of a martyr. For I have always striven for something other than heroism, which I do not have in me…’
(Letter Vincent Van Gogh to Theo Van Gogh, 3rdFebruary 1889)
Has Van Gogh become obscured by his own mythology? And does it matter? This clearly is a concern to Ronald de Leeuw in his 1990 introduction to the Penguin edition of Vincent’s letters to his brother, Theo. It is worth pointing out here that the Editor of the letters was at the time of the book’s appearance Director of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam – so hardly a slouch in terms of authority. Both de Leeuw and the translator of the edition are clear that Vincent took his own life.
Yet film makers beg to differ. He was shot they claim, by a local thug. In this respect At Eternity’s Gatefollows on from the excellent and exquisitely rendered artists film, Loving Vincent(2017) which also pushed the shot-by-a-local called René Secrétan angle. Whereas scholarly thinking is that he committed suicide.
It’s hard not to be fascinated …
by the life stories of artists and this one in particular. After all, Van Gogh painted his way from unknown son of a preacher man to incipient global icon in a period of roughly 11 years, making the decision to become an artist (a late start for a painter with no particular formal training in 1879) and dying aged 37 from gunshot wounds in 1891.
Possibly no other artist’s life – or death – seems quite so intriguing to us or quite so surrounded with mysteries. And film loves a mystery. But there is scholarly theory that these mysteries are not mysteries at all but are add ons to our popular image of the ultimate tortured and impoverished artist. I do not claim that there is no substance in these ideas – the ear chopping episode (mercifully done off screen in Schnabel’s film) is sufficient evidence of a mind and body in torment. But to make a shortcut between that and genius, and to claim little else for the man? That I don’t accept. Also the fact that the artist had self- harmed so spectacularly makes a greater case for his subsequent suicide, rather than a lesser one.
Van Gogh rarely discusses his illness in his letters to his brother perhaps not wishing to make him anxious but occasionally he does make reference to his illness.
When I came out of hospital with good old Roulin, I fancied there had been nothing wrong with me, it was only afterwards I felt I’d been ill. Well, that’s only to be expected. I have moments when I am twisted with enthusiasm or madness or prophecy, like a Greek oracle on his tripod.
But when I am in a delirium and everything I love so much is in turmoil, then I don’t mistake that for reality and I don’t play the false prophet.
(Letter Vincent Van Gogh to Theo Van Gogh, 3rdFebruary 1889)
One aspect of Schnabel’s film which seems on the surface intriguing, but which is in fact inaccurate, is the matter of the missing ledger book. An empty ledger book was given by Madame Ginoux to Van Gogh for him to use as a drawing book and which the film claims was returned to her (although without her knowledge) complete with more than 60 of his drawings. Heavens! What would that be worth now? The ledger, the film says, mysteriously disappeared and was only rediscovered in 2016.
The first thing that occurred to me when I saw this was why? If the artist was reviled in his lifetime certainly by the local populace of Arles, and if so few of his paintings sold, why would someone go to the trouble of stealing a ledger book to all intents and purposes considered worthless at the time? And where was it all those years? How exciting! The answer however – as answers often are – is more prosaic.
Martin Bailey, in an article dated 29thMarch 2018 for The Art Newspaper, writes that the book was not authentic.
Schnabel told The Times that it is “irrelevant” whether the drawings are genuine or not. He has seen them and says “they were pretty damn good”. This comes as a surprise from an artist, since the sketches are weakly drawn, derivative works. The Arles Sketchbook is not authentic, as the Van Gogh Museum determined after an exhaustive examination. (And the sketches were not discovered “in 2016”, since I had been shown some of them in 2010.)
Our need for the tortured artist as sacrificial victim should not overtake historical accuracy in biography. For the film maker it seems, it is not enough that Vincent should have taken his own life but that someone needed to do it for him. Perhaps so that we may be yet more convinced of the rightness of his vision. Perhaps genius can only exist against a backdrop of ignorance, so that it may shine ever more brightly? I don’t know. But here is the artist’s own voice on the subject:
“… I for one would blame myself if I didn’t try to make pictures that give rise to serious reflection in those who think seriously about art and life.”
