What Being an Artist Meant to Van Gogh

Yesterday, just a little over two weeks after posting about artistic lust, I happened upon the following paragraph in a letter Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo in 1882:1

Mauve takes it amiss that I said, ‘I am an artist,’ which I won’t take back, because it’s self-evident that what that word implies is looking for something all the time without ever finding it in full. It is the very opposite of saying, ‘I know all about it, I’ve already found it.’ As far as I am concerned, the word means, ‘I am looking, I am hunting for it, I am deeply involved.’

Anton Mauve was the spouse of one of Van Gogh’s cousins, and a successful artist. He gave Van Gogh instruction in how to paint in watercolour and oils, encouraged him, and supported him briefly, although he rejected Van Gogh when the latter took a prostitute into his home to model for him. I saw Mauve’s “The Return of the Flock, Laren” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art several years ago. At the time, I didn’t realize that Mauve was related to Van Gogh, but the painting made an impression on me. If you live in the area or happen to visit Philadelphia, it is worth your time to go to the Museum just to see this painting. You can look up an image of it online, but the photograph does not come close to the original painting, which is large. When the painting is reduced to what can fit on a computer screen, the composition looks unstable. Moreover, there is something innocent, playful, and childlike in the gestures of the lambs that just doesn’t come across in the photograph.

The popular perception of Van Gogh is that he was mentally ill. This perception is encouraged by the art establishment, which, as I have pointed out previously, loves to talk about artists, and in particular Van Gogh, with a tone of contempt. The public seems to find the idea of a mentally ill painter inspirational. They prefer to believe, and the art establishment wants them to believe, that painting is easy. Anyone can paint. One does not even have to be in one’s right mind to paint. Indeed, it is better if one is not in one’s right mind. A painting is supposed to be so ordinary and commonplace that it can only be interesting if it was made by someone who was mentally ill. I have no idea how people manage to make themselves believe such nonsense.

In fact, Van Gogh was not mad when he produced his paintings and wrote letters to his brother and to others. He did not paint or write during his episodes of mental breakdown.2 This should not come as a surprise. Painting is not straightforward or easy. It requires immense concentration, sustained over the not-insignificant amount of time that it takes to create a painting. And no one becomes a great artist by creating just one or two paintings; great artists like Rembrandt, Monet, and Van Gogh produced hundreds or thousands of paintings. It is by drawing and painting that one becomes a great artist. If you look at Van Gogh’s body of work, you will see that he worked incredibly hard. A mentally ill person could not have created the paintings he created. If you remain unconvinced, please read the letters yourself. If they were written by a lunatic, then we are all mad.

As great an artist as Mauve was, the irony is that Van Gogh is much better known and loved today than Mauve. And time has not been kind to Van Gogh’s paintings. The reason many of Van Gogh’s later paintings look oddly coloured (greenish, whitish, or overly yellow) is that he used a lot of fugitive pigments. He especially loved fugitive reds. He knew they would fade, so he used them thickly, thinking this would prevent them from fading completely, but they faded nonetheless. Even still, in spite of their colour distortions, Van Gogh’s paintings touch people, far more than Mauve’s paintings, as great as those are. I believe this is because of Van Gogh’s attitude towards his art. He was searching for something. He was driven by artistic lust, the lust for a vision the artist has not actually seen and will never successfully capture. He knew that being an artist was not about being an expert who knows something but rather about being someone who is engaged in an honest search for something. Rather than try to impress us, his paintings invite us to join him in his search. That is what great art is all about.

  1. Ronald de Leeuw, ed., The Letters of Vincent van Gogh, trans. Arnold Pomerans (New York: Penguin, 1996), 150. ↩︎
  2. Ibid, xviii-xix. ↩︎