Yet this difficulty need not now prevent them from surveying and seeing up close his huge body of work in digital archives like that of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the largest Van Gogh collection in the world.īy entering the collection, you can see, for example, Self Portrait with Straw Hat, at the top, from 1887, or the strikingly similar portrait of his brother and staunch supporter Theo from the same year, just below it.
Van Gogh’s fame has had the unfortunate side effect of crowding out many students of his art from gallery exhibitions. As the Metropolitan Museum of Art writes, “in 1890,” the final year of his life, “he modestly assessed his artistic legacy as of ‘very secondary’ importance.” (This despite the appreciation he’d begun to receive from several gallery showings.) The posthumous reception of his work-ubiquitously reproduced and admired by countless throngs in exhibit after exhibit-can do nothing now to lift his spirits, but surely vindicates his prodigious effort. Sadly, he felt himself a mediocrity at best, a failure at worst. During the brief 10-year period that Van Gogh pursued his art, he was as dedicated as it’s possible to be-producing nearly 900 canvases and over 1,100 works on paper, and altering the way we see the world, all while experiencing severely crippling bouts of depression, anxiety, and self doubt having his neighbors ostracize and evict him from his home and spending most of his final year in an institution. And perhaps a more realistic view of what was likely debilitating bipolar disorder has given me an even greater appreciation for his accomplishments.
Maybe it’s age and some familiarity with life’s hardship, but I no longer romanticize Van Gogh’s suffering. Well, everybody has their own version of Van Gogh, perhaps, but one I’ve outgrown is the mad, magical genius whose mental illness acted as a tragic but necessary condition for his transcendently passionate work. After waiting for what seemed like forever, not only could I barely get a glimpse of any of the paintings through the scrum of tourists and gawkers, but I felt-in my protective bubble of Van Gogh veneration-that these people couldn’t possibly get Van Gogh the way I got Van Gogh.
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