Vincent van Gogh, the quintessential artistic failure archetype
Posted by: admin in Idealizing bohemian excess, Misunderstanding the artist's life, The excesses of artists, Artists who fall through the cracks, Vincent van Gogh, Artist stereotypes, Favorite failed artist stories, Artists are their own worst enemies, Failed artist, Doomed artist, The struggles of artists, International art failure, The tortured artist, Overcoming Artistic Failure“No more bread.” –Said by a baker to Vincent van Gogh; the painter had been exchanging paintings to the baker for food. (I wrote this in my notebook during my visit to Dean Fleming at the Libre Commune; I think I saw it in a book I had pulled from his bookshelf to read in bed while sleeping in the extra room at Fleming’s geodesic studio/home, but I can’t recall for certain.)
“I feel—a failure.” –Vincent van Gogh in a letter to his brother written after visiting Docter Gachet in Auvers. While in Auvers, van Gogh completed dozens of paintings and drawing, including a portrait of the doctor that later, in 1990, would sell for $82.5 million (the highest price ever for a painting sold in auction—proving “failure” is a relative term). At the end of his two-month stay in Auvers on July 27, 1890, at age 37, the painter would shoot himself in the stomach, and he would die two days later.
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January 24th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
Van Gogh’s letters to Emile Bernard provide another insight in the workings of his mind–working out compositions which appealed to him visually, using color for effect–giving rise to feelings, some examples of energetic “working out” of visual problems. In letters to his friend/fellow artist, there is a sense of success. Its another point of view.
Friend Bernard kept Van Gogh alive for generations who respond to his art.
Commercial success is another beast–artists outside moneyed, acquisitional fringes struggle today as VanGogh did with recognition and financial success.
This, however, is not failure.
January 24th, 2008 at 6:19 pm
Well, I think this is about systemic failure. That’s the point of this Chronicle–to keep an eye on how America and Americans are failing art.
As for Bernard, I once included his words (about seeing the coffin of his friend Vincent at the funeral) in an essay on the Doomed Artist:
“On the walls of the room where his body was laid out, all his last canvases were hung making a sort of halo for him and the brilliance of the genius that radiated from them made this death even more painful for us artists who were there. The coffin was… surrounded with masses of flowers, the sunflowers that he loved so much, yellow dahlias, yellow flowers everywhere. It was, you will remember, his favorite color, the symbol of the light that he dreamed of being in people’s hearts as well as in works of art. Near him also on the floor in front of his coffin were his easel, his folding stool and his brushes. Many people arrived, mainly artists, among whom I recognized Lucien Pissarro and Lauzet,… also some local people who had known him a little, seen him once or twice and who liked him because he was so good-hearted, so human . . . I looked at the studies; a very beautiful and sad one based on Delacroix’s ‘La vierge et Jésus.’ Convicts walking in a circle surrounded by high prison walls, a canvas inspired by Doré of a terrifying ferocity and which is also symbolic of his end. Wasn’t life like that for him, a high prison like this with such high walls–so high . . . and these people walking endlessly round the pit, weren’t they the poor artists, the poor damned souls walking past under the whip of Destiny?”
January 31st, 2008 at 1:58 pm
That quote from Bernard is beautiful and sad and so perfect.
I’m not sure the most supportive artistic community and culture can save anyone from depression — which is, after all, a fatal disease — but certainly it couldn’t hurt.