Considering the topic of the previous post, I’ve decided here to dig out an old essay I wrote on Vincent van Gogh, in which I puzzled over the artist’s unlikely apotheosis to the front of the line of eternally favorite artists. Enjoy.

What Vincent van Gogh Means to Us Today

By Michael Fallon

News Item: Aug. 4, 2003
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (Toby Sterling, Associated Press) - “Film of Van Gogh allegedly discovered.”

“Photography was still young and celluloid film had scarcely been invented when Vincent van Gogh committed suicide in 1890. Yet a team of Dutch filmmakers claimed Monday it has made a documentary about a snippet of film shot that year in which the artist allegedly appears…. According to Lumineus Film Productions producer Jeroen Neus, Van Gogh was attending a welcoming party for a new pastor in Zundert when he was coincidentally captured on film for a few seconds by an early film enthusiast. The film supposedly lay for almost a century in a damp attic before it was discovered in 1984 and restored.”

I WAS NOT SURPRISED to read the above news, for I’ve long thought that Van Gogh is accorded a near-Messianic status among the art lovers of the world. Of course we all know there’s little chance that the figure in the film is actually the artist, but it’s pretty to think so–in the same way we are fascinated to hear about Jesus Christ’s visage in a potato chip, or the Virgin Mary stain on a brick wall (or Elvis at the local minimart, for that matter).

In the art world, Vincent Van Gogh has a cult following and his paintings are granted the status of sacred relics–their worth is almost incalculable. The most expensive painting ever sold was a Van Gogh–his “Portrait of Dr.Gachet” was bought by Ryohei Saito in 1990 for $85 million. The Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam is one of the city’s top tourist stops, drawing 1.3 million visitors last year, according to once source. Last March marked huge celebrations of the artist on the occasion of his 150th birthday. The Dutch village of Zundert, where he was born, has named 2003 the “Van Gogh Year” in his honor.

Meanwhile, any institutions that are fortunate enough to have a relic of the artist’s hand are given cathedral status. (”Does the Arts Institute have a Van Gogh?” is a question I’ve heard more than once.) Van Gogh’s work is revered more than any other art saint’s (perhaps only Leonardo’s work competes). “He is a big name like Einstein and Beethoven,” said Andreas Bluehm, head of exhibitions at the Van Gogh Museum. “We are always amazed by how popular he is and his popularity seems to be growing.”

One can only speculate why Van Gogh has attained such luminance. Yes, his paintings have a certain magic to them–they’re at once colorful, expressionistic, and edgy but still easily accessible. Still, just to compare, Gaugin was a far better painter than Van Gogh; Cezanne was more innovative and influential to the generation of the artists who followed him, and fellow post-impressionists like Georges Seurat and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec made more immediately eye-catching images.

If anything, Van Gogh was an eccentric in art history, a painter with an anomalous style of fairly negligible influence. After all, as we often hear, Van Gogh was a complete flop in his own time and sold but one painting while he lived (a mediocre and muddy effort called “The Red Vineyard”). And he has no direct artistic lineage into the twentieth century.

Many might suggest his popularity has to do with the sensational facts of his life–his scandalous love for a pregnant prostitute and for a cousin, that whole episode with his ear, his falling-out with the painter Gaugin, his institutionalization for mental illness, his suicide at the age of 37 in 1890. Much of the turmoil of his life is well documented in his paintings–the madness that tormented him is apparent in the eyes and swirling color of his later self-portraits, and in the wild fantasy of his most famous painting, “Starry Night.”

But for my money, these facts of his life don’t quite add up to his paramount status. After all, a lot of artists through the ages have been troubled or scandalous or infamous. Andrea dal Castagno was involved in murder and other mayhem; Michelangelo feuded publicly with popes; J. L. David had a hand in the French revolution and was nearly executed, and so on–and none of these artists are nearly the icon that Van Gogh is.

Instead, I think Van Gogh’s status today says something about our age, and the ideals we strive to attain as a culture. Van Gogh represents to many modern people the quintessential romantic dreamer, a cultural-creative Don Quixote-cum-urban hipster who was above the quotidian trials of daily life. Because of the obstacles he overcame to paint, and the single-minded passion he brought to the task, Van Gogh is representative of the burning, soul-wrenching passion to create that we want to believe lies at the heart of human experience. In this, he is an archetypical ideal. His life represents all the risks we wish we could take but are not brave enough to–giving up the day job and all the bourgeois comforts of middle class, dropping out of society and fleeing to the south of France, attempting to establish an artists commune and above all else burning to make up for the time lost in genuflecting to the daily fucking grind.

He gave up the day jobs–the comfortable life he could have had if he’d found any pleasure dealing art, teaching in a boarding school, preaching to Belgian coalminers–and in his late 20s set out to follow his passion, painting, in the biggest possible way. Here’s the truly unique fact of Vincent Van Gogh: he knew what he wanted to do, and he set out to do it despite its unconventionality. And he did it damn well despite that he attained absolutely no material success for it (and despite the fact that his early work shows little conventional talent for it).

It’s a pet theory of mine that humans are born with an endless capacity for passion, but everyone in our lives–parents, teachers, bosses, society-at-large–conspires to wean us of this trait. If you’ve ever heard a baby shouting for her mother’s milk, who is certain only in the knowledge that she is surely going to die of this hunger-pain, then you know how raw and human this sort of emotion is. Yet when’s the last time you felt remotely like that inner infant? If we think on it, passion is a great evolutionary tool. When we somehow find it in ourselves, not only does it help us perpetuate the species but it also spurs us to attempt great things–build bridges, make sculptures, invent life-saving devices–even if everyone you know is telling you it’s a damn fool mistake. Passion helps us say “scupper the consequences,” and it lies at the heart of most of our culture’s most meaningful achievements.

Unfortunately, nowadays we live in a well-mannered age, a time when all the passion has been drained from our manner of living. We spend endless empty hours on the freeway, sitting at a desk in front of one cathode-ray tube or another, attending PTA meetings or watching kids practice soccer at a park, avoiding our own lives with diversion and entertainments, and doing very little of any creative significance. Our lives are anything but passionate. Our age is an age of anti-passion.

Is it any wonder then that art is so popular a practice now? We all dream of being a closet Van Gogh–chucking our shit jobs, our credit debt, and all the chintz that fills our crackerbox houses to live a life more meaningful and real, to be the passionate humans we are meant to be. No wonder there are so many more people who claim to be artists than ever before (2.5 million according to the last census), and no wonder we worship the painter Van Gogh so–we’re all looking for a glimpse of the natural creative passion that is our birthright.

“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.

I met Dean Fleming in the summer of 2005. Driving through the Sangre de Christo mountains about 40 miles south of Pueblo, I realized the weather in Colorado in August is about a perfect you’ll ever fine. Heartbreakingly beautiful. The sky is a pearlescent blue ocean hanging over the sage green ocean-bottom valleys and the distant coral-reef mountains. On each side of the Huerfano valley, the landscape rises up into scrubby chaparral then disappears into rocky murky mountaintops.

Dean Fleming first discovered this region in 1966. At the time, he was feeling increasingly stifled in New York. “Art was a profession,” he said, “like playing football. You get together a resume and a portfolio. You work to get the critics to do a review… The structure of the profession was not something I ever worked at. I didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about it. In New York, there’s a lot of pressure to repeat yourself and do the same thing. In New York I was the ‘parallelogram’ painter, which I thought sucked beyond belief. I didn’t want anything to do with that. I wanted to do what I felt like.”

 Dean Fleming, “Untitled,” 1965

Fleming took a get-out-of-New York trip to California in 1966 with composer Steve Reich and painter John Baldwin. On the way, they stopped Ignacio, Colorado, to catch a Native American Sundance. “I found it magical,” said Fleming. In a letter to New York gallery owner Paula Cooper in July 1966, he wrote:

Dear Paula,

Excellent mustanging across country spending 4 days with the Colorado Utes sun dancing, basking in stars & Rocky Mountain blaze of sun, cleansing chunks of Manhattan funk & generally changing. Steve playing tapes, John the trumpet & me giving out books & buttons, we Johnny Appleseeded culture across the land…

Fleming’s suggestion that he was changing was revealing. It was difficult for him to adjust again to SoHo when he returned: “When I went back to New York, ” he said, “to my loft on Broom Street, I had a dream that I was supposed to be in the country, surrounded by friends. That was the impetus to come back to Colorado.”

In 1965, some artists, filmmakers, and philosophical types from Lawrence, Kansas had started—in Trinidad, Colorado—what would become known as the first rural “hippy commune,” Drop City. The founders of Drop City had hope to continue working on an art concept—Drop Art—they had developed earlier at the University of Kansas. Drop Art was informed by the “happenings” of Allan Kaprow and the work of John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and R. Buckminster Fuller—a professor and inventor who pondered questions related what would later become known as the “sustainability” movement. (Fleming knew “Bucky” Fuller, as he called him. In fact, he learned to make the geodesic dome that is his Libre Commune studio/home from him.)

“The Ultimate Painting ,” by Drop Artists, 1966, acrylic on panel, 60″ x 60″

Fleming first stopped at Drop City with a few friends for a short stay, coming to think of the place as a “touch chaotic.” “They had this open-door policy thing that was untenable,” he explained. “Artists need their own space to think and get work done. They were doomed for failure.” (Drop City was abandoned by its residents in 1970.)

After a few months, Fleming and his group discovered a plot of acreage on a mountainside near Gardner, Colorado. Somehow they scraped up the money to purchase it ($6000), and thus began the Libre Community, a continuously existing commune that has expanded and contracted through the years—with various artist microcommunities popping up then fading away. Amazingly, the commune still exists today, forty years after its founding.

“It’s a funny mix here,” said Fleming, who these days possesses deeply lined face and a long mane of white hair. “There have always been Native American practitioners, Buddhists, wine drinkers, pot smokers. Theater artists. Photographers. Artists. Everyone, each in their own area. Some of the groups overlap. But for me, it’s always just been a great place to work.”

Fleming’s life as a working artist in Colorado has been long and rich—even removed as it’s been from mainstream currents. “I don’t have a lot of money. I never have. But if I have a place to stay, it works out.” Still, like anyone, he seems to have his share of regrets. “I worry about not having health insurance,” he said several times over the course of my stay.

Fleming still paints every morning, first thing—”even when I’m traveling,” he said. Behind his geodesic studio, a good-sized shack holds a large cache of paintings reveals the results of this fifty years of effort. He is pensive about his legacy as he shows this trove to me. “My situation (as an obscure artist) is deliberate. It doesn’t matter in the long run if people like my work or not. I seek a place always where the painting takes over. I’d hope the observer would have that experience, but that’s very individual. It’s the nature of people to like a different painting for different reasons. I think of painting as being a mirror for people—where they’re at.”

Because this site by design is concerned with the lofty idea of chronicling systemic artistic failure–following developments in arts policy, art world economics, the social condition of art, and the like–it may sometimes seem disconnected from the struggles of real artists on the ground. But of course, the reason I look at and write about these forces is because I am truly concerned about their effect on artists.

What I mean to say is, in the midst of my rants and deep investigations of this country’s unjust treatment of the arts I do realize we should remember the struggling artists who have come and gone and are still yet to fail. We should remember them and try to keep others from following in their miserable footsteps.

So, to remember the struggles of artists I’m introducing a new regular feature on CAFA, Favorite Failed Artist Stories.

And here’s the first story, Amedeo Modigliani:

Amedeo Clemente Modigliani (1884–1920) was an Italian artist who, following the long-standing tradition, moved to Paris in 1906 to work as a painter. He worked furiously when he arrived in that town, making myriad images first influenced by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, then, in 1907, by Paul Cezanne. Eventually he developed his own unique style, one that cannot really be grouped with other avant garde artists of the time.

Not only was Modigliani’s style unique, but his behavior also stood out among his peers of the time, even considering the Bohemian standards they upheld. He carried on frequent affairs, drank heavily, and used absinthe and hashish. While drunk at social gatherings, he would sometimes strip himself naked. In time, his childhood tendency toward illness was exacerbated by poverty, overwork, and self-abuse. His health declined. On January 24, 1920, Modigliani died of tubercular meningitis. He was 35. The following evening, his common-law wife, Jeanne Hébuterne, leapt to her death from a fifth-story window. She was eight months’ pregnant with their second child,

And here’s the kicker of the story:

During the 1920s, in the wake of Modigliani’s early death and spurred on by comments by the critic Andre Salmon, who credited hashish and absinthe as the progenitors of Modigliani’s unique style, many hopeful young artists tried to emulate this “success” by embarking on a path of Modiglianian substance abuse and bohemian excess. This was encouraged by Salmon’s claim that whereas Modigliani was a rather pedestrian artist when sober, “…from the day he abandoned himself to certain forms of debauchery, an unexpected light came upon him, transforming his art.”

This rallying cry—toward debauchery and excess—has grown to become the modern hallmark of the romantic soul longing to be a tragic, doomed artist. For this—the great seed source of failed artists everywhere—we can thank Modigliani and his posthumous propagandist Salmon!