A van Gogh portrait with a new twist

Van Gogh
nolead ends nolead begins The Life
nolead ends nolead begins By Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith
Random House. 953 pp. $40.

nolead ends nolead begins

From the moment Vincent van Gogh died, early in the morning on July 29, 1890, posterity has believed that he ended his troubled and tragic life by shooting himself in the chest. Suicide seemed an inevitable conclusion to years of artistic struggle, emotional turmoil, and periods of mental instability.

Now, in their magisterial new biography, Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith have dramatically revised the last act. After meticulously reviewing the evidence and testimony related to the artist's death, they conclude that van Gogh probably was shot - most likely by accident - by one of two young brothers whom he knew.

If that, indeed, was the case - and I find their argument persuasively airtight - then why didn't Vincent say so after he dragged himself, mortally wounded, back to his lodgings in the town of Auvers, downriver from Paris?

Most likely, the authors surmise, because although he didn't pull the trigger himself, he was ready to accept death however it came, and he didn't want to implicate the young men involved.

Naifeh and White Smith underplay this startling denouement by reserving full exposition of how it transpired for a lengthy appendix to the main text. This seems less odd once one has read far enough into their narrative to appreciate its richly detailed texture.

Everyone knows that Vincent died young, and violently. We know, too, about his frequent mood swings, his severing part of his left ear while depressed, his chronic poverty, and the personal and professional failures that plagued his life.

So, do we need yet another biography of the quintessential suffering artist? Yes, we need this one, because Naifeh and White Smith have done for van Gogh what they did so splendidly for another anguished creative soul, Jackson Pollock, in 1989.

They have fashioned a fully rounded, and generally sympathetic, portrait of a complex personality that illuminates the heart and soul behind the famous facade, with all the contradictions and flashes of brilliance and lucidity.

Actually, they give us a dual portrait, of Vincent and his younger brother, Theo, without whose financial support the painter could not have survived, let alone become one of the most significant and popular artists of all time.

The realization of Theo, the good son, the successful art dealer and sophisticated man about Paris, isn't quite the one we're expecting, however. There isn't a hint in the book that Theo supported Vincent because he devoutly believed in his genius, or even because he thought his paintings represented a shrewd business speculation.

No, we learn that Theo sent Vincent money and art supplies because initially he felt obliged to relieve his parents of that burden, and ultimately because he felt duty-bound to do so.

The relationship between the brothers was often strained, not least because Vincent believed he was entitled to his brother's largesse, but also because Theo sometimes found himself pinched for money, especially after he married in April 1889.

Theo also had to endure his brother's neurotically combative temperament, his periodic outbursts of anger, anguish, self-righteousness, and self-pity, and his precocious talent for alienation.

Finally, he had to manage Vincent's attacks of what came to be diagnosed as temporal lobe epilepsy, which, while non-convulsive, caused the artist's brain to misfire in ways that made him act erratically. Such behavior led to his confinement in an asylum for a year before he died.

The authors bring into sharper focus two familiar aspects of Vincent's story, the relative briefness of his career in art and the importance of what I would call his Dutch "apprenticeship" - the years of black-and-white figure drawing from which he diverged dramatically after he moved to France.

The vibrantly colorful and world-famous van Gogh who will be on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from Feb. 1 to May 6 in the exhibition Van Gogh Up Close was a meteor who painted like a demon for only about five years. His French period, which we know best, lasted only from early 1886 to mid-1890.

Yet the Dutch years, which saw him fail first as an art dealer, then as a schoolteacher, and finally as a preacher among the poor, reveal the full flavor of the messianic personal quirks and bohemian habits that caused him so much grief during his 37 years.

In constructing their story, Naifeh and White Smith rely heavily on Vincent's eloquent and voluminous correspondence, most famously with Theo but also with other family members.

Yet they also observe that his epistolary declarations can't always be taken at face value, as what he wrote, especially to Theo, was sometimes dictated by what he hoped to achieve by doing so.

By the conclusion of this doorstop - the main text and appendix run 890 pages - one appreciates that Vincent was a heroic visionary who had to struggle not only against debilitating illness but also against the limitations of his own personality to produce some of the most luminous and febrile images of nature ever imagined.

Ultimately he emerges, particularly in his "mad" periods, as a kind of religious painter who expressed his appreciation for the mystery of creation with a passionate intensity rare in more traditional evocations of piety.