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Van Gogh: The Life (2011)

by Steven Naifeh(Favorite Author)

4.07 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0375507485 (ISBN13: 9780375507489)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Random House

review 1: This is a truly amazing work. Vincent and his family wrote many letters and most are preserved. Also, after his death and fame, friends and acquaintances wrote reminiscences. Naifeh and Smith seem not only to have read them all, they digested the material to produce a truly amazing portrait. I had only read Irving Stone's Lust for Life, and didn't realize what a fiction it is. Good book, but still not really the Vincent of real life. Vincent was a truly difficult, unlikable man, a religious fanatic obsesses with Thomas à Kempis's "The Imitation of Christ" and had art (and younger brother Theo) not saved him, he would likely have ended up starving on the street. What passion and beauty he was able to produce! Regardless of his personal problems, he found a way to share his... more deepest love of beauty forever. His life is a lesson that everyone, no matter how troubled, has something to say, and needs the support to say it.
review 2: Formidable, in detail, size and scope. The Van Gogh revealed in this impeccably researched biography is an alien, an outcast even from his own family, who spent a lifetime seeking love and acceptance. His paintings, now considered the works of a genius, were the result of years of struggle and constant vilification. How hard he worked, both to be an artist and to be loved. From this exhaustive biography, it seemed he only succeeded at one.Overturning former hagiographies and earlier biographies, this work provides a thesis, and evidence, that contradicts the idea that Van Gogh shot himself. It also problematizes or complicates the relationship Vincent had with his brother, Theo. The Van Gogh here - the sower, the mystic, the Promethian man, the holy fool - lives on. less

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