The New York Times Book Review - Patricia Albers
…a new biography as brief and intense as [van Gogh's] life…Van Gogh gives readers what we would get from a knowing interlocutor fresh off a walk…with a master colleague. Bell probes van Gogh's work, artist to artist…This book is to comprehensive biography as memoir is to autobiography. In fact, Van Gogh is dwarfed by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith's 900-plus-page Van Gogh: The Life (2011). Leaving sleuthing and psychological heavy lifting to them, Bell interprets; the result is captivating.
Publishers Weekly
10/27/2014
In the sixth installment of New Harvest’s Icons series, painter and author Bell (Mirror of the World) brings his insight as a fellow artist to the life and work of Vincent van Gogh in a condensed, accessible primer on the renowned artist. Bell traces Van Gogh’s shiftless youth from apprenticeship at his uncle’s art emporium, a failed attempt at priesthood, and his move to Paris and discovery of pointillism, to his subsequent mental breakdown, the severing of his ear, the creation of The Starry Night while institutionalized, and his suicide. Providing astute commentary on Van Gogh’s work, Bell declares the early Miners in the Snow “earnestly ambitious,” and the more accomplished painting Quinces, Lemons, Pears and Grapes a “single resounding chord of yellow played out on various vegetal instruments.” He also illuminates the artist’s famously prickly personality, the grumbling and begging of money from his long-suffering brother Theo, as well as excerpts from letters exhibiting a deep and poetic sensibility. For a more exhaustive account, as the author notes, there are plenty of sources. This quick but thorough read provides a fulfilling overview of the artist. (Jan.)
Kirkus Reviews
2014-10-15
Painter and art historian Bell (Mirror of the World: A New History of Art, 2010, etc.) brings an artist's sensibility to this distilled, intimate biography of Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890).Drawing largely on the artist's letters to Theo, his younger brother and confidant, the author traces the trajectory of van Gogh's life: failed jobs at his uncle's art galleries in the Hague, London and Paris; failed efforts to become a minister or evangelist; a rebuffed marriage proposal; and squalid affairs with prostitutes. "One sometimes gets the feeling, where am I? what am I doing? where am I going? and one starts to grow dizzy," he wrote to Theo in the midst of his theology studies. Finally, at 27, with Theo's encouragement and financial support, van Gogh turned to art. Although his life story may be familiar, what distinguishes Bell's elegant rendering is an astute perception of his artistic vision and shimmering descriptions of his work. After producing "hard-hacked, heavily hatched, jagged and severe" lines in his 1883 drawings, van Gogh discovered the potential of oil. "The brushwork," Bell writes of the 1885 paintings, "accelerated and turned skittery and rhythmic." After moving to the south of France, van Gogh felt a new "licence to aestheticize….Confronting for the first time the southern waves, he found wild new colors coming at him. He longed, he wrote to Theo, to "express the love of two lovers through a marriage of two complementary colours, their mixture and their contrasts, the mysterious vibration of adjacent tones." For the author, the artist's recurring breakdowns, which so frightened his parents that they wanted to institutionalize him and which ended in bouts of delusion and mania, suggest bipolar illness. His "frantic internal bubbling," after all, seems of a piece with the "inner seething" that infused him with both desperation and power. A graceful, empathetic, deeply probing portrait.
