ART CHRON I CLE
VAN GOGH AND MAURER
As has been said often enough, the story of Van Gogh's life
is partly responsible for the vogue of his art among so many people who
do not otherwise feel much for modern art. He has become established
as the very type of artist as tragic hero. But a certain misconception
has resulted from this.
The popular and Balzacian notion of the artist as hero has him
so because a martyr to his art. This Van Gogh was not. True, his paint–
ing was too unconventional to win recognition from more than a few
people during his own lifetime and he would have been lonely in his
art even had he been much less eccentric personally. But it was his in–
sanity that martyred him, not his art-which was, if anything, the final
means by which he tried to save himself. And in so far as he was a
great painter, Van Gogh was not insane; and in so far as he was, he
damaged his art. This is, importantly, the pity of that art, to complement
the greater pity of his life.
It has been said by competent critics that Van Gogh was a divinely
gifted
amateur.
The evidence both to confirm and refute this was pro–
vided by the recent large exhibition of his work at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York, which contained many pictures not seen
in this country before, principally from the collection of the artist's
nephew, Vincent W. Van Gogh, and the Kroller-Miiller State Museum
in Otterlo, Holland. One was amazed to realize that, except for the
earliest painting-"A Fisherman on the Beach" of 1882-and a few
drawings from 1880-81, the one hundred and fifty-odd works on view
covered a span of only six years. From the first, in such canvases as
"The Loom" of 1884 and "The Potato-Eaters" of 1885, we detect an
extraordinary talent. But what shows that it belongs to more than a
"divinely gifted amateur?" That is, is there craft competence, did Van
Gogh have a professional command of his art? Or was it his derange–
ment that made him the painter he was? The answer is by no means
clear-cut. The distorted but expressive drawing of "The Potato-Eaters"
and its soggy color are the result in part, I feel sure, of the pathological
pressure of feeling as well as of the resistance of a medium in which
