Van Gogh's Progress: Utopia, Modernity, and Late-Nineteenth-Century Art (review)

Abstract

Surely no other modern artist has received the same degree of public adulation and persistent interest as Vincent van Gogh. His brief but psychologically tumultuous life, his letters, his illnesses, his failed romances, his lack of commercial success, his self-mutilation, and his suicide produce a virtual template for the romanticized and sentimental myths of the misunderstood artist-genius, the artist as secularized Christ figure, that have been a dominant component of popular Western art reception at least since the eighteenth century. Van Gogh has been the subject of best-selling novels and hit songs, films on his life are major box office successes, books and posters reproducing his art proliferate. At the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, as at exhibitions elsewhere, long lines of visitors jostle daily to pay their entrance fees and to view the glass-enclosed icons and relics representative of their adulation. Indeed, when considered in association with the production and sales of catalogues and other souvenir items, but even more with what the museum and exhibition tourists spend at hotels, restaurants, and other related businesses, the exhibitions of Vincent van Gogh's art become a significant contributor to the commercial life of the cities where they take place. In van Gogh, the failed artist resurrected for posterity, it would seem art and commerce have melded into an inseparable unity.