When I published an earlier entry about Van Gogh's online letter repository, Dolores López lent me a book, because as she says, "there's always a book". The publication in question is Van Gogh and his letters (2007), by Leo Jansen. The book is a shorter version of the six hardback volumes compiling Van Gogh's entire existing correspondence (over 900 letters), with over 4,300 illustrations and sketches.
Even though it is really short (79 pages without appendixes), it manages to convey the spirit of Van Gogh the man, the artist in the making, through the written exchanges with his brother Theo, his sister Willemien, and other artists, such as Emile Bernard, Charles Angrand, Eugène Boch, Paul Gauguin, Paul Signac or Anthon van Rappard. In them, we see him sharing his thoughts and troubles, explaining his work, discussing business and family matters, quarreling and asking for money. but "his letters were never intended to report events, certainly not in any detail. they were prompted primarily by the self-evident need for human contact and for exchanging ideas and feelings with a kindred spirit" (p.45).
If you like Van Gogh, you will definitely enjoy the book and the letters themselves, since they are a good complement to his artistic career. But even if you don't, you can still enjoy reading them, since, as Jansen claims, Van Gogh was "a born writer [using] the evocative, direct language of a strong personality". His extremely personal correspondence rises above the individual to achieve the universality of great literature.
As an example, here's an extract from his letter to Wil (Willemien, his sister, 9 years his junior), which is more intimate in tone and where he discusses writing as a natural talent. Van Gogh advised his sister to seek refuge in everyday life and to let it be a source of inspiration when writing: "And above all I find it a very worrying matter that you believe you have to study in order to write. No, my dear little sister, learn to dance or fall in love with one or more notary's clerks, officers, in short, whoever is within your reach; rather, much rather commit any number of follies than study in Holland, it serves absolutely no purpose other than to make someone dull, and so I won't hear of it" (p.39).
No comments:
Post a Comment