The Stranger

In 1876, when Vincent van Gogh was in the grip of a religious mania (feverish obsessions were a constant in his life), he gave his first sermon as an itinerant preacher. He quoted Psalms: “I am a stranger in this world.” That was another of van Gogh’s constants–miserable estrangement. Those two conditions are motifs in any telling of his story, but they have never been laid out as cogently and thoroughly as in Van Gogh: The Life. Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, whose 1989 biography of Jackson Pollock won the Pulitzer Prize, have written this generation’s definitive portrait of the great Dutch post-Impressionist.

Naifeh and Smith are very good on van Gogh’s decades-long struggles to find a new freedom of color and brushwork and on his fraught dealings with his saintly brother Theo. They also bring new insight to the question of what caused his periodic mental breakdowns. (Answer: frontal-lobe epilepsy.) Their most important achievement is to produce a reckoning with van Gogh’s occasional “madness” that doesn’t lose sight of the lucidity and intelligence–the profound sanity–of his art.

For all that, the most talked-about part of their book will be the final pages. Everybody knows two things about van Gogh. One is that in December 1888, after a fierce argument with Paul Gauguin, he sliced off part of his ear. The second is that 19 months later, recuperating in the French village of Auvers-sur-Oise, he walked into a wheat field with his painting kit and shot himself in the stomach. Two days later, he died in his room at a nearby inn.

Naifeh and Smith don’t buy the suicide story. They believe van Gogh was shot, perhaps inadvertently, by a 16-year-old student from Paris named Ren Secrtan. He and his brother Gaston spent summers in Auvers. Gaston, who loved art, found a companion in van Gogh. Ren and his contemptuous buddies nicknamed him Toto, French slang for crazy.

One thing that raised the authors’ doubts about van Gogh’s death was an interview that Ren gave in 1956 to share memories of the artist. In it he mentioned a small pistol he carried that summer–one that tended to go off accidentally. In the 1960s, two other old residents of Auvers would claim that van Gogh did not shoot himself in the wheat field but in a small farmyard. One even reported that her grandfather saw van Gogh enter the farmyard; later, she claimed, he heard a shot.

Naifeh and Smith suspect that the Secrtan brothers came upon van Gogh that day and accompanied him to the farm. If so, did Ren start taunting him in his usual way? Did van Gogh react in anger? Did Ren pull out his faulty pistol, either as a threat or a joke? And once back at the inn, did van Gogh claim he had shot himself to cover for his friend’s brother?

As the authors admit, what they offer is a “hypothetical reconstruction,” but it’s one that helps explain many puzzles surrounding van Gogh’s death. Why did his doctor believe that the lethal bullet was fired from a distance? Why was his painting kit never found in the wheat field? And what to make of van Gogh’s odd words to the police, “Don’t accuse anyone else”?

For more than a century, we haven’t. Maybe it’s time we did. But even if it’s impossible to establish the facts of van Gogh’s death, we have this comprehensive book to give us the full, ragged glory of his life.