The Woman Who Made Vincent van Gogh - The New York Times

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation).

In 1885, a 22-year-old Dutch woman named Johanna Bonger met Theo van Gogh, the younger brother of the artist, who was then making a name for himself as an art dealer in Paris.

History knows Theo as the steadier of the van Gogh brothers, the archetypal emotional anchor, who selflessly managed Vincent’s erratic path through life, but he had his share of impetuosity.

On their marriage night, which she described as “blissful,” her husband thrilled her by whispering into her ear, “Wouldn’t you like to have a baby, my baby?” She was powerfully in love: with Theo, with Paris, with life.

Their apartment was crammed with Vincent’s paintings, and new crates arrived all the time.

Vincent, who spent much of his brief career in motion, in France, Belgium, England, the Netherlands, was churning out canvases at a fanatical pace, sometimes one a day — olive trees, wheat fields, peasants under a Provençal sun, yellow skies, peach blossoms, gnarled trunks, clods of soil like the tops of waves, poplar trees like tongues of flame — and shipping them to Theo in hopes he would find a market for them.

Theo had little success attracting buyers, but Vincent’s works, three-dimensionally thick with their violent daubs of oil paint, became the source material for Jo’s education in modern art.

Just before Christmas in 1888, while Theo and Jo were announcing their engagement, Vincent was in Arles cutting off his ear following a series of rows with his housemate Paul Gauguin.

Theo had arranged for Vincent to stay in the village of Auvers-sur-Oise to the north of Paris, in the care of Dr.

He had supported his brother financially and emotionally through his brief, 10-year career, an effort to produce, as Vincent once wrote him, “something serious, something fresh — something with soul in it,” art that would reveal nothing less than “what there is in the heart of ...

a nobody.” Less than three months after Vincent’s death, Theo suffered a complete physical collapse, the latter stages of syphilis he had contracted from earlier visits to brothels.

Twenty-one months after her marriage, Jo was alone, stunned at the fecund dose of life she had just experienced, and at what was left to her from that life: approximately 400 paintings and several hundred drawings by her brother-in-law.

The brothers’ dying so young, Vincent at 37 and Theo at 33, and without the artist having achieved renown — Theo had managed to sell only a few of his paintings — would seem to have ensured that Vincent van Gogh’s work would subsist eternally in a netherworld of obscurity.

Instead, his name, art and story merged to form the basis of an industry that stormed the globe, arguably surpassing the fame of any other artist in history.

Long before Covid-19, Hans Luijten was in the habit of likening Vincent van Gogh to a virus.

“If that virus comes into your life, it never goes away,” he said in his bright, modern Amsterdam apartment when we first spoke in April 2020, and added with a note of warning in his voice: “There’s no vaccine for it.” Luijten is 60, slim, with wire-rimmed glasses, floating tufts of gray hair and a strong penchant for American roots music: gospel, Dolly Parton, Justin Townes Earle.

After getting his doctorate, he heard that the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam wanted to develop a new critical edition of the 902 letters in the Vincent van Gogh correspondence, including those that he and Theo exchanged.

He can speak fluently about the paintings, but it’s in Vincent’s letters that he found another layer of insight.

The end result of this exhaustive research project, which went on far longer than Vincent’s career did, is “Vincent van Gogh: The Letters.” It runs to six volumes and more than 2,000 pages and was published in 2009.

“I think Hans realized that, while we were at last delivering Vincent’s letters, that project was only just a start, because Vincent wasn’t even known at the end of his life.”.

In 2003, the Dutch writer Bas Heijne found himself in the Van Gogh Museum’s library and stumbled across some letters, which prompted him to write a play about Jo.

A young woman of that era could look forward to only very narrow options in life, yet here she wrote, “I would think it dreadful to have to say at the end of my life, ‘I’ve actually lived for nothing, I have achieved nothing great or noble.’” “That, to me, was actually very exciting,” Luijten says.

Before leaving Paris, she corresponded with the artist Émile Bernard, one of the few painters with whom Vincent had had a relationship that was both close and free of discord, to see if he might be able to arrange an exhibition in Paris of her late brother-in-law’s paintings.

While Vincent had not generated enough of a following to warrant a one-man show, he had had paintings exhibited in a few group shows just before his death.

She set it aside the moment she started her life with Theo; her last entry, from almost exactly three years before, began, “On Thursday morning I go to Paris!” During the whole mad period that followed, she was too busy to keep a journal, too swept up in another life.

“As well as the child,” she wrote, “he has left me another task — Vincent’s work — getting it seen and appreciated as much as possible.”.

In addition to Vincent’s paintings, she had inherited the enormous trove of letters that the brothers had exchanged.

Nearly all, it turned out, were from Vincent — her husband had carefully kept Vincent’s letters, but Vincent hadn’t been so fastidious with the ones his brother had sent him.

Details of the artist’s daily life and tribulations — his insomnia, his poverty, his self-doubt — were mixed with accounts of paintings he was working on, techniques he experimented with, what he was reading, descriptions of paintings by other artists he drew inspiration from.

By the end of her first year on her own — living with Vincent’s paintings and his words, reading deeply, immersing herself from time to time in these gatherings — Jo had experienced a kind of epiphany: Van Gogh’s letters were part and parcel of the art.

They were keys to the paintings.

The letters brought the art and the tragic, intensely lived life together into a single package.

The letters also pointed to the audience Vincent had intended.

“No result of my work would be more agreeable to me,” he wrote to Theo, quoting another artist, “than that ordinary working men should hang such prints in their room or workplace.” Vincent’s letters and paintings seemed to reinforce Jo’s own longstanding convictions about social justice.

She was now ready to act as agent for Vincent van Gogh.

At first, though, Veth dismissed Vincent’s work outright and belittled Jo’s efforts.

He himself later admitted that he was initially “repelled by the raw violence of some van Goghs,” and found these paintings “nearly vulgar.” His reaction, despite his commitment to the new, gives a sense of the shock that Vincent’s canvases engendered at first sight.

Another early critic found Vincent’s landscapes “without depth, without atmosphere, without light, the unmixed colors set beside each other without mutually harmonizing,” and complained that the artist was painting out of a desire to be “modern, bizarre, childlike.”.

She pressed an envelope full of Vincent’s letters on Veth, encouraging him to use them, as she had, as a means to illuminate the paintings.

“I read the letters — not only with my head — I was deep into them with my whole soul,” she wrote to Veth.

“I read them and reread them until the whole figure of Vincent was clear before me.” She told him that she wished she could “make you feel the influence that Vincent has had on my life.

He wrote one of the first appreciations of the artist, saying that he now saw “the astonishing clairvoyance of great humility” and characterized Vincent as an artist who “seeks the raw root of things.” In particular, Jo’s effort to bring her brother-in-law’s life to bear on his art seems to have worked with Veth.

Something similar happened when Jo approached an influential artist named Richard Roland-Horst to ask him to help promote Vincent.

van Gogh is a charming woman, but it irritates me when someone fanatically raves about something they don’t understand.” But he came around, too, and assisted Jo with one of the first solo exhibitions of Vincent’s art, in Amsterdam in December 1892.

Each man found it unprofessional to look at the paintings with the artist’s life story in mind.

When Jo asked Roland-Horst to make a cover illustration for the catalog of Vincent’s first exhibit in Amsterdam, he crafted a lithograph of a wilting sunflower against a black background, with the word “Vincent” beneath and a halo above the sunflower: an aesthetic canonization.

Time and again, critics at first resisted the idea of looking at Vincent’s life and work as one, then gave in to it.

When they looked at the paintings, they saw not just the art but Vincent, toiling and suffering, cutting off his ear, clawing at the act of creation.

Vincent’s intensely personal and emotion-filled approach had been ahead of its time, but time was catching up; in Antwerp, a group of young artists who saw him as a trailblazer asked to borrow several van Goghs to exhibit alongside their own work.

“She did that all over Europe, in more than 100 shows.” A key to her success, says Martin Bailey, an author of several books on the artist, including “Starry Night: Van Gogh at the Asylum,” was in “selling the works in a controlled way, gradually introducing van Gogh to the public.” For an exhibit in Paris in 1908, for instance, she sent 100 works but stipulated that a quarter of them were not for sale.

Her son, Vincent, now 15, wrote out the invitations.

Fourteen years after she was handed her task and had the epiphany to sell the art and artist as a package, everyone in the art world seemed to know Vincent personally, to know his tragic lifelong struggle to find and convey beauty and meaning.

The work of Vincent’s later period, when he was in an asylum in the South of France and after, which today is probably the most beloved part of his oeuvre, made some people uncomfortable.

As one critic wrote, in response to the Amsterdam show, Vincent lacked “the distinctive calm that is inherent in the works of the very Great.

The discomfort over its distortions began with Theo, after Vincent sent the painting to him and Jo from Saint-Rémy.

Throughout her life she mostly held onto what she believed to be Vincent’s best work.

That kind of criticism, however, only seemed to bring more attention to the painting, and ultimately to give further validity to the idea of art as a window into the mind and life of the artist.

It may also have confirmed for Jo her reappraisal of Vincent’s more stylized work.

It eventually ended up at the Museum of Modern Art, becoming the first van Gogh in the collection of a New York museum.

When Emilie Gordenker, a Dutch-American art historian, took over as director of the Van Gogh Museum at the beginning of 2020, the staff greeted her with a copy of Hans Luijten’s biography of Jo van Gogh-Bonger.

Gordenker put me in contact with Jo’s great-grandson Vincent Willem van Gogh.

After Jo’s death, the Engineer (as Jo’s son is referred to in the family, to distinguish him from the other Vincents) made it the temporary home of the collection: the 220 original Van Gogh paintings, as well as hundreds of drawings, that Jo, even after a career of selling Vincent’s works, had kept, and that she left to him.

I’d locate something and say, ‘This, Grandpa?’” The former lawyer, who is now on the board of the Van Gogh Museum, gave a chuckle at the memory: “You could never do that now.”.

All the art that Jo had kept was transferred to the Vincent van Gogh Foundation.

The government built the Van Gogh Museum to house the work and assumed the responsibility of making it public.

Thus the museum itself is another product of Jo van Gogh-Bonger’s efforts to realize Vincent’s ambition of democratizing his art.

She spent nearly three years in the United States, living for a time on the Upper West Side and then in Queens, networking, explaining the artist’s vision and, in her spare time, translating Vincent’s letters into English?

Jo, meanwhile, continued to believe that the letters to Theo — in which Vincent came through as a romantic figure, a tragic figure — would open up his soul to America and beyond.

It contained an introduction by Jo, in which she furthered the myth of the suffering artist and highlighted her husband’s role as well: “It was always Theo alone who understood him and supported him.” Seven years later, Irving Stone published his best-selling novel “Lust for Life,” based heavily on the letters, about the relationship between the van Gogh brothers

Late in her life, while she was translating the letters into English, she arranged to have Theo’s remains disinterred from the Dutch cemetery where he had been laid to rest and reburied in Auvers-sur-Oise, next to Vincent

Jo’s 21 months with Theo were the most intense of her life

Moving today through the museum that houses all the paintings Jo couldn’t bear to part with, another notion surfaces: that, in devoting herself utterly to Vincent van Gogh, in selling him to the world, she was keeping alive that moment of her youth, and allowing the rest of us to feel it

Russell Shorto is a contributing writer and the author, most recently, of “Smalltime: A Story of My Family and the Mob.” He last wrote about the obsessive aristocrat Jan Six, who found two unknown Rembrandt paintings