Van Gogh And Gauguin

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 10 SEPT 2001

The oft-trod personal and artistic interactions of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin are given fresh dirt by journalist Collins, a Parsons School of Design professor, whose goal is to "introduce nuance and complexity into polarized conception" of the artists as diametrical opposites taken by many previous writers. Debunking the notion of van Gogh as a primitive peasant, Collins points out that he read literature voraciously in three languages. Finding some truth in the myths of van Gogh and Gauguin as respectively "the innocent versus the rogue, the masochist versus the willful manipulator," the book's six brief chapters include examples of Vincent being unsympathetic (as in anti-Semitic letters) and Gauguin being noble, writing about his deranged friend, "I can't hold a grudge against an excellent heart that is ill, that is suffering, and that needs me." Admitting when we cannot know what was going on between the two men, such as when Vincent would approach the bed of the sleeping Gauguin, only to stand there silently until his friend awoke and shooed him away, Collins only briefly dips into psychoanalysis of van Gogh paintings like Gauguin's Chair: "By endowing the feminine chair with a phallus, Vincent turned it into a phallic mother." Collins's close, concise study succeeds, largely because of a restrained, commonsense approach whose general rationality contrasts strongly with the hysterical adulation that the two artists, especially van Gogh, still inspire in their fans.