When I was young and besotted with him, to be Vincent Van Gogh–gifted, misunderstood, destitute and dead at 37–was, I thought, an appropriately romantic state of being for anyone who aspired to be an artist. Vincent, of course, wasn’t very good at any state of being–which may explain why he found 37 years to be quite enough–but what he was very good at, other than making hypnotically beautiful paintings, was writing.
No visual artist before or since has left a body of written evidence more expressive than Van Gogh’s: hundreds upon hundreds of letters, mostly to his beloved younger brother, Theo, written over nearly two decades–currently on view at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Lucid, brutally frank, unimaginably alive, and immensely sorrowful, they comprise an essential self-portrait of one man’s heart and mind–every bit as unforgettable as the portraits he rendered immortal with paint.
