How Van Gogh went from being an abject failure to a hero
By Brian Bethune - Thursday, February 23, 2012 - 0 Comments
In a new book, historian Modris Eksteins writes our admiration for Van Gogh says more about us than him
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Vincent Van Gogh, who sold but a single painting in his time, died penniless in 1890, by his own hand or—in a theory proposed by his latest biographers—by a combination of accident, sheer bad luck and mulish self-denial that seems more emblematic of his emotionally tumultuous life than suicide. A century later, after decades of ever-increasing popular adulation, Van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet sold for $82.5 million, the most any painting has ever fetched in the 20th century. It’s true neither fact says anything about Van Gogh as an artist or as a human being, but both speak volumes about us, according to the acclaimed Canadian cultural historian Modris Eksteins.
“We choose our heroes out of our deepest concerns,” Eksteins says during an interview about his new book, Solar Dance: Genius, Forgery, and the Crisis of Truth in the Modern Age. In it, Eksteins traces Van Gogh’s 20th-century arc from abject failure to “demonic saint and hero,” while ironically contrasting that transformation with the story of Otto Wacker, one of the artist’s most prolific forgers. Van Gogh, a lonely misfit in his own era, struggled against the dominant Victorian values of sublimation, duty and structure. But by the end of the Great War, Eksteins argues, the whole Western world had caught up with the painter in its rejection of the old order, now lying in ruins. Van Gogh was seen, as he is now, as someone who saw through veils of hypocrisy and lies into the essential truth of the human experience, a kind of icon of authenticity: “Van Gogh is ours, and we are Van Gogh,” concludes Eksteins.
Twenty-three years ago, Eksteins wrote the book on that seismic change in Western culture, finding its origins as much in the violent currents—emotional, spiritual and aesthetic—running beneath the surface of pre-war European society as in the actual violence of the war. Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age took its title from Sergei Diaghilev’s ballet The Rite of Spring. Through its defiantly dissonant music, radically twisted dance steps and shocking storyline featuring human sacrifice, Diaghilev’s modernist classic famously provoked a riot at its 1913 Paris premiere.
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Absinthe and logarithms
By Colby Cosh - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 at 6:18 PM - 38 Comments
(Reuters) – Christie’s has put a record price tag on an important Picasso painting from his celebrated Blue Period that will be offered for sale in London in June. Portrait of Angel Fernandez de Soto (The Absinthe Drinker), dated 1903, is expected to fetch 30-40 million pounds ($45-60 million), the highest pre-sale estimate for any work of art offered at auction in Europe.
I don’t know if anyone else does this, but I think about art prices on a logarithmic scale, the way we rate earthquakes and loud noises. Van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet (I), which sold for $138 million in today’s dollars, would be an 8.1. The most expensive single works by Jeff Koons or John Singer Sargent are around 7.4. Mary Cassatt’s about a 6½; Borduas or Kurelek, around 5½; and so on, right down to the creators of embroidery samplers at your local craft fair. Logarithms make things like this a lot more comprehensible; they make the whole Great Chain of Being visible, they permit interpolation and prediction, and they run almost from 1 to 10. To 9, anyway, if you assume that there are objets d’art with a hypothetical market value of nearly a billion dollars, which there surely are. It’s not important how much an artwork or an artist’s oeuvre is worth at auction, of course, except that an ounce of revealed preference is worth a ton of gum-flap.
Picasso has a lot of paintings still changing hands between collectors and is therefore always contending for nominal-dollar auction records. It’s interesting to me to find him still doing so 40 years after his death; somebody paid a magnitude-8 price for a Dora Maar painting a few years ago. How much of Picasso’s standing in the marketplace comes from the plain fact that he became synonymous with “painting” during his life—largely on the basis of bluster and myth and populist touches and, above all, surviving the big wars cockroach-fashion—and that, as a result, even dumb people have heard of him and have a shot at recognizing his work? I am inclined to think the answer is “A lot”. Nor does it hurt that there’s a lingering fragrance (or stench) of Old Left romanticism attached to his name.
I don’t mean to suggest that these features of Picasso are not every bit as “real” as his technical gifts or his innovativeness, but when one considers these paintings as equities, as items that will have a certain resale value in the year 2100, the social resonances that accompany the man’s name are bound to fade in memory. I wonder if he will remain an 8. When some Japanese executive pays that kind of price for a good Van Gogh, he’s paying for Van Gogh’s power—acquired by being spiritually injured in a certain way, at a particular place and time—to endow ordinary objects and scenes with a particular beauty and cosmic significance. Van Gogh might not be your particular cup of cadmium, but somebody will definitely still feel that way about those paintings in the future. It’s a lot harder to be sure about Picasso, at least in his various 20th-century incarnations.
