Theo, what am I in the eyes of most people?
Just for once, everything was going right for Vincent van Gogh.
He'd just sold his first painting
and he'd been hailed by the critics as the genius of the future.
He was painting like a demon, a picture a day.
One of them, this one, Wheatfield with Crows, was a revolutionary masterpiece.
It's the painting which begins modern art.
Yet, within a few weeks, the man who had achieved it had killed himself.
Now, why would he want to do that?
All his life, Vincent had this childlike faith that his art revolution
would be seen by everyone.
So, was The Wheatfield a cry of anguished frustration
that he would never realise his vision in painting,
or was it a shout of triumph that finally he'd done it?
And this kind of painting, turbulent, raw, overwhelmingly emotional,
was the new art for the people?
Ask anyone, who's your idea of the tortured artist, the mad genius?
Chances are you'll get one answer, and just one answer,
Vincent van Gogh.
Sliced his ear off, didn't he?
Well, no, actually, he didn't.
What he did do was cut off a fleshy chunk of earlobe.
Oh, I know, I know, that's enough to suggest he is barmy, isn't it?
And when he eventually did shoot himself, there was bound to be a chorus of,
''Well, yes, he would, wouldn't he?''
Soft pink. Soft pink and blood red.
Soft pink and blood red,
soft Louis XV greens and harsh blue-greens.
An infernal furnace.
How would a man like that make art as stunning as this?
What others diagnosed as mental sickness,
Vincent thought was an illumination,
a new vision of what art could be.
A revelation of heaven, here on earth.
He thought of himself as a prophet, then.
But also, as a thinker.
The thoughts poured themselves out in a torrent of words.
Page after page, day after day.
All you have to do to find the real van Gogh,
no fool at all, but a thoughtful, observant man, is to read his letters.
Hundreds of them, mostly written to his younger brother, Theo.
And you'll see that intelligence burning away.
My dear Theo, God, how beautiful Shakespeare is.
His language and his method are like a brush
trembling with excitement and ecstasy.
So meet this other van Gogh, not a creature of blind instinct at all,
but an insatiable bookworm.
I have made more or less a serious study of Victor Hugo
and Dickens, and recently Aeschylus and a few of the great minor masters.
Okay, the scary one who'll buttonhole you in the pub and bang on and on
about George Eliot and Charles Dickens,
and you'll be backing off from the awful pong.
Well, you do know that Fabricius and Bieder counted among the minor masters?
Bieder? Bieder?
So, underneath the scabby face and moth-eaten coat,
Vincent lived the life of the mind.
For a long time, art never came first, what mattered most was the search for salvation.
It was in his blood.
His father, the Reverend Theodorus van Gogh,
was pastor in a village in the south Netherlands.
So even when he was rescued from the Calvinist Dutch gloom by his uncle
and sent to London as an art dealer, he's out to save souls.
It was in the Victorian gaslight that the real Vincent started to emerge.
Amidst the grime and grit of Disraeli's London,
the starchy young Dutchman rediscovered Jesus.
It is an old faith. It's an old faith and it is a good faith.
Our life is a pilgrim's progress, and our life is, uh...
It is an old faith and it is a good faith that our life...
He appointed himself as a missionary to the destitute.
And as he wore out shoe leather tramping past the dispossessed, the drunks and the whores,
Vincent grew to despise the pygmy world of the galleries.
What he wanted to be was a preacher.
It is an old faith and it is a good faith.
Our life is a pilgrim's progress, that we are strangers on the earth.
But, though this be so, we are not alone for our father is with us.
Our father is with us. Is with us.
We are pilgrims, and our life...
We are pilgrims and our life...
So St Vincent the Good abandoned the plush red carpets,
and set off in search of captives starved for light.
The coal pits of southern Belgium.
Dirt poor and, as far as Vincent was concerned, in desperate need of saving.
The young lay preacher took his dog-eared bibles
and his eager retriever look through mucky streets
where women hauled sacks of coke, and did his best.
And our life is a long walk from earth to heaven.
A long walk from earth to heaven.
But it still wasn't enough.
After a trial period,
the missionary society who paid his pittance got rid of him.
Excessive zeal, apparently.
But you didn't get rid of Vincent van Gogh that easily.
He hit on a different way to preach,
he would paint.
This would be Vincent's new calling.
And this is amazing.
He's nearly 30, he's not so much as picked up a paintbrush,
much less had any kind of formal training.
But Vincent's not bothered, this is his road-to-Damascus moment.
In a way, I'm glad I never learned painting.
I know for certain that painting is in the very marrow of my bones.
I want to do drawings that will touch people.
I want to get to the point where... Where people say of my work,
that man, that man feels deeply,
that man feels keenly.
Art would succeed where the Church had failed.
It would bring salvation and comfort.
Its ministry would be to open the eyes of everyone, especially the poor,
to the miraculous force of life.
Exactly the kind of vision from which they were cut off
by the grey relentlessness of the daily grind.
I just wish that there were more
and better opportunities and exhibitions to bring art to the people.
I mean, far from wanting to hide the light under a bushel,
I'd sooner let it be seen.
And if he were to give people a sense that heaven was in simple things,
calloused hand, the petal of a flower,
you'd better be a labourer yourself, Vincent thought,
and you'd better head to the lower depths, and live with them, too.
And you don't get much lower than shacking up with a broken-down prostitute,
habitually drunk, bad case of quinsy, single mother, sickly kids,
another one on the way.
Clasina Hoornik, Sien to Vincent who took her in,
would be his unlikely muse.
Sien's history of misery marked on her body.
The drooping breasts and stringy hair became the food of Vincent's inspiration.
There's no such thing as an old woman, he wrote to Theo.
And in the lovingly described lines of a used body, you can see what he meant.
My dear Theo.
I'm longing to see what an impression Sien makes on you.
She's... There's nothing special about her. She's just an ordinary woman of the people,
who holds something of the sublime for me.
Not surprisingly, this didn't go down brilliantly with the vicar father.
Theo, no prude, didn't much care for it, either,
but it didn't stop him steadfastly supporting his brother's latest career.
No matter how surly, unpredictable or ungrateful Vincent was,
every month, regular as clockwork, the brotherly subsidy rolled in.
In return for keeping him afloat,
Vincent supplied Theo, now himself an art dealer in Paris,
with paintings for sale.
Trouble was, according to Theo, they were unsellable,
dense, clotted, murky things.
My dear Theo, my dear Theo, my dear Theo,
what's so very contrary about you is that,
one sends you something and one hears nothing in reply,
and you do not lift a finger!
But one is not allowed to say, ''I cannot manage on the money.'' No.
And I should like to add that I shan't be asking you
whether you approve or disapprove of anything I do.
But baby brother believed, and stuck by his cantankerous, passionate Vincent.
Not everyone was in it for the long haul.
Sien got tired of Vincent's campaign to turn her into a good Dutch hausfrau,
and disappeared back into the Hague gaslight.
Which leaves Vincent where, exactly?
He's 30 years old but, as he says, his wrinkles make him look more like 40.
For money, he depends entirely on his brother, Theo.
For sex and love, he goes from the unsuitable to the impossible.
And as for his efforts in his belated new profession,
well, they're best generously described as uneven.
So when he lopes back to his parents' house, he's not exactly the apple of their eye.
I sense what Father and Mother think of me instinctively.
I do not say intelligently.
They shrink from taking me into the house,
as they might shrink from taking in a large shaggy dog with wet paws.
''He'll get in everyone's way, and his bark is so loud.
''In short,
''he is a filthy beast.''
And then, it happens.
The Potato Eaters is his first knockout masterpiece.
It's a resume of everything he's felt and thought up to now.
Everything that would make him a revolutionary artist is already here.
The dark, thick colour was chosen not just for pictorial effect,
but you might say, philosophically, to say something.
And that something isn't meant to be charmingly rustic.
I mean, how brown can you get?
This is manure brown, the grey brown, as he explained,
of dusty spuds before they've been rinsed.
Lost in total identification, van Gogh paints like a clod.
The heavy, loaded brush doing its own manual labour.
The picture seems trowelled and dug, rather than painted.
There's total union between painter and subject.
It's all in the hands.
I've tried to bring out the idea that
these people, eating potatoes by the light of their lamp,
have dug the earth with the selfsame hands that they're putting into the dish.
Manual labour, a meal honestly earned.
Anyone who wants to paint peasants looking namby-pamby had best suit himself.
It's almost as if he's having a go at the polite siennas and decorous burnt umbers
of the drawing-room paintings he'd had to sell in the Hague and London.
It's this lot who dine in a state of grace.
Their potato supper, a holy communion of the toiling class.
He knows he's done something chock-full of power, magisterial.
So excitedly he sends it off to Theo,
who moans about how hard it is to sell Vincent's dark pictures,
when everything in Paris is bright.
Theo,
it's become very apparent to me
that you couldn't care less about my work.
What I've had against you this last year is a kind of relapse into
cold respectability,
which to me seems sterile and futile.
But something's niggling at him.
Maybe he does after all have something to learn from the French.
Maybe, if he was there, if he was living with his brother,
together they could shake the art world out of its indifference.
The usual story is the Dutch frog kissed by Impressionism
and turned into the prince of colour painting.
Vincent and his art at last lightened up.
Away with the northern murk,
bring on the tubes of carmine, cobalt and chrome yellow.
It's not all wrong.
Vincent does get colour, becomes addicted to it,
consuming its brilliance, disgorging it onto the canvas.
And, for a while, he does what you're supposed to do as a trainee Impressionist.
Down by the river at Asniéres, trap the light and you've got the point.
So everything is speckled and freckled, dappled and mottled.
Right then, it's Pissarro on Monday.
Look at the colour-coded dots in this restaurant,
and you'll see him doing his pointillist homework.
Seurat on Tuesday.
Oh, Vincent could do it all right,
but there was something altogether too decorative about the Impressionists,
marinading the meat of human existence in the rinse of their luminescence.
Van Gogh's version of nature would always be earthier, clumsier,
smellier, truer and still unsellable.
It must be Theo's fault, thinks Vincent,
and organises a show of pictures in a local cafe,
hobnail boots and cut sunflowers.
Technically, these are still lives, but there's nothing still about them.
The boots are a self-portrait, tramping the long, weary march of the pilgrim
towards a heavenly resting place.
And the sunflowers, hardly the nature morte, the dead nature of their billing,
these things are threateningly mysterious.
The black seed heads bristling with irrepressible life force.
Organisms landed violently from a burning star.
Vincent hardly seems to be joining the Impressionists' club, then.
So it's not surprising Vincent gets a crush on another misfit.
An artist who's hanging around the edge of the Impressionist circle.
A painter who carries with him an air of creative danger.
Paul Gauguin.
It wasn't as if they had much in common, apart from their hard-luck stories.
Gauguin, the dodgy stockbroker, allowed to lurk on the edge of art.
Vincent, the gin-soaked preacher down in the muck.
And how uneasy they made everyone.
If van Gogh stuck out like a sore thumb,
Gauguin poked it in the eye of the Impressionist bigwigs.
And the more Gauguin cursed the dealers, the more he screwed and drank,
the more puppyish Vincent became in the presence of a master.
But when Gauguin left Paris, gone west to Brittany, Vincent didn't follow.
He needed somewhere warmer, more regenerating.
A place where the chilliness of the Paris art scene
would give way to what Vincent, the collector of Japanese prints,
imagined as a monkishly pure way of life.
Zen with olive oil.
And in the spring of 1888, under the sun of Provence,
Vincent can feel the life force stirring.
Like the sunflower, Vincent turns his face into the nourishing light.
Theo,
no matter how incompetent you feel in the face of the overwhelming beauty of nature,
you have to make a start.
Herewith, another landscape.
For wheat has all the hues of old gold, copper, green-gold,
or red-gold, yellow-gold, yellow-bronze, red-green.
Just have a look at the sower.
It's his take on an older painting by Jean-Francois Millet.
Vincent's version echoes Millet's lyrical anthem to noble toil.
But Millet's sower is rooted to the soil,
while van Gogh's floats on a carpet of brilliance,
like Jesus walking on water.
A scene of drudgery is dissolved into the fertility miracle
that's being enacted beneath a high-wattage sun.
Van Gogh described the paintings that really work for him as a jouissance,
the French for orgasm, and it really did mean that.
A great ejaculation of emotional energy, not to mention paint.
''Yes, well, that's what I go to the brothel for, ''
you can hear Gauguin sneering from his garret in Brittany.
But that's precisely why van Gogh denied himself that doubtful pleasure.
Painting and fucking a lot don't go together.
It softens the brain, which is a bloody nuisance.
Or at least, limit the fucking to once a fortnight.
Now, what Vincent really wanted to share with Gauguin
wasn't a night out with the whores, it was a creative nest.
What he'd been longing for was a studio
where partners, linked in passion and devotion to art,
could live and work together.
But he did send Gauguin the pictures of his boots and his cut sunflowers,
the most potent twosome he could think of.
Paul and Vincent, the ultimate double act.
Did Gauguin really buy into Vincent's dream of a little commune in the sun?
Don't think so.
But the ever-supportive Theo had offered to sponsor Gauguin
if he joined Vincent in Arles.
Gauguin was broke, so why wouldn't he listen to a deal
where board, lodging and materials would be paid for?
But then, there was Vincent.
Like everyone else, Gauguin was a bit nervous of his histrionic passions.
Gauguin procrastinated. Should he go?
Vincent waited in a fever of excited preparation,
like a groom waiting for his bride.
The room which will be Gauguin's will have white walls, and...
And will be hung with yellow sunflowers.
And the beds
will have an air of...
Of permanence,
solidity and calm.
I really want to make this an artist's house.
But not affected. On the contrary, nothing affected.
SCHAMA: Vincent was sure their work would somehow undergo a process of creative fusion,
from which a great explosion of artistic energy would be liberated.
Except, with every painting, it became clear that Vincent's vision of the universe as a revelation,
the boundary between water, land and sky dissolved,
rapt lovers gazing at the burning stars,
all this was happening now, without Gauguin.
Ever since he'd discovered colour,
Vincent had been fascinated by opposites that were also complementaries.
Blue and yellow, red and green,
and the drama they played with the senses.
The drama wasn't just aesthetic,
it was because van Gogh is still our pilgrim, moral and emotional.
At the heart of all the greatest pictures from this prolific summer
is the opposition between barren and fruitful worlds,
between comradeship and loneliness.
Pinks, pinks, pinks, soft pinks.
Soft pinks and blood red.
Soft Louis XV greens and harsh blue-greens.
All this in an infernal...
Welcome to the night cafe,
the hangout of the lonely and the desperate.
I've tried to express the idea
that the café is a place where one can destroy oneself,
go mad or commit a crime.
So the colours shout and barge into each other, like drunks looking for a fight.
Vincent, absinthe-sodden, staves off his anxieties about Gauguin's non-appearance
by painting and painting and painting.
Soft pink. Soft pink
and blood red.
Soft Louis XV greens
and harsh blue-greens.
All this in an infernal furnace,
in a pale sulphur...
And all this to express the powers of darkness
in a common tavern.
So what's the opposite of a hellhole cafe?
Home. A warm kitchen hearth, domesticity.
Meet the Roulins, Vincent's happy family.
Monsieur Joseph Roulin, postman, salt of the earth.
Vincent's primary colours and arresting frontal pose
are the signals of straightforward honesty.
Not just a public servant, then, but a pillar of society,
who wears his uniform as though he was an admiral.
And his whiskers proclaim his virility.
So Madam Roulin is bosomy, maternal, comforting.
The handsome young buck, Armand, in his check-me-out yellow jacket,
caught on the cusp between teenage innocence and manly swagger.
The moustache wispy, the hat cocked.
He loves this family, and he wants to be loved back.
Then Gauguin arrived, and the summer of visions was over.
At first, Gauguin found the friendly competition amusing,
and even creatively challenging,
but the result was just to point out the differences between them.
Here's what Vincent does with an excursion to a vineyard at the time of the grape harvest.
A rush of energy through the painting.
Lots of bending and picking under that great sun god,
the brush jiggling in what he called his best spermatic manner.
And here's Paul's take on rural labour, called In the Heat.
A drowsy, heavy moment with two figures,
one of which is a pig.
A half-naked woman,
her arm stained to the elbows with red grape juice,
the shadow of her big breasts outlined,
as though wanting the laziest of massages,
which the painter duly supplies with his brushes.
It wasn't just a matter of technique or subject matter.
Their philosophies of art were diametrically opposed.
For Gauguin, art was just a swim in pure sensation.
''Don't sweat it,'' he once crushingly said. ''It's just a dream.''
But for Vincent van Gogh, there was no joy without sweat.
The ride his art gave you was into the world, not away from it.
After barely a month with his new housemate,
Gauguin is beginning to feel a serious space problem.
Gauguin and I discuss Rembrandt and Delacroix a great deal.
The debate is exceedingly electric.
Sometimes, when we're finished, our minds are as drained as a...
As an electric battery after discharge.
He's irked by Vincent's manic rate of painting.
A picture a day, sometimes even more.
And he's starting to feel something he never dreamt he'd have to worry about.
Envy. Envy?
Of Vincent van Gogh? So he exorcises his jealousy
by doing van Gogh as the painter of sunflowers,
slumped in a chair, body and face distorted, as if already a deranged invalid.
It's me,
but it's me gone mad.
Not mad exactly, but suffering.
Vincent was an epileptic and struggled with deepening bouts of depression,
made worse, no doubt,
by the relentless bad news from Theo that still no one wanted to buy his pictures.
The broody frustration began to surface in scary mood swings.
Gauguin could smell them coming.
My dear Theo,
I think Gauguin's a little disenchanted with me.
Gauguin's very strong and very creative,
and because of that he needs peace and quiet.
Will he find it elsewhere if he doesn't find it here?
Well, I await his decision with absolute equanimity.
Not that much equanimity.
That evening Vincent thrust into Gauguin's hands
a newspaper article about a local knife attack.
''The murderer fled,'' the last line says.
Gauguin didn't need chapter and verse spelling out.
He was the murderer of their great project.
That night he spent in a hotel.
When he got back in the morning,
there were police all over the front of the house and a lot of blood inside.
It didn't take long for the story to get told.
Around midnight, Vincent had shown up at his favourite brothel,
handed one of the girls, Rachel, a small package.
Inside was a large piece of ear. The girl fainted.
Well, we all would, wouldn't we?
By the time Vincent was discharged from hospital, Gauguin had gone,
and van Gogh committed himself voluntarily to a mental asylum nearby.
My dear Theo,
it just won't do for us to think that I'm completely sane.
If I recover, I must start afresh.
But I'm afraid that I will never reach the heights to which
the illness to some extent lead me.
Yours, with a handshake,
Vincent.
Inside the walled hospital, Vincent was looked after by solicitous doctors,
but the accelerating rhythm of the attacks was unpredictable and terrifying.
He'd feel better, venture cautiously out
and, gathering confidence and energy, would paint
to stave off the next attack, which he knew would be inevitable.
His sickness was both the destroyer and the midwife of his masterpieces.
For it was precisely between the spasms of craziness
that Vincent saw the world most intensely.
Was suddenly possessed of his vision that heaven could exist here on earth.
His mission had never been clearer.
These grey, broiling, surging works
aren't the product of his madness, they're exactly the opposite.
They're the documents of Vincent's battle to keep disintegration at bay.
Whether Theo can sell them doesn't matter any more.
They're wild, but they're also deeply sane.
A man in total control of his painterly faculties.
He may have sensed the seismic tremors
that the ground would once again buckle and heave beneath his feet,
but his grip on the brush was never stronger.
Well, here I am, at it again.
I could almost feel I have a new spell of lucidity before me.
It's just that the attacks, when they come,
well, I don't know. But what is one to do?
There's no remedy, except one,
which is to work.
What we're looking at, of course, is only incidentally
a stand of cypresses,
the cart-wheeling stars.
What we're looking at always
is the inside of Vincent's head.
For anyone allergic to the outpourings of the crucified ego,
it's all a bit of an embarrassment.
But for millions more of us,
an emotional connection is made.
Every mark of Vincent's stabbing brush seems like a personal letter to us.
We're moved by its humane openness,
by his unconditional belief in our sympathetic understanding.
In 1889, van Gogh painted his final self-portrait.
Vincent himself described it as a study in calm,
which seems a stretch when we get pulled into the vortex
of all those whirlpools of paint that coil round his head,
ride through the waves of his hair,
as if the pulses of some engulfing migraine
were throbbing mercilessly through his invaded body.
A clinical map of physical and mental distress.
But he's not gone under, has he?
The cast of the face around which the swirling ocean of painted pain crashes
is calm, watchful.
And the colour he's chosen somehow makes the engulfing waves less morbid.
Against it, he flies the flag of red-blooded resolution.
Jaw line contoured by the brisling red hair of the fighter, watchful, pugnacious.
I'm trying to recover.
I am trying.
I'm trying to recover.
For despite the heroic battle, art against craziness,
Vincent knew that sometimes nothing would avail.
For days, my mind has been wandering wildly,
and it must be expected that the attacks
will recur in the future.
It is frightful,
apparently.
I pick up dirt from the floor
and eat it.
Worse, actually.
Desperate for his fix of chrome yellow.
I'm trying to recover,
like someone who was meant to commit suicide,
but then makes for the bank because he finds the water too cold.
He's survived, then.
In fact, he's on the brink of a great power surge of creative fury.
He's fidgeting to get going, to be somewhere else,
to let all that inventive energy rip.
What's happening is a miracle.
He's translating mental upheaval into a revolution on the canvas.
Theo sensed that this was a tremendous moment for his brother,
but he worried that Vincent might implode from the intensity of it.
If there was going to be a revolution, it would have to be one made in a refuge.
Theo had just the right place,
the village of Auvers-sur-Oise, 20 miles north of Paris.
And the right man to keep an eye on his brother, Dr Paul Gachet,
amateur artist, but more to the point, a specialist in melancholy.
The prescription for maximum output with minimum stress seemed to be working.
Vincent appeared to be able to relax with his nearest and dearest.
Dear, Mother.
Last Sunday, Theo, Jo and their little one were here, and they lunched at Dr Gachet's.
And my little namesake made the acquaintance of the animal world
for the first time.
He was very well, as were Theo and Jo.
For me, it's very, very reassuring to have them living so close.
I am absorbed in this immense plain
with wheatfields against the hills,
boundless as the sea.
So while the landscapes are mindscapes,
they're anything but deranged.
They're unflinching, tumultuous, heroic,
and completely new.
And here's the most startling of them all,
Wheatfield with Crows.
Not for what it's supposed to say about van Gogh's frailty,
because I don't think the artist who painted this was frail at all,
but for what it says about the conventions of art.
It shows Vincent in total command,
never fiercer in his contempt for the rules.
In his headlong rush to junk the entire history of landscape painting.
Starting with perspective.
Its whole point had been to create an illusion of deep space,
so that the eye could confidently wander through to a distant horizon.
But here perspective is reversed, it's a road that goes nowhere.
And the two flanking paths just seem to rise up vertically
through the picture, like flapping wings.
And what are those green borders? Grass, hedges, a corner of a tree?
All our signals, our assumptions about how to read visual signs
have been wickedly scrambled.
So what are we looking at?
Suffocation, sure, but elation too.
Those crows might be coming at us,
but equally they might be flying away, demons gone,
as we sink into a total immersion in the power of nature.
And into a massive wall of writhing, brilliant paint
in which the colour itself seems to tremble and pulse and sway.
And it's with this independent life of formed blocks of colour
that Vincent van Gogh creates modern art.
This physical feeling, simultaneously thrilling and terrifying,
of being swallowed alive in paint,
lies at the heart of so much modern art.
And it was what Vincent had been yearning to realise, ever since he picked up a brush
on the dark moors of north Holland.
The pilgrim had gone the distance.
I don't think there's the slightest possibility that accomplishing this revolution
could have been a moment of suicidal despair for Vincent van Gogh.
In his art, he'd never been more visionary, never more brilliant,
but not in his life.
For as spring turned to summer, Vincent really did think trouble lay ahead.
Even as his own painting was going brilliantly,
his tower of strength, Theo, began to look shaky.
The pleasure he'd taken in his family now turned to worry, and even pain.
Perhaps Theo's wife and baby would have to come first.
Dear brother and sister,
I still continue to feel the storm which threatens you, weighing on me too.
You see, I try to be genuinely cheerful,
but my life is also threatened at the very root
and my steps are wavering.
And you do not lift a finger.
When Theo arrived from Paris, he found Vincent mortally wounded,
a single shot to the abdomen.
The two brothers stayed together.
For a while, Theo was optimistic about Vincent's chances of recovery.
But then, a day later, the fever mounted and Vincent slipped from consciousness.
Theo held him as he died on the 29th of July, 1890.
Gone precisely at the moment when his entire life was being vindicated.
Theo believed that as well, that Vincent's time had finally arrived,
but it was too late.
Not just for Vincent, but for Theo,
his own health deteriorated and within a year he was dead, too.
There they are, side-by-side in death,
as they had very much been wherever they were in life.
In his last letter to Theo, Vincent wrote
of how, not managing to have children, his paintings were his progeny.
But he did have a child, of course, Expressionism.
And many, many heirs,
Kokoschka, de Kooning, Howard Hodgkin,Jackson Pollock.
But there's something about van Gogh's legacy
which is much more important than his fathering this or that ism of modern art.
Vincent's passionate belief was that people wouldn't just see his pictures,
but feel the rush of life in them.
That by the force of his brush and the dazzlement of his colour,
they'd experience those fields, those faces, those flowers,
in ways nothing more polite or literal could ever possibly convey.
His art would reclaim what had once belonged to religion,
consolation for our mortality through the relish of the gift of life.
It wasn't the art crowd he was after.
What he wanted was to open the eyes
and the hearts of everyone who saw his paintings.
Well, he got what he wanted.
What am I, in the eyes of most people?
A nonentity? An eccentric?
An unpleasant person?
Somebody who has no position in society and never will. In short, the lowest of the low.
Alright then, well, even if that were all absolutely true,
then one day,
I should like to show by my work
what such a nonentity, such a nobody
has in his heart.
With a handshake,
ever yours, Vincent.