Up close with Van Gogh

VAN GOGH: A POWER SEETHING
Author: Julian Bell
Publisher: New Harvest/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Pages: 163
Price: $20

As a fledgling artist, Vincent van Gogh hired a carpenter to build a perspective frame: a wire-grid window. He used it to draw the Dutch countryside, his eyes darting between his pencil and the views through the frame. A few years later, van Gogh suffered a spate of psychiatric crises that sent him to an asylum in Saint Remy, France. There his bedroom's barred window doubled as a new perspective frame, albeit one with only verticals, through which he sketched the wheat field below.

This "wrenched him out of orthodox perspective," Julian Bell writes in Van Gogh: A Power Seething, a new biography as brief and intense as his subject's life. A painter as well as a writer, Bell takes full measure of van Gogh's use of this imposed device. His skewed panorama "made plain his own tangential, left-sided relation" to the land, "even while thrusting the stuff of the crop dynamically forward." It was a breakthrough. In what could easily be the book's epigraph, Bell writes: "The painter may be in hell, but painting is still heaven."

The author gets up close not only to the artist but also to the social animal. A 30-year-old lout with no money, no job and no plan, van Gogh retreats to his parents' home. There he is perceived, he tells his brother Theo, as a "large, shaggy dog . . . with wet paws" who scares his own father. The shouting begins. A few years later, van Gogh severs part of his own left ear. But Bell refuses to view van Gogh as a madman or martyr, quickly asserting that he would rather focus on the "astonishing paintings and letters" than on the "lump of bloody gristle to which a social misfit is no longer attached."

Van Gogh gives readers what we would get from a knowing interlocutor fresh off a walk - or rather six walks (there are six chapters) - with a master colleague. Bell probes van Gogh's work, artist to artist. What did van Gogh learn from Rembrandt and Hals? What painting options lay before him as he arrived in Paris? Why did he take up self-portraiture? What did painting mean to him at various times of his life? Unlike most artists' biographers, Bell rarely gives titles and dates. Nothing feels fixed in art history.

The author frequently quotes from van Gogh's correspondence, mostly the more than 600 letters to Theo. The book flags only when the two are living together in Paris and fewer letters exist. Van Gogh writes beautifully about his own life and art, but his words don't always match what he painted or what he did. Bell works the gaps, poring over a drawing, scanning the artistic horizon, backtracking to make a connection, delivering an irreverent aside.

This book is to comprehensive biography as memoir is to autobiography. In fact, Van Gogh is dwarfed by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith's 900-plus-page Van Gogh: The Life (2011). Leaving sleuthing and psychological heavy lifting to them, Bell interprets; the result is captivating.

Peering into van Gogh's art, he perceives a "frantic internal bubbling, driven by a heat from below." It boiled over into what people call madness. Yet painting, that joy, tapped into this vortex, and made it, in Bell's judgment, the deep source of a rushing and reeling and mode-jumping art that binds what ostensibly does not belong together. Witness the hyperconnectivity of the transcendent Starry Night. We all end our lives with a deficit, van Gogh once told Theo, "yet, yet, one feels a power seething inside one, one has a task to do and it must be done."

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