Speaking for both authors, Smith said the search for a new subject for an extensive biographical study focused on 3 questions:
1) Is the artist significant enough?
2) Is his or her life interesting enough?
3) Has such a book been done before?
Smith said both he and his writing partner considered Vincent Van Gogh. And when they found to their suprise that scholars agreed that there was no definitive biography of the troubled Dutch genius, it was "like a little red meat," Smith said.
And so the pair plunged into the massive project. And the operative word here is massive. Ten years of research and writing. More than 100,000 pages of digitized notes. A book of 976 pages. A website containing 28,000 foot notes.
Tonight, Naifeh and Smith appeared at Politics and Prose to discuss their book Vincent Van Gogh: A Life and the arduous process involved in creating it.
First they divided up the research. While Smith began internalizing the 800 letters that Van Gogh wrote, Naifeh undertook the daunting task of trying to understand Van Gogh's world, his influences, and especially his readings.
"Vincent was a prodigious reader. He would have loved this book store," Naifeh said, adding that Van Gogh had read all the collected works of numerous authors including Shakespeare, Dickens, Balzac, and Zola. And he read in 4 languages - Dutch, English, French, and German.
But while the readings did give Van Gogh allusions for his work, it also pointed out the depth of his alienation. "He was an outcast to his family. He couldn't keep friends. He would go months without any human contact. He was so lonely that reading filled up his day," Naifeh said.
And alienation and loneliness were not Van Gogh's only problems. He suffered violent seizures from front lobe epilepsy and would periodically find himself strapped to an instutional bed with no memory of how he got there. He was extremely argumentive, so much so that he would wear a person down with his arguments and, once the person had capitulated, would begin the argument anew, this time from the point of view he had initially oppposed. He was an alcoholic. He cut off his ear. His death, at age 37, was considered a suicide. (However, new evidence, much of it explored in depth in their book, have led Naifeh and Smith to conclude that Van Gogh was actually the victim of an accidental shooting by a young drunken antagonist).
But of all the facts of Van Gogh's troubled existence the most astounding is this - in his life he sold only 1 painting. In short, the painter today we hold up as an example of artistic genius was an abject failure in his lifetime, abhored by his family, the artistic community, and his entire society. People actually found his work, with its brilliant use of color, scary.
But as the world shifted from the 19th to the 20th Century, Van Gogh became recognized as the true innovator and art-world-changing genius he is considered today - a tragic man truly way ahead of his times.
"Finally, the whole world came to Vincent's doorstep," Smith said. "We wrote a biography of a man, but we were really writing a biography of an imagination."
Tales, Tidbits, and Traveling Tips:
Obviously, inherent language barriers inhibited the research. After all, Van Gogh was Dutch and Naifeh and Smith were not versed in that language. "At first, we thought it might be like if 2 Croations who spoke no English showed up the Library of Congress and said they wanted to write the definitive biography of Abraham Lincoln," Naifeh said. However, those fears were unfounded and the Dutch turned out to be tremendously helpful and supportive of the project. But despite the striving for authenticity, both authors said they would, at least in American book talks, retain the English "Van Go" pronounciation of Van Gogh's name. In Dutch, the author's name sounds more like Van Hwaarwkkk." "People there say hearing his last name is like hearing a lot of spitting and coughing," Naifeh explained.
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