Book of the week: Van Gogh: The Life by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith

(Random House, $40)

Forget what you know about Vincent van Gogh, said Martin Gayford in Bloomberg​.com. Authors Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith have rewritten the book on the Dutch painter, complete with a “radical theory” about how he died. Conventional accounts have the painter walking into a wheat field outside Auvers, France, in July 1890, leaning his easel against a haystack, and shooting himself with a revolver. Instead, say the authors, he more likely was shot accidentally by a local teenager named René Secrétan. “Any detective-story reader would wonder about a suicide without a weapon,” after all, and no gun was recovered after Van Gogh staggered back to town to die. Secrétan, who owned a faulty pistol, had a history of bullying Van Gogh. If a mishap occurred, might not the despondent artist have hidden the truth to protect the young fool from punishment?

Talk about speculation: The authors have no hard evidence to tie the boy to the crime, said Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times. Fortunately, their hypo­thesis has been tucked discreetly in an appendix so as not to distract from an otherwise “magisterial” account of Van Gogh’s life and art. Gathering many insights from a new edition of the painter’s letters, Naifeh and Smith render a Van Gogh who’s “far from the madman of myth.” True, he had an unstable emotional life, the result, say the authors, of nonconvulsive epilepsy. Yet despite deep unhappiness, he possessed an “iron-willed determination to learn and grow as an artist.” And learn he did: He fused lessons he’d drawn from the impressionists, the symbolists, and Japanese prints to create a uniquely expressive style that managed to “remake the world” as a mirror of his turbulent heart.

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This “thoroughly engaging” biography is the best yet at capturing both Van Gogh’s “stormy personality and commitment to painting,” said Jonathan Lopez in The Wall Street Journal. If the book has a fault, it’s that the authors too often “consider Van Gogh’s paintings merely as evidence of his disturbed mental state.” Yet such simplistic readings can be forgiven in light of the work’s substantial achievements. Well-known features of Van Gogh’s life, from his loss of an ear to his deeply dependent relationship with his brother Theo, are retold here with “boundless ingenuity.” Count on Van Gogh: The Life to “introduce a whole new generation to one of art history’s most remarkable creative spirits.”