The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

180 chapter 13his long, sober, boring life: he is the opposite of van Gogh in every wayexcept his sentimentality and his bourgeois values and his lack of esteemamong his high-art contemporaries.In his painting van Gogh was not foolish or mad. There is even doubt,by the way, about the circumstances of the ear-cutting-off. A German arthistorian, Rita Wildegans, claims that Gauguin did the ear-cutting, andthat van Gogh was covering up for his friend by claiming that he himselfdid it. Vincent, as nonreligious people say, was spiritual. He sought faithand hope, but substituted art for religion. Van Gogh was canonized, I havenoted, at the peak of Art as religion, the age of high modernism, Picasso toPollock.By the time of his best painting he was no longer the intense youngChristian seeking after sainthood he had once been. Yet he was still, deLeeuw writes, a “struggling seeker after God”: “Whether his particular concernwas religious or artistic, he invariably cultivated his inner universe andconfidently sought the eternal in the temporal.” 12Explaining in the letter to Bernard in June 1888 mentioned above how hepainted one of his many studies on Millet’s The Sower, he speaks of the technicaldetails (“the rest of the sky is chrome yellow 1 and 2 mixed”), notingthat “I couldn’t care less what the colors are in reality.” Postimpressionismcame to be more and more about the arrangement of colors on a flat surface.He then declares to Theo his search for faith and hope, tying them toa particular aesthetic project: “I am still enchanted by snatches of the past[his faith], have a hankering after the eternal [his hope], of which the sowerand the sheaf of corn are the symbols. But when shall I get around to doingthe starry sky, that picture which is always in my mind?” 13 “I keep hoping,”he wrote to Theo in September, “to express hope by some star.” 14 Hope,hope, hope. Thus his Starry Night (June 1889). The very painting that is supposedto show him as the mad artist turns out to have been not a crazy effusionbut a project long conceived, worked on repeatedly, planned carefullybefore his first illness, and achievable only when well.One of his two last paintings was Wheatfield with Crows, which, “hankeringafter the eternal,” is shadowed by birds of ill omen. Yet, write DeniseWillemstein and the staff of the Van Gogh Museum, “this theory is probablyincorrect as the subject is traditional. . . . Moreover, in his final letter toTheo, dated 25 July, Vincent ordered new paint, suggesting that he still hadmany plans for new paintings.” 15 He shot himself two days later. Vincent was