The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

van gogh and the transcendent profane 181not the sort of nonbourgeois, non-Dutch brother to waste long-sufferingTheo’s money on a gesture.Johan de Meester wrote a newspaper article about the painting sixmonths after Vincent’s death. It emphasized, as he put it in a letter toAndries Bonger, Vincent’s brother-in-law, “the side that interested me mostas a pessimistic psychologist.” Bonger wrote back politely but firmly, “I havenot considered Vincent ‘a sick man.’” He rejected de Meester’s comparisonof Vincent with Claude, the painter and suicide in Zola’s novel L’oeuvre(1886).Zola was advancing the theories of the doctor and criminologist CesareLombroso that men of genius were mentally ill—for example, epileptic. 16Medicine in its initial decades of real science seemed to wish to redefine virtuallyeveryone as sick. It is the theme of Freudianism. In April 1887,beforeVincent had fallen ill, Theo himself had written of the Zola novel, “BeforeI read it, I also thought according to the criticism that Vincent had much incommon with the hero. But that is not so. That painter was looking for theunattainable, while Vincent loves the things that exist far too much to fall forthat.” 17 A later Dutch painter, Jan Sluyters, wrote about it this way in 1953:“His paintings have nothing strange, mysterious, or abstract about them. Theyare the most natural impressions of a perfectly healthy temperament. ...People—how well I know it—have often written about mental disorders,etc., etc., but of these so-called nervous disorders I have discovered no tracein his entire oeuvre....He shows ...the usual things of daily life . . . fanatically,yes!—but naturally.” 18In another letter to his brother in the year of miracles, 1888—again beforethe attacks—van Gogh confessed to “a terrible need—shall I say the word—of religion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars.” 19 His art became Art,a simulacrum of religion like others put forward as the sea of faith receded.The simulacra since Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn have been more or less insequence, I have noted, beauty, literature, history, the nation, spiritualism,science, progress, evolution, the future, the race, the revolution, struggle, thesuburban family, technology, peace, Wall Street, and the environment. VanGogh’s was the movement of a faithful spirit aiming at great things, ashumans keep faithfully hoping.“I can well do without the good Lord in my life and also in my painting,”van Gogh wrote a few weeks before the paint-the-stars letter, “but, sufferingas I am, I cannot do without something greater than myself, something