By Debora Silverman
Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
November 2000; $60.00US/$99.00CAN; 0-374-28243-9
During the Fall of 1888, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin
lived and worked together in the town of Arles, in Provence. Until now the Arles
period has been interpreted in the light of the temperamental differences
between the two painters, culminating in the famous incident in which van Gogh
cut off part of his earlobe to spite Gauguin. In Van Gogh and Gauguin, Debora
Silverman reinterprets their vexed collaboration: concentrating on their very
different religious backgrounds, she traces the quest of each painter to
discover a modern form of sacred art to fill the void left by the traditional
Christian system that he rejected but could never fully escape, as a man or as
an artist. Both artists emerge in startling new ways, as the paintings they
produced -- before, during, and after Arles -- are given close readings and new
meanings.
At the heart of this beautifully illustrated book -- an 
art story even more than
a personal story - are two contending ways of using paint and canvas for
spiritual ends, of putting God in pigment. Silverman uncovers the ethos of the
sanctity of labor in the van Gogh family's Dutch Reformed Church, and discovers
van Gogh as a weaver-painter and builder of craft tools, seeking to express
divinity in the labor forms of paint as woven cloth, plowed earth, and crumbled
brick. Gauguin, on the other hand, was educated in a little-known Catholic
institution that emphasized release from a corrupt earth and corrupt bodies;
Silverman presents him as a penitent sensualist, who turns to painting as a new
site to pose the fundamental question of the Catholic catechism -- "Why are
we here on earth?" -- and who oscillates between visionary ascent and
carnal temptation.
Throughout Van Gogh and Gauguin, Silverman unfolds the
cultural meaning of visual form. Analyzing specific pictures, she shows how van Gogh's labor theology pressed him
to emphasize the materiality of painting and to embed the sacred in the stuff of matter and the faces of ordinary people.
Gauguin's quest for the sacred, by contrast, led him to develop techniques that would dematerialize the physical surface of
the canvas as much as possible, emulating the matte permeation of the fresco, for example, or devising unusual forms
to represent what he considered the misery of the age and
one of its key sources: sexual suffering.
Debora Silverman's book enables the reader to see van
Gogh's and Gauguin's art -- from the familiar masterpieces of Arles, Nuenen, and Tahiti to lesser-known drawings and
objects -- in constantly new and surprising ways and to
appreciate the special character of their nineteenth-century
cultures and contexts. This book, the first of its kind, opens up
an unmined terrain of central importance: the relationship
between religion and modernism.
Debora Silverman holds the University of California President's Chair in
Modern European History, Art, and Culture at UCLA. She is the author of Selling
Culture and Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France.
Reviews:
"A highly original and challenging account of
the tortuous and revealing relationship between two seminal figures of modern
painting. Silverman's revelation frames through which van Gogh and Gauguin saw
themselves and the world brings a rich new dimension to the history of art and culture."
--Jerrold Seigel, author of The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp: Desire,
Liberation, and the Self in Modern Culture
"Debora Silverman's new book
discovers an important subject and proceeds to make the most of it. The
tremendous encounter between van Gogh and Gauguin, which has been worked over by
generations of scholars, receives unexpected illumination, and what had seemed a
familiar story emerges deepened and transformed."
--Michael Fried, author of Manet's Modernism: Or, The Face of Painting in the
1860s
"The Friendship between van Gogh
and Gauguin is one of the great adventures in modern art. Debora Silverman's
book on the subject reminds us that scholarship can be its own rich and stirring
adventure."
--Deborah Solomon, author of Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph
Cornell
The following is an excerpt from the book Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art
Publicist : Caprice Garvin
cgarvin@fsbassociates.com
FSB Associates
http://www.fsbassociates.com
Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art Barnes & Noble
