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Van Gogh's Weeping Woman sitting on a Basket, Van Gogh Museum
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VINCENT’S
WOMEN: THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE LOVES OF VINCENT VAN GOGH
BY
DONNA RUSSO, MARCH, 2024
Bestselling author Donna Russo
researched the life, letters, and work of Vincent Van Gogh for three
years. While her 423-page novel, Vincent's Women: The Untold Story of the Loves of Vincent Van Gogh is a hybrid—part distillation
of facts gathered from an impressive bibliography, part a work of fiction. It is a story
that follows Van Gogh from his difficult childhood in Holland, to a
failed stint as a clerk in a London art house, to a brief tenure as a
preacher to coal miners, in the Borinage area of Belgium, and
finally, to his transition art, initially in Holland and later in
France. Throughout, there were sojourns in Holland where he chafed
at social constraints and clashed frequently with his bourgeois
parents. In Russo’s view, which is hardly original, Van Gogh was a
lonely, misunderstood, allegedly unloved child, who grew into an
adult incapable of functioning without storm and stress. The implied
corollary of this thesis is that the seeds of Vincent’s madness
parental lie in the cold soil of maternal emotional abuse. The
question is, really? Van Gogh’s parents lived in a society where
conformism was a virtue and good parents were those who ruled with an
iron hand. If every Dutch child who had stern mothers became a
self-mutilating painter, would the Dutch Stock Exchange have
survived? Who would have planted tulips?
Possibly,
the reason that Russo veers from historiography to wild conjecture
and nebulous notions of conspiracy, is that novelists who choose Van
Gogh as subject, face a crowded field. Many
have sifted his
ashes in search of the key that
might
unlock, once and for all,
the secret of his genius,
as well as the cause of his
mental instability. Medical
savants seem to have been
unable to reach consensus on the matter. Each issued
a different diagnosis according to which he suffered from
syphilis and alcoholism, that
he went mad from consuming too much thujone--a
component of the absinthe
he drank all too
frequently--that he was plagued bymalnutrition,
porphyria, that he ate oil
paint, and he often stayed out in the sun long enough to get sunstroke.
What else can be added to this
litany of possibilities that that might tempt prospective readers to shell
out for a new book on the subject? Could one attribute Van Gogh’s
ill health, his prickly personality, his poor social skills to a
new single cause? Why yes,enter Momzilla.
Where
the medic savants hesitate to pinpoint a single cause for Van Gogh’s
problems, Russo seems to favor a simpler explanation—his mother,
Anna Cornelia Carbetus, is the root of it all. That is, from the she
named her son after another Vincent, who had died in infancy, Anna
established a pattern of rejection that would blight Vincent II’s
life. Conventional, controlling, straight laced Anna seems too
convenient a target, but then, this is an author who does not blush
to hint that it might have been Gauguin* who lopped off a portion of
Van Gogh’s left ear with a sword, no less. If this not sufficiently
speculative, she invites the reader to consider an obscure teenager for the role of prime suspect in Van Gogh’s death.
But
what of the women mentioned in the title? There most vivid presence
in the novel is that of the narrator, Johanna van Bongen, wife of
Theo, Vincent’s beloved brother and staunch provider of emotional
and financial support.There are those who believe that it was her marriage
to Theo plunged Vincent into a maelstrom of apprehension and
insecurity that eventually, led to madness. Supposedly, he feared
that that Theo’s new obligations would drain his limited resources
and that his commitment to Johanna would leave no room in either his
heart or his budget for impecunious Vincent. That proved to be a
misapprehension. Not only did Theo continue to provide for his
brother, Joanna did not stop him from doing so. After Theo’s
death, which followed Vincent’s by a few weeks, it was Joanna who
continued to promote his paintings, who organized exhibits of his
work, and who translated many of his letters.
Unlike Johanna, none of the women who figure in Vincent’s in Vincent's seem to have led noteworthy lives. What saved them foim obscurity was having posed for him. Ultimately, all of those he loved. spurned him.
Eugenie Loyer, with whom he fell in love while living in her mother’s
boarding house, in London, was already engaged to someone else when
he became infatuated with her. This was a detail she kept to herself
until Vincent proposed marriage. Dejected by this revelation, Vincent
left the boarding house. His model, prostitute Sien Hoornick, left him. Kee Strick Vos, fled from him. This pattern of proposals and
rejections fits neatly into the premise of the novel, according to which, each failed relationship replicates his dysfunctional relationship with
a mother who found him to be an inadequate replacement Vincent,
the baby she had lost. The suggested
inference is damning in its simplicity--Vincent II did not measure up to the dead baby, therefore Mommy became Momzilla. That, is in a nutshell, the source of all his
pain and suffering.
Armchair psychoanalysis by laypersons
has little value. Russo’s portrayal of Anna Carbetus Gogh as a
villain, is one of the glaring flaws in this novel. The clumsy
syntax that makes the text read like a bad Google
translation, is another. Readers might consider other books such as
Derek Fell’s Van Gogh's Women: His Love Affairs and Journey into
Madness, October 13, 2004.. Debby Beece’s The Van Gogh Woman, March
2022, Caroline Cauchi’s Mrs Van Gogh, September, 2023. They may not be as lovingly and laboriously researched, but they cannot be more deficient in grace.
Note--The
sword slash by Gauguin has been debunked by experts.
