Vincent van Gogh - Crows in the Wheatfields 1890

VAN GOGH''S INTEGRITY
BY
DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS

Painters and writers have gotten along famously in the past. The visual and conceptual arts obviously complement one other, or at least they should be complementary. Painters have bowed to poets at times, giving them precedence, and poets have bowed to painters: perhaps neither one is superior to the other, notwithstanding DaVinci''s opinion that the eye is a nobler instrument than the ear. The truth of the matter is that if an author or a painter wants to strike out on his own, if he wants to be "original", as it were, it would behoove him to look not to his peers, his fellow painters or his fellow writers, for ideas, but to his complement.

An author''s work will likely improve if he looks to painters instead of writers for fresh ideas. Naturally his new hats will be old hats for the old masters who painted their poetry. The author who is interested in being true to his ethical as well as to his aesthetic principles may have something to learn from the struggles of masterful painters for integrity in their lives and in their compositions. A study of Vincent Van Gogh''s letters, for example,  provides considerable insight in that regard.

Now some people are disturbed by Van Gogh''s paintings: they are upset by what they believe represents a disintegrated or unwholesome mind. I was disturbed by his alleged suicide. Yet, curiously, Picasso described Vincent Van Gogh''s life as an "exemplary life."

Van Gogh, as we know, was a devout man, a frustrated minister who loved the world and embraced it, painting himself wholeheartedly into his paintings, providing us with an objective view of a peculiar integration of individual exhibitionism and social idealism. He may have been "mad" as an individual, yet in his artful integration of self with nature, and when, like the working people he loved, he atoned with nature through his work, he was as sane as could be expected of a whole being.

After flirting with the wanton abstractions of a wild imagination, Van Gogh turned to reality, clinging to it for dear life unto his tragic death. Thus did he occupy himself with his destiny and fate; and in being true to himself in nature, he was certainly a man of integrity.

Today integrity is most often associated with business: almost every mission statement declares the person or firm to be one of great professional integrity, therefore deserving of our business. Van Gogh was definitely not a commercial artist. Many talented artists suffer from the infamous psychological fear of success/failure and the belief that money works the ruin of truth and therefore art. Vincent Van Gogh sold only one painting - Red Vineyard -  in his entire life - to painter Anna Boch, after the critic Albert Aurier favored him and he was invited to the Les XX avant garde exhibit in Brussels. That single sale troubled him greatly. Indeed, Van Gogh was a man of integrity but he was materially poor. His brother supported his spiritual-artistic life, thus did Van Gogh have his artistic license.

Thanks to birth, marriage, or a patron, many great literary men and women do not have to suffer material impoverishment for their artistic license. Rich or poor, an artist needs ample time to produce fine art, and not all have suffered material poverty to produce it - spiritual poverty might suffice. We may have difficulty sympathizing with them, yet affluent people sometimes suffer greatly from want of love if not ennui. For example, a novelist had his wealthy heroine debark from her limousine, enter her fine Manhattan townhouse, walk through several luxuriously appointed rooms into her elegant bedroom, throw herself down on her four-poster bed and burst into tears: her lover had deserted her; she was all alone with her wealth -imagine that and weep. She soon took up the writing of novels, and, due to her personal contacts with media moguls, a publisher accepted her first novel and it was a best seller. By the way, the novel was autobiographical.

As for material poverty, it has not always provoked the production of fine art. Dire impoverishment has resulted in the destruction of many talented artists. It appears that Vincent Van Gogh was about to have the economic rug ripped out from under him. Brother Theo Van Gogh had supported his career for some time. After Theo''s wife bore him a new child in June of 1890, he informed Vincent that he was quitting his job and starting up his own dealership, and warned that the risk entailed would require financial restraint. Shortly after their meeting in Paris, Vincent wrote a letter to Theo, stating in part:

"It was no slight thing when we all felt our daily bread was in danger, no slight thing when for reasons other than that we felt that our means of subsistence were fragile. Back here, I still felt very sad and continued to feel the storm which threatens you weighing on me too. What was to be done - you see, I generally try to be fairly cheerful, but my life is also threatened at the very root, and my steps are also wavering. I feared - not altogether but yet a little - that being a burden to you, you felt me a thing rather to be dreaded, but Jo''s letter proves to me clearly that you understand that for my part I am as much in toil and in trouble as you are. There - thought the brush almost slipped from my fingers, but knowing exactly what I wanted, I have painted three more big canvanses since. They are vast fields of wheat under troubled skies, and I did not need to go out of my way to try to express sadness and extreme loneliness."

We have at least two versions of Vincent''s fate: he "accidentally" shot himself in a wheat field which had been a subject of his painting; or, the fatal wound was no accident.Van Gogh was active for ten years, producing 1,000 watercolors and 1,250 paintings.

It is within reason to speculate that Vincent Van Gogh, threatened with the loss of support from his brother and therefore his occupational integrity as an artist, committed suicide after producing seventy paintings - including several masterpieces - in the last two and one half months of his life. Theo, by the way, outlived Vincent by a mere six months.For Van Gogh, life may have not been worth living without the means to pursue his occupation. Many others have taken their own lives when deprived of their occupation; they might do so to "save face" or because they cannot stand to be alienated from the practice of their life''s work. In Van Gogh''s case, we can only speculate, and by no means do we wish to add to the scandal of his death.