Starred review from November 15, 2021
Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Naifeh (Jackson Pollock) offers a captivating look inside the mind of Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) through the artists who inspired him. Propelled by a “wide-ranging curiosity drew him to one artistic and intellectual movement after another,” the Dutch painter’s omnivorous taste led him to study numerous works of artistic expression. Drawing primarily from Van Gogh’s correspondences with his brother Theo, Naifeh lucidly traces the painter’s relationship with everything from 17th century works by Rembrandt (who, like Van Gogh, had a penchant for “obsessively” painting himself) to experimenting with the Pointillist dots of Georges Seurat (which, Naifeh writes, “freed Van Gogh from the unforgiving linearity of realism”) to his fascination with Japanese woodblock prints in the mid-1880s. Further enriched with images of prints that Van Gogh himself owned and annotated—including Vase with Flowers (c. 1875) by French painter Adolphe Monticelli, which, Van Gogh wrote, encapsulated “in a single panel the whole range of his richest and most perfectly balanced tones”—the book allows readers to glimpse the lessons the artist drew from prototypes when executing his own vivid works, including his famous Sunflowers and Green Wheat Fields, Auvers (1890). While illuminating the life of one of the world’s most significant artists, this also sheds a broader light on the fascinating nuances of the creative process.