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A review by dyno8426
Lust For Life by Irving Stone
5.0
"“To act well in this world,” he read, “one must die within oneself. Man is not on this earth only to be happy, he is not there to be simply honest, he is there to realize great things for humanity, to attain nobility and to surpass the vulgarity in which the existence of almost all individuals drags on.”""
This passage meets us and Vincent Van Gogh somewhere around the beginning of the book and essentially captures the summary of this artist's life and how he must have found this call for arms that inspired his extreme devotion to his art. Written as a fictional biography on this now household name and an icon for the art that speaks, this book tells you essentially about artist's experience and the process of creative expression. If you have ever been affected by any art - anything whose underlying idea or expression captures that truth that you find undeniable and something that needs to be said in that exact manner - then this book is one of the many answers to quench that intellectual curiosity that makes us wonder what affected the artist to find this diamond-in-the-rough-ness of life. Van Gogh's relentless pursuit towards getting hold of this truth and the authenticity of his medium of expression tells one such story that awes anyone due to its reality. Van Gogh's obscurity while he was alive is tragic not because it makes us pity the lateness of that appreciation which he truly deserves; it's tragic because it points to how many unrecognised receptacles of such truths are lost in the transience of life. This risk is one of the many precious facets of the artist experience that Van Gogh's life gathers in its wake.
"“Rembrandt only liked to paint ugly old women, didn’t he?” she asked. “No,” replied Vincent. “He painted beautiful old women, women who were poor or in some way unhappy, but who through sorrow had gained a soul.”"
The truth that the artist expresses is something that matters to the artist personally. The art is their way of seeing things and it's only when we recognise the underlying beauty of the existence of that truth is when we truly merit an artwork. The crudeness of Van Gogh's style comes from the crude reality that he consistently shared his bed with. His early evangelist exploration is an evidence of the love for his humanity - its drudgery and the ordinariness that his line and form celebrated. His poverty and financial meagreness kept him near to the baseness of life - feeding the survival machine relentlessly without the uplifting beauty that is promised. In his attempts to serve his fellow humans through working as a Church minister, his own tolerance is pushed, his resilience witnessed and his love for the embodiment of life - his fellow humans - marvelled at when he gives the little he has and still faces the blank, unfeeling, dirty reality staring back. This harshness and unforgiving nature of life permeates his very soul with an idea to remember reality for what it is.
From thereon, Van Gogh starts to learn painting and confronts the another brutality in art - authenticity. The natural honesty in Vincent is curious upon seeing the contrasting success of what is generally appreciated and what is actually worthy. His past as a salesman in an art gallery had already perplexed and annoyed him. But when he starts measuring his own ideas in the scale of worldly price-scale, he finds himself challenged by this unanticipated challenge. The fellow artists he admires and aspires to gain admiration from start challenging his choices and devotion to un-aesthetic subjects. His conception of the beauty of form, the snapshots of life as he knows it, are under-appreciated and he is shown the way towards getting in line for beautiful subjects, pleasant mediums. Van Gogh's passion and hardness in his own choices is tempered like steel in a furnace.
"“What the world thought made little difference. Rembrandt had to paint. Whether he painted well or badly didn’t matter; painting was the stuff that held him together as a man. The chief value of art, Vincent, lies in the expression it gives to the artist. Rembrandt fulfilled what he knew to be his life purpose; that justified him. Even if his work had been worthless, he would have been a thousand times more successful than if he had put down his desire and become the richest merchant in Amsterdam.”"
Van Gogh, by this point, starts becoming a recluse and a misunderstood creature. From quite some time, constant companionship with the working class, from which seamed his own lifestyle of drudgery and physical limitations, along with his own personal experiences, had provided reality's another subject for him to admire for its uncompromising nature - pain and suffering. This brings into perspective the frequently pondered question of the essentiality of pain for creating any good art. He was able to see the perseverance of life in samples from these poor sections who trudge along the path, with bowed down shoulders and eyes away from the hopeful horizon. This picture was beautiful to him and he loved them despite their sorrows, for their sorrows. He saw his passion, the thrill in return on chasing it and making it his own through his paints.
"He saw how exquisite suffering had made her. Before, she had been only a happy girl; now she was a passionately suffering woman with all the richness that emotional misery can bring. Once again there flashed into his mind the old saying: “From out of pain, beauty.”"
"“You mean it’s a sort of challenge?” “Exactly. The blank canvas stares at me like an idiot, but I know that it is afriad of the passionate painter who dares, who once and for all has broken the spell of that ‘you cannot.’ Life itself turns towards a man an infinitely vacant, discouraging, hopelessly blank side on which nothing is written, Margot, no more than on this blank canvas.” “Yes, doesn’t it.” “But the man of faith and energy is not frightened by that blankness; he steps in, he acts, he builds up, he creates, and in the end the canvas is no longer blank but covered with the rich pattern of life.”"
Though this runs into the common risk of romanticising pain which is also encountered. Like any fire, it provides light and warmth but consumes the very thing it burns on. Any artist's encounter with pain demands a capacity from him/her to withstand it, to handle it without losing control over it unless it takes away his/her capacity to create some beauty or meaning out of it. Van Gogh's tragedy that most of the readers are aware of, becomes an omen that unsettles when we encounter the cost of this pursuit. Van Gogh finds people around him who are drawn by his passion that glimpses through his early work. Like a Christ figure, his embracement of pains for the benefit of humanity is remarked time and again. The discomfort of this notion is a conscious motif in the book that brings us closer to the artist as a human.
"Whether he was drawing the figure or landscape, he wished to express not sentimental melancholy but serious sorrow. He wanted to reach out so far that people would say of his work, “He feels deeply, he feels tenderly.”"
Vincent's exploration of his artistic identity brings him to Paris. Here he is ushered into the era of modern art. He finds himself in company of the rebels and misfits of artistic talent. He witnesses the same struggle, same integrity with which his contemporaries are trying to make a place of their own. Like him, these icons of post-impressionism did not reach the million dollar status overnight. The wandered from studios to salons in the hope of getting their work seen. He finds himself not alone in this pursuit to capture truth and share their message to the world. Vincent's contemporaries like Lautrec, Gauguin, Seurat, Rousseau, Cezanne are trying to get their foot in the door, while trying to maintain their worldly survival and ruthless inertia towards change. Their gasping artistic revolution evokes pitiful sympathy when we see the ridicule and close-minded criticism that tries to bring them down everyday. There constant struggle again pulsates the tragic vein where doubt and obscurity threatens their creative inspiration.
"“But, Theo, I must learn everything all over. Everything I do is wrong.” “Everything you do is right . . . except your light and colour. You were an Impressionist from the day you picked up a pencil in the Borinage. Look at your drawing! Look at your brushwork! No one ever painted like that before Manet. Look at your lines! You almost never make a definite statement. Look at your faces, your trees, your figures in the fields! They are your impressions. They are rough, imperfect, filtered through your own personality. That’s what it means, to be an Impressionist; not to paint like everyone else, not to be a slave to rules and regulations. You belong to your age, Vincent, and you’re an Impressionist whether you like it or not.”"
What comes wonderful to both the readers and Vincent here are the originality and assertive identity of the different truths whose expression were the different flavours of arts that spread their artists message. In the blank canvas of life, art becomes your conscious effort to paint out your meaning. Be it Seurat's precise physical abstraction to model the universe we see, or Impressionists' aether of "moving air" inside which all life lives as we see it, Lautrec' morality challenging works, or Vincent's bold lines and tempestuous colours that are larger than life. As an artist, a self-doubt about one's real talent sickens Vincent as well for some time. He underestimates his passion in the crowd of passions. Preserving his identity and force of expression becomes critical and an artist's compass. While beauty is transcending, it is also ruthless in consuming everything lesser than itself in the process. An artist's confidence in the face of someone else's conception of beauty is what Vincent loses and regains. The plot here reinforces the blank amorality of life to which everybody's claim is equally valid. Art is the process that reinforces this right and freedom.
"“Let’s formulate our manifesto, gentlemen,” said Zola. “First, we think all truth beautiful, no matter how hideous its face may seem. We accept all of nature, without any repudiation. We believe there is more beauty in a harsh truth than in a pretty lie, more poetry in earthiness than in all the salons of Paris. We think pain good, because it is the most profound of all human feelings. We think sex beautiful, even when portrayed by a harlot and a pimp. We put character above ugliness, pain above prettiness, and hard, crude reality above all the wealth in France. We accept life in its entirety, without making moral judgements. We think the prostitute as good as the countess, the concierge as good as the general, the peasant as good as the cabinet minister, for they all fit into the pattern of nature, and are woven into the design of life!”"
Vincent then abandons his contemporaries, and runs back into the harsh wilderness of solitude where he wants to paint how he started - amidst the passionate nature which fuels life into him, face-to-face with the only important task of capturing that ever-fleeting vision.
"When I am alone, in the country, I forget that there are thousands of canvases being painted every day. I imagine that mine is the only one, and that it is a beautiful gift to the world. I would still go on painting even if I knew my work to be atrocious, but this . . . this artist’s illusion . . . helps."
In order to prevent being overwhelmed by the physical forces of nature, Vincent had to match with a passion of his own. Here he starts creating the world as he sees it with that hypersensitivity which needed the artistic exaggeration to convey to us what he saw in those cornfields, sunflowers and almond blossoms. Vincent, with the sole power vested in him as a creator who can paint, survived on the threshold of life, dragging himself with a desire to continue living and relishing life for its simultaneous abundance and meagreness that was offered to him. The lust for life comes from this encounter of two matching passions - one which bursts from the nature and humans living around Vincent and his own desire to communicate to the world what's right in front of their eyes but hardly felt in the numbness that existence renders in the most of us.
"Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what he had before his eyes, he used colour arbitrarily to express himself with greater force. He realized that what Pissarro had told him in Paris was true. “You must boldly exaggerate the effects, either in harmony or discord, which colours produce.” In Maupassant’s preface to “Pierre et Jean” he found a similar sentiment. “The artist has the liberty to exaggerate, to create in his novel a world more beautiful, more simple, more consoling than ours.”"
"“When I paint a sun, I want to make people feel it revolving at a terrific rate of speed. Giving off light and heat waves of tremendous power. When I paint a cornfield I want people to feel the atoms within the corn pushing out to their final growth and bursting. When I paint an apple I want people to feel the juice of that apple pushing out against the skin, the seeds at the core striving outward to their own fruition!”"
Vincent's venturing into the extremities of physical nature ultimately took a toll on his mental capacity as well. He holds on to his conscious thread to reality through his work and spends all his creative energies as he does his passion to paint. After the bursts of climax that satisfied his soul, he felt exhausted - a little more spent every time. As a symbol of our finite existence, the sustenance of this infinite feeling of being alive was as short-lived. In this finiteness, it makes sense that an artist's passion also dries up from its source.
"His love for nature had not died; it was simply that he no longer felt the desperate need to fling himself at a scene and re-create it. He was burned out. During the whole month of June he painted only five canvases. He was weary, unspeakably weary. He felt empty, drained, washed out, as though the hundreds upon hundreds of drawings and paintings that had flowed out of him in the past ten years had each taken a tiny spark of his life."
As literature worth reading, this is (without a second thought!) one of the best books that I have read. Irving Stone has given life to an artist who deserves to be known. I kept remembering James Black rendition of "Vincent" song when I was reading this. It perfectly captures the pathos of Vincent's life - how he walked that lonely, misunderstood, outcast life with that exceptional force which produces exceptional work. Art elevates the viewer to a space, a plane of existence which only things like faith has the power of doing. Van Gogh's lust for life has created ever lasting tributes for what kept him going. We are only grateful that people like him did keep going.
This passage meets us and Vincent Van Gogh somewhere around the beginning of the book and essentially captures the summary of this artist's life and how he must have found this call for arms that inspired his extreme devotion to his art. Written as a fictional biography on this now household name and an icon for the art that speaks, this book tells you essentially about artist's experience and the process of creative expression. If you have ever been affected by any art - anything whose underlying idea or expression captures that truth that you find undeniable and something that needs to be said in that exact manner - then this book is one of the many answers to quench that intellectual curiosity that makes us wonder what affected the artist to find this diamond-in-the-rough-ness of life. Van Gogh's relentless pursuit towards getting hold of this truth and the authenticity of his medium of expression tells one such story that awes anyone due to its reality. Van Gogh's obscurity while he was alive is tragic not because it makes us pity the lateness of that appreciation which he truly deserves; it's tragic because it points to how many unrecognised receptacles of such truths are lost in the transience of life. This risk is one of the many precious facets of the artist experience that Van Gogh's life gathers in its wake.
"“Rembrandt only liked to paint ugly old women, didn’t he?” she asked. “No,” replied Vincent. “He painted beautiful old women, women who were poor or in some way unhappy, but who through sorrow had gained a soul.”"
The truth that the artist expresses is something that matters to the artist personally. The art is their way of seeing things and it's only when we recognise the underlying beauty of the existence of that truth is when we truly merit an artwork. The crudeness of Van Gogh's style comes from the crude reality that he consistently shared his bed with. His early evangelist exploration is an evidence of the love for his humanity - its drudgery and the ordinariness that his line and form celebrated. His poverty and financial meagreness kept him near to the baseness of life - feeding the survival machine relentlessly without the uplifting beauty that is promised. In his attempts to serve his fellow humans through working as a Church minister, his own tolerance is pushed, his resilience witnessed and his love for the embodiment of life - his fellow humans - marvelled at when he gives the little he has and still faces the blank, unfeeling, dirty reality staring back. This harshness and unforgiving nature of life permeates his very soul with an idea to remember reality for what it is.
From thereon, Van Gogh starts to learn painting and confronts the another brutality in art - authenticity. The natural honesty in Vincent is curious upon seeing the contrasting success of what is generally appreciated and what is actually worthy. His past as a salesman in an art gallery had already perplexed and annoyed him. But when he starts measuring his own ideas in the scale of worldly price-scale, he finds himself challenged by this unanticipated challenge. The fellow artists he admires and aspires to gain admiration from start challenging his choices and devotion to un-aesthetic subjects. His conception of the beauty of form, the snapshots of life as he knows it, are under-appreciated and he is shown the way towards getting in line for beautiful subjects, pleasant mediums. Van Gogh's passion and hardness in his own choices is tempered like steel in a furnace.
"“What the world thought made little difference. Rembrandt had to paint. Whether he painted well or badly didn’t matter; painting was the stuff that held him together as a man. The chief value of art, Vincent, lies in the expression it gives to the artist. Rembrandt fulfilled what he knew to be his life purpose; that justified him. Even if his work had been worthless, he would have been a thousand times more successful than if he had put down his desire and become the richest merchant in Amsterdam.”"
Van Gogh, by this point, starts becoming a recluse and a misunderstood creature. From quite some time, constant companionship with the working class, from which seamed his own lifestyle of drudgery and physical limitations, along with his own personal experiences, had provided reality's another subject for him to admire for its uncompromising nature - pain and suffering. This brings into perspective the frequently pondered question of the essentiality of pain for creating any good art. He was able to see the perseverance of life in samples from these poor sections who trudge along the path, with bowed down shoulders and eyes away from the hopeful horizon. This picture was beautiful to him and he loved them despite their sorrows, for their sorrows. He saw his passion, the thrill in return on chasing it and making it his own through his paints.
"He saw how exquisite suffering had made her. Before, she had been only a happy girl; now she was a passionately suffering woman with all the richness that emotional misery can bring. Once again there flashed into his mind the old saying: “From out of pain, beauty.”"
"“You mean it’s a sort of challenge?” “Exactly. The blank canvas stares at me like an idiot, but I know that it is afriad of the passionate painter who dares, who once and for all has broken the spell of that ‘you cannot.’ Life itself turns towards a man an infinitely vacant, discouraging, hopelessly blank side on which nothing is written, Margot, no more than on this blank canvas.” “Yes, doesn’t it.” “But the man of faith and energy is not frightened by that blankness; he steps in, he acts, he builds up, he creates, and in the end the canvas is no longer blank but covered with the rich pattern of life.”"
Though this runs into the common risk of romanticising pain which is also encountered. Like any fire, it provides light and warmth but consumes the very thing it burns on. Any artist's encounter with pain demands a capacity from him/her to withstand it, to handle it without losing control over it unless it takes away his/her capacity to create some beauty or meaning out of it. Van Gogh's tragedy that most of the readers are aware of, becomes an omen that unsettles when we encounter the cost of this pursuit. Van Gogh finds people around him who are drawn by his passion that glimpses through his early work. Like a Christ figure, his embracement of pains for the benefit of humanity is remarked time and again. The discomfort of this notion is a conscious motif in the book that brings us closer to the artist as a human.
"Whether he was drawing the figure or landscape, he wished to express not sentimental melancholy but serious sorrow. He wanted to reach out so far that people would say of his work, “He feels deeply, he feels tenderly.”"
Vincent's exploration of his artistic identity brings him to Paris. Here he is ushered into the era of modern art. He finds himself in company of the rebels and misfits of artistic talent. He witnesses the same struggle, same integrity with which his contemporaries are trying to make a place of their own. Like him, these icons of post-impressionism did not reach the million dollar status overnight. The wandered from studios to salons in the hope of getting their work seen. He finds himself not alone in this pursuit to capture truth and share their message to the world. Vincent's contemporaries like Lautrec, Gauguin, Seurat, Rousseau, Cezanne are trying to get their foot in the door, while trying to maintain their worldly survival and ruthless inertia towards change. Their gasping artistic revolution evokes pitiful sympathy when we see the ridicule and close-minded criticism that tries to bring them down everyday. There constant struggle again pulsates the tragic vein where doubt and obscurity threatens their creative inspiration.
"“But, Theo, I must learn everything all over. Everything I do is wrong.” “Everything you do is right . . . except your light and colour. You were an Impressionist from the day you picked up a pencil in the Borinage. Look at your drawing! Look at your brushwork! No one ever painted like that before Manet. Look at your lines! You almost never make a definite statement. Look at your faces, your trees, your figures in the fields! They are your impressions. They are rough, imperfect, filtered through your own personality. That’s what it means, to be an Impressionist; not to paint like everyone else, not to be a slave to rules and regulations. You belong to your age, Vincent, and you’re an Impressionist whether you like it or not.”"
What comes wonderful to both the readers and Vincent here are the originality and assertive identity of the different truths whose expression were the different flavours of arts that spread their artists message. In the blank canvas of life, art becomes your conscious effort to paint out your meaning. Be it Seurat's precise physical abstraction to model the universe we see, or Impressionists' aether of "moving air" inside which all life lives as we see it, Lautrec' morality challenging works, or Vincent's bold lines and tempestuous colours that are larger than life. As an artist, a self-doubt about one's real talent sickens Vincent as well for some time. He underestimates his passion in the crowd of passions. Preserving his identity and force of expression becomes critical and an artist's compass. While beauty is transcending, it is also ruthless in consuming everything lesser than itself in the process. An artist's confidence in the face of someone else's conception of beauty is what Vincent loses and regains. The plot here reinforces the blank amorality of life to which everybody's claim is equally valid. Art is the process that reinforces this right and freedom.
"“Let’s formulate our manifesto, gentlemen,” said Zola. “First, we think all truth beautiful, no matter how hideous its face may seem. We accept all of nature, without any repudiation. We believe there is more beauty in a harsh truth than in a pretty lie, more poetry in earthiness than in all the salons of Paris. We think pain good, because it is the most profound of all human feelings. We think sex beautiful, even when portrayed by a harlot and a pimp. We put character above ugliness, pain above prettiness, and hard, crude reality above all the wealth in France. We accept life in its entirety, without making moral judgements. We think the prostitute as good as the countess, the concierge as good as the general, the peasant as good as the cabinet minister, for they all fit into the pattern of nature, and are woven into the design of life!”"
Vincent then abandons his contemporaries, and runs back into the harsh wilderness of solitude where he wants to paint how he started - amidst the passionate nature which fuels life into him, face-to-face with the only important task of capturing that ever-fleeting vision.
"When I am alone, in the country, I forget that there are thousands of canvases being painted every day. I imagine that mine is the only one, and that it is a beautiful gift to the world. I would still go on painting even if I knew my work to be atrocious, but this . . . this artist’s illusion . . . helps."
In order to prevent being overwhelmed by the physical forces of nature, Vincent had to match with a passion of his own. Here he starts creating the world as he sees it with that hypersensitivity which needed the artistic exaggeration to convey to us what he saw in those cornfields, sunflowers and almond blossoms. Vincent, with the sole power vested in him as a creator who can paint, survived on the threshold of life, dragging himself with a desire to continue living and relishing life for its simultaneous abundance and meagreness that was offered to him. The lust for life comes from this encounter of two matching passions - one which bursts from the nature and humans living around Vincent and his own desire to communicate to the world what's right in front of their eyes but hardly felt in the numbness that existence renders in the most of us.
"Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what he had before his eyes, he used colour arbitrarily to express himself with greater force. He realized that what Pissarro had told him in Paris was true. “You must boldly exaggerate the effects, either in harmony or discord, which colours produce.” In Maupassant’s preface to “Pierre et Jean” he found a similar sentiment. “The artist has the liberty to exaggerate, to create in his novel a world more beautiful, more simple, more consoling than ours.”"
"“When I paint a sun, I want to make people feel it revolving at a terrific rate of speed. Giving off light and heat waves of tremendous power. When I paint a cornfield I want people to feel the atoms within the corn pushing out to their final growth and bursting. When I paint an apple I want people to feel the juice of that apple pushing out against the skin, the seeds at the core striving outward to their own fruition!”"
Vincent's venturing into the extremities of physical nature ultimately took a toll on his mental capacity as well. He holds on to his conscious thread to reality through his work and spends all his creative energies as he does his passion to paint. After the bursts of climax that satisfied his soul, he felt exhausted - a little more spent every time. As a symbol of our finite existence, the sustenance of this infinite feeling of being alive was as short-lived. In this finiteness, it makes sense that an artist's passion also dries up from its source.
"His love for nature had not died; it was simply that he no longer felt the desperate need to fling himself at a scene and re-create it. He was burned out. During the whole month of June he painted only five canvases. He was weary, unspeakably weary. He felt empty, drained, washed out, as though the hundreds upon hundreds of drawings and paintings that had flowed out of him in the past ten years had each taken a tiny spark of his life."
As literature worth reading, this is (without a second thought!) one of the best books that I have read. Irving Stone has given life to an artist who deserves to be known. I kept remembering James Black rendition of "Vincent" song when I was reading this. It perfectly captures the pathos of Vincent's life - how he walked that lonely, misunderstood, outcast life with that exceptional force which produces exceptional work. Art elevates the viewer to a space, a plane of existence which only things like faith has the power of doing. Van Gogh's lust for life has created ever lasting tributes for what kept him going. We are only grateful that people like him did keep going.