Vincent Van Gogh led a pretty sodded life, some of which was due to his brain chemistry, some his own doing, and some possibly due to others. In any case, his art never really got appreciated while he lived. He was highly prone to depression from childhood. This is something he knew very well, and made mention of in his several letters to his elder brother Theo (these can be found here). He failed with women constantly, and had a very hard time accepting this. This much was summarized in this article (link) following his first failure at love :
"Vincent Van Gogh did not understand the mechanics of interpersonal diplomacy,
or the principles of salesmanship. During this period he fell in love for the first time,
and openly professed his love for Eugenia, a respectable upper class woman.
Eugenia was insulted by his unwanted advances, and she harshly rebuffed him.
Van Gogh's inability to read the intent and emotions of others, caused him
to fail to see that she had never expressed any interest in him.
Failing in his first romantic experience, he also blundered miserably in his
first job as an art dealer. He was dismissed by the art firm ..."
In such moments, he often ended up acting like a maniac. The famous Van Gogh ear incident, for instance, was probably a reaction to rejection by a woman in favor of his room-mate and the equally crazy Paul Gaugin. (This version of the events is disputed in this long but very interesting New Yorker article : link.) Fine, the chap was somewhat crazy, and often a failure, but also a genius. This much is well established.
The questions that I would like to ask and elaborate upon are the following two --
1) Van Gogh was supposedly a very empathetic man. But was he not also deeply narcissistic?
2) Was Van Gogh addicted to depression?
I don't have clear answers but I would like to discuss these questions in the context of Van Gogh's choice of women. Van Gogh's first love was Eugenia, who was out of reach because she was a different class to him ; his second love was his cousin Kee, who was out of reach, for obvious reasons ; and his third love was a prostitute, Sien, with whom he could not maintain any form of exclusivity, for he did not have enough money to offer her. There is a pattern here : Van Gogh obsessed with women with whom he had no chance of a true, mutually fulfilling relationship. And I think these three women highlight three key aspects of Van Gogh's personality : narcissism, fatalism, and empathy, which hid under it some more narcissism.
Everyone suffers from these to relatively different degrees. And possibly every love has some element of narcissism, as unfortunate as that might be -- you want to associate with a particular partner not just because you like spending time with them, expect them to be a good parent to your children, but also because, you see them as an accomplishment of sorts. Women often go for men for are rich (or status etc.), and men, for women who are beautiful.
Van Gogh's empathetic nature is very well documented. He yearned for a socialist cult of artists who could sustain themselves by helping each other out financially, and artistically. He developed a strong aversion to the art-gallery culture because it appeared to make art a commodity only for the rich. He also felt very strongly for the cause of peasants, their poor subsistence, and painted extensively on the topic of their daily labor and struggles. So how could such an empathetic man have loved just to appease his own ego, that is, loved out of narcissism? Well, empathy is an obscure concept. It is something narcissistic individuals can choose to believe in (and in fact, imbibe), because it is a quality that is respected by everyone. Whether they are truly empathetic is difficult to ascertain. Whether empathy has any other origins other than narcissism is also not clear to me, although I certainly hope this is not the case. Regardless, one has to question why Van Gogh was happy in his job as an art dealer, and only started to worry about the questions of poverty and the exclusivity of art after his failure with Eugenia - was this simply the development of a side that Vincent wanted to project to the world, to fuel his narcissism, something that was hurt by the rejection he received from Eugenia? But Eugenia's rejection also made Van Gogh pick up the paint brush and paint!
The second instance of love is far more puzzling. Surely Van Gogh knew that his incestuous advance towards Kee was never going to be accepted? Love is certainly a strange thing. There is a magnificent beauty in the heart of a beautiful person -- something that is, personally, the most affectionate quality of any love that I've experienced. I'm going to give Van Gogh the benefit of the doubt and say he loved his cousin for these, fairly pious reasons as well. But to take it to the other level, in such circumstances, is strange. He actually went up to her father's door and put up a flame under his hand and told his uncle that he won't leave until he sees his cousin. (The piece of fuck!) In my opinion, perhaps the only acceptable reasoning of his behavior is that, he knew this would never work out, he knew that he would then go into an episode of terrible depression, and he liked it. It is no coincidence that Van Gogh's best work followed moments of sadness which were set in motion by either the loss of a loved one, or failure in a romantic endeavor. This is fatalism.
And finally, for his love for the third woman, the prostitute Sien, the less said the better. A man, lost in the eyes of the world, wants to reform a prostitute, how charming! This is the definition of narcissism hiding behind empathy. I don't mean to denigrate Van Gogh (who am I to do so anyway?). Honestly, I feel for the guy. I know depression, and I also maintain that I occasionally force myself into it. It gets me to write, to draw, to think. It makes me a richer human being, always. It's a bitter-sweet relationship. Only that Van Gogh knew no bounds and took it too far.
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The links :
Van Gogh's Ear : link (New Yorker)
The troubled life of Vincent Van Gogh : link
A Biograph of Van Gogh : linkArchive of Van Gogh's Letters : here
