Breaking van Gogh by James Grundvig

Author:James Grundvig
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2016-09-12T16:00:00+00:00

Before Theodorus van Gogh—named after his father—had been committed to the insane asylum in a complete collapse in October 1890, he made sure he gave his wife Jo and her brother Andries—“Dries”—strict instructions on what to do with Vincent’s massive collection of artwork, as well as his troves of letters stored in a cupboard. He insisted on the need to make and keep an inventory of the paintings, and tried to explain to her how to sell the art in the years to come.

Art dealer Theo was a great instructor; he knew exactly what to do and communicated that to his wife. Jo, for her part, was an even better listener and would become the gatekeeper to her brother-in-law’s masterworks, introducing Vincent van Gogh to the world. Ever the wise woman, she would wait for the right time to sell some of the paintings after the Impressionist new school painters’ art market took off.

She would bring a woman’s touch to selling Vincent’s “peasant genre,” a woman’s intuition to knowing whom to trust, and a woman’s patience to selling the paintings at the right time for the right price while keeping many pieces of art in the family and not flooding the market with too many van Goghs. That tactic, strategy, and execution were repeated and perfected by the auction houses of the day, driving an air of exclusivity both for the artists and their particular artwork. Jo also took meticulous care in transcribing and organizing the 850 or so letters written in French, as well as translating them first into Dutch, then eventually German, and, during the last decade of her life, from the 1910s to 1925, into English.

Along with Theo’s letters and others that Vincent had kept, she would publish the archival record of communications of all of the letters between Vincent, Theo, and their mother and sister, and the letters from doctors Ray and Peyron, Postmaster Joseph Roulin, and Jo herself.

Jo van Gogh-Bonger was twenty-eight years old when Theo died on January 25, 1891, in the asylum in Utrecht, Netherlands. He was clinically insane. When he died his death certificate read: “dementia paralytica.” It was thought to be caused by “heredity, chronic disease, overwork, sadness.”155

In 1914, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger would have Theo’s body exhumed from his native Dutch soil and his body sent back to Paris to be buried alongside his brother Vincent, where today their headstones sit side by side—the master artist and the art dealer brother.156

By 1914, Vincent van Gogh was one of the most famous, celebrated, and renowned artists in the world. Jo put her brother-in-law on that trajectory, an ascendancy that would continue long after she passed away in 1925.

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