After riding a series of escalators to the fifth floor of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, I stepped into a gallery where, on display, were a dozen paintings and lithographs by late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century artists, including Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, and Georges Seurat.
But most visitors were gathered around one explosively colorful painting in swirling shades of light and dark blue, bottle green, and pale gold.
Instantly recognizable.
One of the most famous paintings in the world.
The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh.
These were the early days of my research about a little-known woman who is key to shedding light on three inevitable questions when it comes to Vincent van Gogh. Why did he cut off his ear? Why did he commit suicide? And how, after dying in obscurity, did he eventually become regarded as one of the world’s greatest artists?
Gauging Van Gogh
Watching and talking to people as they engaged with this particular masterpiece seemed an apropos way to gauge the interest of Van Gogh lovers.
I, for one, could remember, as a child, first seeing The Starry Night reprinted in one of my parents’ art history books. It was my modern art “aha” moment. No one was standing over my shoulder telling me to pay it special attention, but I was mesmerized. The painting became imprinted on my young imagination, and I never forgot it.
As I observed the gallery, I quickly learned my reaction is hardly unique.
A man from Southern California named Paul Duelo was laughing. “I know this painting, and I don’t know anything about art,” he said with a chuckle, nodding at the crowd standing around The Starry Night. “Look at everyone!”
A woman from Seattle stood gazing quietly with her arms folded. Sheri Larison first saw a picture of The Starry Night more than 30 years ago in her high school art class. A reproduction of the iconic painting hung in her office. This was her very first time seeing the original.
“It’s overwhelming,” Larison whispered, with tears in her eyes. “It evokes something. It’s magical.”
She was interested in the painting’s origin story. “His mental health was declining,” she said, and that was true, although perhaps also misleading.
Van Gogh painted The Starry Night in June of 1889 during a year he spent in a mental asylum in the south of France.
It does not represent an actual place but a compilation of elements—a village, starry sky, moon, dark hills, and a cypress tree—all things that Vincent had seen at one time and brought together in this composition. The sight of stars, he said, always made him dream.
Hanging just to the left of The Starry Night was a Paul Gauguin’s painting, The Moon and the Earth. The juxtaposition provoked a curious thought. Gauguin and Van Gogh lived and worked together in Vincent’s yellow house in Arles in the south of France for several weeks. What would the hot-tempered, competitive Gauguin have thought seeing so many people gathered around Vincent’s painting at this moment while his was comparatively ignored? And what would Vincent have made of all the attention given to The Starry Night?
It is generally believed that it was an argument with Gauguin, who was threatening to quit Arles (in effect abandoning Van Gogh), which spun the mentally unstable Vincent into such a state of despair and frustration that he mutilated himself by slicing off his left ear.
The fine art of family matters
But, as I was learning, family matters also very likely played a part in the most notorious instance of self-harm in art history.
It’s a tragic story of dependence and the limits of love. And it’s where Jo van Gogh-Bonger comes in. Biographical details about her—revealed in her diaries and letters—have only recently been made public by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. They paint a picture of a determined woman to whom the world of art owes a tremendous debt.
Jo was married to Vincent’s younger brother, Theo, who was an art dealer in Paris and Vincent’s only source of income. Theo supported Vincent with a monthly allowance, and in exchange Vincent gave Theo his paintings to try to market and sell. The financial arrangement, as it would in most families, put an emotional strain on both brothers. Theo was not rich, and Vincent constantly complained about being broke, with not even enough money for food, and often practically begged his brother for more money.
Over the course of 10 years, Vincent created more than 800 paintings and 700 drawings, desperately hoping for financial independence and commercial success. But in Vincent’s lifetime, Theo is known to have sold just one painting: Red Vineyard at Arles.
In July of 1890, believing himself a failure as an artist and a man, Vincent shot himself in the chest. He was only 37.
Six months after Vincent’s suicide, Theo died from the ravages of syphilis, leaving Jo a young widow with a baby to support, not much money, and an unusual inheritance—Vincent’s paintings—more than 400 in total.
They filled the walls of their Paris apartment, were stored in closets, under beds, and at a nearby art supply store. The Potato Eaters, Irises, Sunflowers, self-portraits, and The Starry Night. Celebrated as masterpieces today, at the time they were regarded as the unpolished works of a depressed, crazy man and commercially worthless. Jo thought differently. She had no formal art training, but she loved his work and her instincts told her that Vincent was (as Theo had come to believe) a genius.
Jo also inherited hundreds of letters that Vincent wrote and received, most exchanged with Theo. Jo read and re-read those letters, initially to feel closer to Theo, but she was also captivated by Vincent’s compassion and intelligence. She decided the world should read them too. It was part of her plan: to organize exhibitions, lobby critics, and publicize the letters, which showed how vulnerable and anguished Vincent was, yes, but also how deliberate he was in his craft and how close Vincent and Theo were to each other. Eventually, in 1914, Jo succeeded in publishing Vincent’s letters in an ambitious three-volume book, which today is considered one of the most revealing and important works of art history.
An infamous ear
As much as she would play a vital role in propelling him to fame, Jo was also someone who unwittingly played a part in Vincent’s self-destructive descent, something she at times admitted feeling guilt about after his death. Jo understood Vincent was lonely and that he became more isolated after she married his brother.
That infamous act of self-mutilation, when Vincent cut off his ear, happened the very day Vincent likely received the surprising news that Theo and Jo were engaged, triggering what some Van Gogh experts, including Martin Bailey, suspect were unquenchable fears that Theo might eventually abandon him.
And Vincent shot himself just days after a stressful visit with Jo and Theo in Paris. Theo was thinking about quitting his job to start his own business, which meant, for a time, no income. The couple (who by now had a baby son they named after Vincent) hoped to rent a better apartment on a lower floor. But budgets were tight, arguments ensued, and Vincent eventually rushed out of the apartment, unable to shake the thought that he was a burden that Theo would or could no longer bear.
Jo didn’t seek to put herself at the center of this story, but she is there, nonetheless. A surprisingly relatable woman (at times insecure, at times doggedly persistent), she courageously stood up to the male-dominated art world as a champion for Vincent and spent 30 years of her life promoting his work and life story in Holland, Germany, France, England, and even, for a time, in America.
Interestingly, of all the paintings Jo inherited, no one—not Jo or Theo or Vincent—considered The Starry Night one of Vincent’s best. Vincent didn’t even sign it. Research recently published by the Van Gogh Museum points out that Vincent signed only about 16% of his paintings, hypothesizing he did so usually when he was completely satisfied or wanted to make them a gift to friends or family. In the brothers’ correspondence, The Starry Night was referred to rather than named. Theo called it simply “the village in the moonlight,” critically writing to Vincent that “I feel that the search for style takes away the real sentiment of things.”
Vincent conceded the painting lacked character and considered it a mistake that “…once again I’m allowing myself to do stars too big…new setback, and I’ve had enough of that.”
Jo also didn’t seem to consider The Starry Night as especially important. She sold it early on but reacquired it briefly in time for a major exhibition she organized in Amsterdam in 1905. It was painting number 199, called De Sterren (The Stars), and it changed hands two more times before MoMA acquired it in 1941. By then, it had been rechristened The Starry Night. The name stuck.
There is a world of personal stories behind the paintings of Vincent van Gogh, and they reaffirm an old adage: we can’t separate the art from the artist. I believe Jo would agree.
Paul Duelo, the man from California I met while admiring MoMA’s The Starry Night, lit up when I told him about Jo van Gogh-Bonger.
He had never heard of her before.
But he wanted to know more.
If you or someone you know may be experiencing a mental-health crisis or contemplating suicide, call or text 988.