Van Gogh’s Incarnational Art
In 1887, while he was living and painting in the south of France, Vincent van Gogh painted a series of self-portraits depicting himself in a straw hat and blue smock, an outfit the French artist Aldophe Monticelli was known for wearing. Art critic Kathleen Powers Erickson claims this imitation was van Gogh’s attempt to channel one of his favorite artists, as if putting on the outfit of Monticelli would bring the artist alive in him: “I myself think about Monticelli a great deal down here,” he wrote. “He was a strong man — a little, even very, cracked — dreaming of sunshine and love and gaiety, but always frustrated by poverty, a colourist’s extremely refined taste, a man of rare breeding, carrying on the best ancient traditions.”[1] Van Gogh started to paint like Monticelli: “I’m forced to lay the paint on thickly, à la Monticelli. Sometimes I really believe I’m continuing that man’s work…”[2] Van Gogh imbibed the spirit of the artist, imitating him through his work, actions, words, and dress.
Monticelli is only one example of the many people van Gogh admired and imitated throughout his life. As a young man, he wished to imitate his father Theodorus, who was a Dutch Reformed Calvinist pastor. During his many years of clerical studies, van Gogh discovered Thomas a Kempis’ Imitation of Christ and fully embraced Kempis’ creed to forsake the world and embrace the life of Christ through imitation. Even after his eventual rejection of institutional religion, at a point in his life many mark to be the start of his artistic career, van Gogh continued to pursue this Christian imitation. He could never shake off entirely his deeply religious upbringing, but instead brought it into the world of art. Van Gogh believed that art, “although produced by man’s hands is not created by hands alone, but by something which wells up from a deeper source out of our soul.”[3] I contend that one cannot understand van Gogh’s art, and consequently his artistic mission, without understanding the role that spiritual imitation played in his life and work.
When van Gogh discovered Kempis he wrote to his brother Theo, “[I] am also busy copying out the whole of [Imitation of Christ] ...that book is sublime, and he who wrote it must have been a man after God’s heart… there are words so deep and serious that one cannot read them without emotion and almost fear.”[4] Kempis preached that in order for a Christian to follow Christ, he must “endeavor, above all things, to know, love and imitate my Redeemer, content to suffer all for Him and in Him, that I may one day reign with Him!”[5] He argued that in order for this imitation to occur, the Christian must resign himself to God’s will. As St. Paul tells the Corinthians, “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.”[6] Once a Christian resigns himself and imitates Christ, he experiences a participation in the life of the God-Man; “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2:19). In a letter to his brother Theo, Van Gogh reveals a piercing, interior longing for this participation in the mysterious life of Christ, using the language of bondage: “I am still far from being what I want to be, but with God’s help I shall succeed. I want to be bound to Christ with unbreakable bonds and to feel these bonds. To be sorrowful yet always rejoicing. To live in and for Christ, to be one of the poor in His kingdom.”[7] This language of “unbreakable bonds” is strikingly similar to that of Kempis, when he implores, “Join me to thyself with an inseparable bond of love.”[8] It is the language of renouncement; the Christian gives up his will, in total acceptance of God’s will.
We see van Gogh living out this Kempis philosophy in 1878, when he became a missionary pastor for a coal-mining district in Belgium. During this time, he refused to be treated as a privileged pastor and lived in the extreme asceticism of the Imitation of Christ. He denied himself physical pleasure and comfort by eating little and even refusing to sleep in any accommodations more luxurious than the miners’. He stated; “God wants man to live and walk humbly upon the earth, in imitation of Christ, minding not high things, but condescending to men of low estate, learning from the gospel to be meek and lowly in heart.”[9]
This strict ascetic life alarmed the leaders of the Dutch Reformed Church, and they subsequently laicized him. This ingrained resentment toward institutionalized religion within Van Gogh, and he abandoned the Church. And yet, Van Gogh retained some interior element of Christianity — a memory that recurs and resurfaces in his later works. He kept this Christian sense of imitation from Kempis and it began to develop in his vision as an artist. Many years after his rejection of religion, van Gogh describes Christ as an artist to his friend Emile Bernard:
But the consolation of this so saddening Bible...the consolation it contains, like a kernel inside a hard husk, a bitter pulp — is Christ... Liv[ing] serenely as an artist greater than all artists, disdaining marble and clay and paint, working in living flesh. This extraordinary artist, hardly conceivable with the obtuse instrument of our nervous and stupefied modern brains, made neither statues nor paintings nor even books..... he states it loud and clear, he made living men, immortals. These reflections, my dear old Bernard — take us a very long way — a very long way — raising us above art itself. They enable us to glimpse [at] the art of making life, the art of being immortal, alive…The passage about John the Baptist that you dug out of the Gospel is absolutely what you saw in it... People pressing around somebody — ‘art thou the Christ, art thou Elias?’ As it would be in our day to ask Impressionism or one of its searcher-representatives, ‘have you found it?’ That’s just it.[10]
Whereas in his early life van Gogh related to Christ as the “Man of Sorrows,” he now, after his rejection of the Church, admires Him as the ultimate artist, sculpting art from living flesh. He still believes that he can learn something from Christ and further that the mission of artists lies in him. In his work, Art and Scholasticism, Maritain describes the artist as akin to God, both in his power to create and in his prophetic power. Maritain highlights the prophetic role of the artist — the ability to see the principles of nature, the “mystery of a form” — and portray it in a way pleasing and familiar to the public:
And no doubt the artist perceives this form in the created world, whether exterior or interior: he does not discover it complete in the sole contemplation of his creative spirit, for he is not, like God, the cause of things. But it is his eye and his spirit that have perceived and uncovered it; and it must itself be alive within him, must have taken on human life in him, must live in his intelligence with an intellectual life and in his heart and his flesh with a sensitive life, in order for him to be able to communicate it to matter in the work he makes. Thus the work bears the mark of the artist; it is the offspring of his soul and his spirit.[11]
In other words, the artist is the seer of forms, who reproduces them in his medium. “Have you found it?” a modern man asks an Impressionist, echoing the people in the desert who ask the Prophet if he has found the Messiah. The artist, to both van Gogh and Maritain, is the modern day prophet, who speaks through his canvas. In this way, the artist imitates Christ, the ultimate prophetic artist.
This Christian sense of imitation permeated into even van Gogh’s secular admirations. Erickson explains, “van Gogh was always adopting the styles, goals and personalities of others he admired,”[12] and implementing them into his own work. For instance, during his time in Paris, his art changed from his early dark palette to brighter and more color palette, reflecting the styles of the great Impressionists. But, van Gogh’s imitation takes a step farther. More than just taking inspiration from those he loves, he took on the personalities and artistic missions of others, which points to a more conscious use of imitation, which we may call participation. Van Gogh wishes to somehow share in the life of the artist, in a way similar to Kempis’ use of imitation in the life of a Christian.
Aldophe Monticelli, whom I mentioned in the introduction, was an artist who preceded the Impressionists. Van Gogh admired him, and through dressing up and painting like him, strove to imitate Monticelli and continue his artistic mission. In his Self Portrait with Straw Hat, we see a colorful background framing the headshot of van Gogh, who is wearing a straw hat and blue smock. He gazes at the viewer with pursed lips and intense gaze, indicative of an interior struggle. Van Gogh believed that the artist was physically more vigorous than him, and hoped that he would one day have the same vigor. Just as in his early years, van Gogh “puts on Christ” as St. Paul commands, he now “puts on Monticelli,” not only through painting and costume, but by striving to continue Monticelli’s artistic vision and legacy. Van Gogh feels a connection to Monticelli personally but also locally, due to the fact that he lived nearby, as if he can feel the remaining spirit of Monticelli within the Southern landscape. “He died in Marseille, rather sadly and probably after going through a real Gethsemane. Ah well, I myself am sure that I’ll carry him on here as if I were his son or his brother.”[13] If van Gogh can wear the costume of Monticelli, paint like him, live near and be like him, then he can extend the life and work of the Italian artist.
In May of 1889, van Gogh admitted himself into the St. Paul asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, longing for physical and mental healing. His room was small and empty and he painted to distract himself from pain: “Work distracts me infinitely better than anything else, and if I could once really throw myself into it with all my energy that might possibly be the best remedy.”[14] Somehow, while in this morbid environment, van Gogh painted works that would later become some of the world's most famous paintings: The Starry Night, Irises, and The Reaper, to name a few. However, the two most striking paintings made during this time are relatively unknown: The Pieta and The Raising of Lazarus. These two paintings, along with The Good Samaritan, are by far van Gogh’s most overtly religious paintings. Critics have disregarded them because they are copies of paintings by artists Rembrandt and Delacroix that van Gogh’s brother Theo had gifted him. However, Erickson states that van Gogh could never truly uproot his love for Christ, and his life was “continuous religious pilgrimage… ending [at St. Remy] with a recovery of some of his more traditional Christian beliefs.”[15]
This “recovery” of Christian beliefs can be seen in the love that van Gogh had for these religious prints. He was determined to copy them, as he said, “Heaps of people don’t copy. Heaps of others do copy – for me, I set myself to it by chance, and I find that it teaches and above all sometimes consoles.”[16] Van Gogh makes the prints his own; in both color and subject. As he put it, “[it] is much rather to translate them into another language than to copy them.”[17] The act of copying is not just an act of reflection, but an imitation that transforms the object imitated. To illustrate, let us look more closely at the Pieta, and the Raising of Lazarus.
In this moving canvas, we see the Virgin Mary painted in deep hues of blue, van Gogh’s symbol of divine being.[18] With outstretched arms, she gestures to us to look at the crucified Christ lying at her feet. Christ, limp and lacerated, is wrapped in white linen, has reddish hair, a scruffy red beard, and a long narrow face. It is the face of van Gogh himself. The Pieta is van Gogh’s cry for his own passion. By painting himself as Christ, he enters into Christ’s sufferings, in an attempt to redeem his own. Van Gogh perceives himself as the one carrying the cross, hoping and yearning for redemption. In this painting we see van Gogh’s Imitation of Christ, through art. In a letter to Theo, van Gogh relates how much he relied on this print during this time, as a source of consolation: “I am not indifferent, and even when suffering, sometimes religious thoughts bring me great consolation. So this last time during my illness an unfortunate accident happened to me -- that lithograph of Delacroix’s Pieta, along with some other sheets, fell into some oil and paint and was ruined. I was very distressed -- then in the meantime I have been busy painting it… I hope it has feeling.”[19]
Similarly, in the Raising of Lazarus we see van Gogh’s affinity for the famous biblical character. Lazarus’ face has also been transformed into van Gogh’s. He appears to be at death’s door, lying weakly in the tomb, but he is in fact newly risen. Van Gogh relates to this deep sense of frailty and yearns for renewal. In 1889, he wrote the following:
During the attacks, I feel a coward before the pain and suffering -- more of a coward than I ought to be, and it is perhaps this very moral cowardice which, whereas I had no desire to get better before, makes me eat like two now, work hard, limit my relations with other patients for fear of a relapse -- altogether I am now trying to recover like a man who meant to commit suicide and finding the water too cold, tries to regain the bank.[20]
By replacing the face of Christ in The Pieta as well as the face of Lazarus in The Raising of Lazarus, van Gogh hopes to become like these figures of resurrection and to cease being a coward before the face of pain and suffering. In a way, these paintings are self-portraits, ones in which we see van Gogh consciously reflecting on how he can imitate and participate in the characters he paints. Art critic Roger de Piles claims that “a true painting must draw in the viewer by the force and great truth of its imitation, and… the surprised viewer must respond, as if entering into a conversation with the figures that it depicts.”[21] In these works, Van Gogh is that viewer, who enters into a dialogue with his subjects by translating them into a personal reflection. By painting himself as Christ and Lazarus, he desires to imitate and participate in their redemption and life. It is his attempt at “ultimate triumph over suffering…[and] his desire for a mystical union with the divine.”[22] As scholar Gregory J. Walters states, “[i]f there ever were a modern man who attempted to follow the imitatio Christi, then it was Vincent van Gogh.”[23]
In his ideal world, van Gogh saw every artist as a prophet for modern man. He saw himself as this prophet. For van Gogh, art is a holy medium, in which the artist can prophesy and imitate Christ — and others — to the fullest. The artist and the Christian share this ability: to take on another being and be transformed in that being, to find oneself through the mask of another. Van Gogh compares the Impressionists with John the Baptist, the prophet who announced that the Truth Incarnate was coming into the world to set man free. The Impressionists are likewise prophets, showing modern man the way to truth through the medium of art. Scholar David Nichols supports this, saying van Gogh “aspire[d] to the role of the Baptist, herald of a new age.”[24] Van Gogh fully believed that art was the new way of evangelization, that a painting would replace the sermon.
However, van Gogh not only wished to be a prophet. He desired to imitate Christ as artist and creator. He wanted his art to breathe and come alive on his canvas. Nichols explains it thus:
It would not be overreaching to say that van Gogh strove in his paintings for something akin to incarnation—to place us in the world the right way, all over again. In fact his astonishing thick layering of paints, almost gelato in appearance, often had a flesh-like quality about it. The paints could never be tangible enough for him it seems: he could not resist on occasion mixing into them the grass, sand and grit taken from his studied landscaped.[25]
This is yet another way in which van Gogh sought to imitate Christ as artist. He hoped that his art would have an incarnational effect; that its viewers would see his paintings surge and swell with color, motion, and life. He wished to create life itself, not resisting blending and molding pieces of his subject into his paint.
It’s no wonder that van Gogh had such holy reverence for his favorite artists, for he believed they were achieving this level of incarnational art. “Ah Millet! Millet! How that fellow painted humanity and the ‘something on high’, familiar and yet solemn. These days, to think that [Delacroix] wept as he started painting,[26] that Giotto, that Angelico painted on their knees… Who are we Impressionists to act like them already?...”[27] This is van Gogh’s artistic vision: to be able to see divinity infused in all of creation; to be a prophet for the modern man. The artist should be moved by the truth and realness of his painting, as Delacroix was when he wept before his creation. As van Gogh recalls walking into a room full of Millet paintings, “When I entered the room in Hôtel Drouot where [the paintings] were exhibited, I felt something akin to: Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.”[28]
[1] Vincent van Gogh, “Vincent van Gogh, The Letters,” Van Gogh Museum, October 2009, accessed May 5, 2019, http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters.html, Arles, 26 Aug. 1888.
[2] Van Gogh, Letters, Arles, 26 Sep. 1888.
[3] Van Gogh, Letters, Antwerp, 16 Jan. 1886.
[4] Letters, Amsterdam, 4 Sept. 1877.
[5] Thomas a Kempis, Imitation of Christ (Veritatis Splendor Publication, 2014), 109.
[6] The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1966), 1 Corinthians 11:1.
[7] Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh, (London: Penguin Press, 1997), 24.
[8] Kempis, Imitation of Christ, 211.
[9] Van Gogh, Letters, Borinage, 26 Dec. 1878.
[10] Van Gogh, Letters, Arles, 26 June 1888.
[11] Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism (Charleston: Nabu Press, 2010).
[12] Kathleen Powers Erickson, At Eternity’s Gate: The Spiritual Vision of Vincent Van Gogh, (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co, 1998), 109.
[13] Van Gogh, Letters, Arles, 26 August 1888.
[14] Van Gogh, Letters, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, 2 September 1889.
[15] Erickson, At Eternity’s Gate: The Spiritual Vision of Vincent Van Gogh, 154.
[16] Van Gogh, Letters, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, 20 September 1889.
[17] Van Gogh, Letters, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, 3 November 1889.
[18] Van Gogh was particularly interested in the power of symbolic color, an idea that would later become absolutely massive in modern art: “I still have hopes of finding something in [the study of colour]. To express the love of two lovers through a marriage of two complementary colours, their mixture and their contrasts, the mysterious vibrations of adjacent tones. To express the thought of a forehead through the radiance of a light tone on a dark background. To express hope through some star. The ardour of a living being through the rays of a setting sun.” (Arles, 3 September 1888).
[19] Erickson, At Eternity’s Gate: The Spiritual Vision of Vincent Van Gogh, 158.
[20] Erickson, At Eternity’s Gate: The Spiritual Vision of Vincent Van Gogh, 142.
[21] Van Hoogstraten, The Visible World, 161.