The popular image of painter Vincent Van Gogh involves a tortured genius whose paintings are a product of his growing madness and who died as a martyr to his art.
Madison’s Fermat’s Last Theater Co. will try to set the record straight this Thursday – while calling attention to how little artists are paid from the millions their work generates – through its reading of Dear Theo: The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh. Brainchild of Fermat’s President David Simmons, Dear Theo is Fermat’s entry in the World Premiere Wisconsin festival.
“I first ran across a second-hand book of Van Gogh’s letters to his brother more than 35 years ago,” Simmons recalled during a recent phone interview. “Reading them, I realized the public perception of Van Gogh is all wrong.”
Fueled by Irving Stone’s melodramatic novel Lust for Life (1934) and exacerbated by the ensuing film adaptation starring Kirk Douglas (1956), the popular image of Van Gogh ignored his “more reflective and intellectual side,” noted Rachel Esner in the catalogue to the Detroit Institute of Arts’ recent Van Gogh in America exhibit.
Van Gogh’s “concern for solving artistic rather than emotional problems with his painting – both of which are fully manifest in his letters – would henceforth be entirely ignored by the public and scholars alike,” Esner continues.
“People think that Van Gogh’s madness produced the paintings, with their vivid colors and wild swirls,” Simmons said to me. “But it’s the opposite. It’s when Van Gogh would recover from his attacks that he was productive as a painter.”
Running approximately 75 minutes and accompanied by images of Van Gogh’s paintings, Fermat’s show will revolve around Melvin Hinton’s reading from the letters – which, narrator Maggie Schenk will inform us through an introduction, “stand alone as great literature.” Violinist Diana Wheeler will provide musical accompaniment.
Dear Theo will draw on letters covering the final two-plus years of Van Gogh’s life, involving the productive period in Provence during which Van Gogh made many of the paintings with which the public is most familiar.
“I want to get across that Van Gogh is well read,” Simmons said. “That he spoke four languages. That he had a detailed knowledge of the history of Western painting. That he was conscious of his place in art history, and knew he was making important advances in a new direction.”
Paying Artists Fairly
In addition to setting the record straight on Van Gogh’s life and work, Simmons hopes Dear Theo can bring attention to the stunning disconnect between the prodigious revenue artists generate and how little of it they themselves ever see.
“Fermat is a political theater,” Simmons pointed out, alluding to its mission-driven commitment to “stage works of theater and literature that confront issues of injustice” and to “engage the community and audience in dialogue about the social, cultural, and political issues raised by the works we perform.”
Simmons hopes that a post-reading discussion on Thursday can highlight what the letters themselves make clear: “the issue of money was central to Van Gogh’s life.”
“Van Gogh was supported by his brother during the last eleven years of his life and died penniless,” Simmons noted. “Meanwhile, just last year a Van Gogh painting sold at auction for $117.2 million.” That painting, Van Gogh’s Orchard with Cypresses (1888), had belonged to Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.
“There’s a fraught relationship between art and money,” Simmons said. “Why doesn’t Wisconsin support art and the artists who make it?,” he asked, noting that Wisconsin ranks 49th among 50 states in public per capita arts spending, at just 14 cents per capita (conversely, the figure for next-door Minnesota is $7.34 per capita).
In this context, Simmons had especially high praise for a new program in Ireland, where the government is paying 2,000 artists a no-strings attached guaranteed basic income of more than $18,000 per year for three consecutive years.
“Programs like the one in Ireland allow people to focus on their art rather than working an extra shift at Starbucks,” Simmons said.
Art for the People
In his excellent, provocatively titled Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech (2020), arts critic William Deresiewicz notes that the chronic underfunding of the arts in America doesn’t just drive artists to seek other careers.
It also diminishes how much art is made by everyday people rather than those from disproportionately privileged backgrounds. That economically driven winnowing then risks distorting the relationship between the art being made and the world it purports to represent.
Bottom line: truly democratic art requires art made by and for the people. All the people.
“Van Gogh wasn’t focusing on biblical scenes and classical subjects,” Simmons said. “He was focused on the here and now: This is what a landscape looks like. These are the real people – the potato eaters, the reapers, the sowers, the post man – who live and work in it. ‘I am not that different from you,’ his paintings tell us. ‘I suffer and am poor like you.’”
Simmons hopes that by seeing Van Gogh’s art in a new light, Fermat’s audience might come to see Van Gogh himself as “a person rather than a rock star.” At the Van Gogh exhibit in Detroit, I watched in dismay as his paintings become an excuse for narcissistic selfies. Conversely, Van Gogh had hoped his art might help us understand him and his world.
“I hope people hear Vincent’s plea to be understood and to be recognized,” Simmons said. “Not in a flashy way, but as one saying, ‘here I am. Do you see what I’m trying to do? The world is so beautiful. Do you see that? That beauty is in a pair of shoes and in a starry night. Take some time and look at the world.’”
The Fermat’s Last Theater Co. reading of Dear Theo: The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh takes place at 7:30 pm this Thursday, April 13, at the Arts & Literature Lab, 111 S. Livingston St. in Madison. For more information, visit https://worldpremierewisconsin.com/event/dear-theo-the-letters-of-vincent-van-gogh/.
