Description
The definitive Van Gogh — all 900 pages of him. Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographers of Jackson Pollock, spent a decade on Van Gogh: The Life, and it shows. This is the most complete, most psychologically penetrating portrait of the tortured genius ever written, drawing on the full correspondence and years of fresh research across Europe.
Forget the ear-severing caricature. Naifeh and Smith give us Vincent whole: the failed preacher, the devoted brother, the ferociously disciplined worker who produced some 2,000 artworks in a single decade. Their account of the final years — the asylum, the portraits, the wheatfields — is as thrilling as any novel, and their controversial theory about his death will keep you arguing for weeks.
If you read one art biography this year, make it this one. Long, rich, and utterly absorbing — the rare doorstopper that earns every page. You will finish it feeling you knew him.
Van Gogh: The Life
Van Gogh: The Life by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith is the sweeping, definitive biography of Vincent van Gogh — the result of a decade of research into the letters, documents, and paintings of one of history’s most beloved artists. Published in 2011, it became a New York Times bestseller and was hailed by the Van Gogh Museum as the biography for decades to come.
The authors — Pulitzer Prize winners for Jackson Pollock: An American Saga — follow Vincent from his troubled youth in the Netherlands to the sunlit fields of Arles and Saint-Rémy, tracing the family tensions, the turbulent friendship with Paul Gauguin, and the devotion of his brother Theo. Drawing on thousands of letters and previously untapped sources, they challenge old myths about the artist’s madness and death, presenting a fuller, more human portrait.
A landmark biography
Rich in detail and beautifully paced, Van Gogh: The Life is essential reading for art lovers, students of art history, and anyone drawn to the man behind The Starry Night and Sunflowers.
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