Posthumous Fame of Vincent Van Gogh - Early Promoters

Early Promoters

Probably it is little more than for curiosity that one of the first mentions of Van Gogh in newspapers was printed in Arles. September 30, 1888, L'Homme de Bronze told its readers

"Mr. Vincent, impressionist painter, works in the night, as we are assured, in the glow of the gas lanterns on one of our public places."

Earlier this year, Van Gogh's contribution to the exhibition of the Artists Indépendants has been reviewed.

Notes on Van Gogh's exhibits were again published in 1889, amongst them a review by the Dutch painter Joseph Jacob Isaacson, a friend of Meyer de Haan and Theo van Gogh, printed in the 17 August 1889 issue of the Amsterdam weekly De Portefeuille. Vincent felt more troubled than honoured, and asked Isaacson to stop writing about him.

But there was no chance to turn the wheel back: January 1890 - in the first issue refounding the Mercure de France - Albert Aurier published his enthusiastic essay 'Les Isolés: Vincent van Gogh', on which Vincent's fame as an artist is based as well as Aurier's as a leading art critic.

Another voice was that of Octave Mirbeau whose review article 'Vincent van Gogh' in L'Echo de Paris on 1 March 1891. Later that year Van Gogh's friend Émile Bernard contributed short pieces on Van Gogh for La Plume and Les Hommes d’aujourd’hui.

Julius Meier-Graefe wrote influentially of Van Gogh, his publications including: Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst (Stuttgart, 1904 and later Munich 1927), Über Vincent van Gogh, Sozialistische Monatshefte (February 1906), Vincent van Gogh (Munich 1912), and Van Gogh der Zeichner (Berlin, 1928, published by Otto Wacker).

In the English-speaking world, the Bloomsbury art critics Roger Fry and Clive Bell were his first champions. Fry, in a 1924 essay, "Vincent Van Gogh," reported that after Van Gogh's death, he "disappeared" and "scarcely any picture dealer in Bond Street gave him another thought" until the 1910 show titled "Post Impressionist Exhibition" in which "his works dazzled, astonished and infuriated all cultured England." Fry's essay canonized Van Gogh as "a saint" of art, "the victim of the terrible intensity of his convictions—his conviction that somewhere one might lay hold of spiritual values compared with which all other values were of no account." His works gave "an expression in paint for the desperate violence of his spiritual hunger....". That set the agenda for many subsequent Van Gogh studies, which are predominantly biographical to this day. Van Gogh fits modern culture's attempt to find secular substitutes for a religion it no longer believed in, as M.H. Abrams describes in "Natural Supernaturalism" (1970).