THE INSPIRATION PLACE PODCAST
Miriam Schulman: Van Gogh definitely did give up. But Jo Van Gogh never. That is the real story of why Van Gogh became famous.
Speaker 2: It’s the Inspiration Place podcast with artist Miriam Schulman. Welcome to the Inspiration Place podcast, an art world inside a podcast for artists by an artist where each week we go behind the scenes to uncover the perspiration and inspiration behind the art. And now your host, Miriam Schulman.
Miriam Schulman: Well, hey there, it’s Miriam Schulman and you’re listening to episode number 307 of the Inspiration Place podcast. I am so pumped up right now to do this episode. I was on my phone and there were these two trolls underneath one of my ads. And I get the best podcast ideas from responding to trolls. So here we go. This is going to be super fun. There is something that I say and I get a lot of flack about that. And that is anyone can make a thriving living from their art and talent is not the deciding factor. And it gets a lot of people very, very upset. So in case you haven’t heard me talk about this before, we all know very, very talented people who struggle and we all know less talented people who rise the top.
Now, this little clip has been playing on the socials in a reel, both on Instagram and Facebook. And I think it was on Facebook. I’m just gonna see if I can pull it out. I’m not gonna say the trolls’ names, because I’m just not. Hold on, let me just see if I can find it. I think this person responded about a week ago, and I didn’t realize that she was being sarcastic. So she said, art is not about talent, never has been, never will be. And she was being sarcastic, but I couldn’t really tell. And then somebody else responded, but talent definitely wins out on the long run. Look at Van Gogh, by the way, this troll spend it Van Gogh, not Van, V-O-N, Van Gogh, one of the greatest masters. He sold one painting his entire life, but he never gave up. That’s courage and talent.
Okay, so there’s lots of things wrong with the statement. First of all, he committed suicide. If that’s not giving up, I’m not quite sure what is. I mean, I know he had mental illness, but yeah, committing suicide is a form of giving, I would think. And it’s not courage and talent. It’s not, yes, he’s very talented, but let’s talk about what made him famous. It’s not because somebody discovered him. It’s not even because of his brother. So his brother was an art dealer, Theo. Here is the real reason why Van Gogh became famous. We’re gonna back up. I love the story. So in 1885, a 22-year-old Dutch woman named Johanna Bonger met Theo Van Gogh, and he’s the younger brother of Vincent. And Theo was making a name of himself as an art dealer and Paris. So those are the two brothers, okay? And he married her right away. Her name was Jo and she was raised in a middle-class family. Her father was the editor of a shipping newspaper. So I’m gonna back up in a minute, but I just wanna jump straight ahead to the punchline.
And that is that, you know, we do know the story about Vincent Van Gogh passing away, committing suicide rather. But what most people don’t know is that his brother Theo died several months after his brother did. He suffered a complete physical collapse and he died of syphilis which he, of course, got from not his wife, but from going to brothels. So he died in 1891. And this was less than two years after he got married to Jo. So now I’m gonna back up and tell you the story about Jo, because Jo is really the heroine of this entire story. If it wasn’t for Van Gogh’s sister-in-law, Jo, we’d all be like, Van Gogh who? I’m serious. She is the real reason he was made famous because he, like we all know, he only sold one painting during his lifetime and Theo died right after Vincent did. So it was not Theo who made his career. It was Jo. So she got married to him when she was 22 and they actually got married like after only meeting a few times.
He asked her to marry him after they only met a few times and she was dating somebody else. So at first she said no, but he really pursued her. Apparently he was very attractive. He was thin, he was pale, but he was like very worldly. And she liked the idea of being in an artistic family and surrounded by art and intellectualism. So that was her attraction to him. So eventually he did win her over and about a year and a half after they met, she agreed to marry him. Now they were in Paris, which was a wonderful place to be in this time. As you know, this is like the blooming of the Impressionist movement. It was really an amazing time in Paris. And Theo was not just any art dealer. He was at this forefront, he was specializing in dealing the kind of art that most dealers wouldn’t touch. So he was dealing the impressionists. So Theo van Gogh was like their savior. He was the one leading that charge. So this is also how Vincent was able to cultivate these friendships. So Theo dealt art for Gauguin, Pissarro, and Toulouse-Lautrec. These were the avant-garde in Paris, and Jo was exposed to all this art and all of these avant-garde artists.
And since the beginning of their marriage, Theo would talk about his tortured genius brother. So she was very much aware of kind of Vincent and their apartment was full of Vincent’s paintings and new crates were always being shipped to him. I think he only actually, by the way, painted for like 10 years. So he spent this career in France, Belgium, England, the Netherlands, and he was turning out canvases at very manic pace, sometimes one a day, olive trees, wheat fields, peasants, the sun, yellow skies, peach blossoms, gnarled trunks, you know, all the art that we know and love. And he was shipping them all to Theo in hopes that Theo would find a market for them the same way Theo marketed Gauguin’s work and Pissarro’s work. However, Theo didn’t have very much success attracting buyers for Vincent’s works. But Jo did like them.
Now, a little bit more than nine months after their wedding night, Jo gave birth to their son and she named her son after the brother Vincent. So she named her son Vincent. As much as Theo adored his brother, he also constantly worried about him. He’s very aware of his deteriorating mental state. By the time Jo came on the scene, Van Gogh, and whenever I refer to Van Gogh without using his first name, just know I mean Vincent. Van Gogh was already sleeping outside in the winter. He was an alcoholic. He was drinking alcohol and coffee and tobacco and doing as much as he can with that. He had gonorrhea. He wasn’t bathing. His teeth were rotting. He cut off his ear. And he also was fighting with his friends. So he was distancing himself from artists and others who actually might have helped him. He was like very, very difficult. So when he cut off his ear was actually right before Theo and Jo announced their engagement. So Vincent was in Arles. That’s when he cut off his ear after having a fight with Gauguin. Now, Vincent was always fascinated by the night sky in Arles, hence Starry Starry Night.
He wrote in a letter to Theo about this painting. The blue depth of stars were sparkling, greenish, yellow, white, pink, more brilliant than emeralds, rubies, sapphires. And he became fixated on the idea of painting such a sky. He also was influenced by the poetry of Walt Whitman, whose work was especially popular in France, and he interpreted the poet as equating the great starry firmament with God and eternity. So Starry Starry Night also references the poetry of Walt Whitman. When he sent the finished painting to Theo, and also Jo, he enclosed a note explaining that it was an exaggeration. The Starry Night continued his progression away from realism. And Theo didn’t like it. Theo did not like Starry Night. He thought it was disturbing. He thought it was an example of his brother’s disturbed mental state. He didn’t feel that buyers were going to understand it. So he wrote back to Vincent, I consider that your strongest when you’re doing realism. But what he said was real things. But he did send him more money.
Now, when he came in to visit Vincent and Jo in 1890, so this is, if you’ll remember, I think this is not quite two years later, Jo thought he would be like this enfeebled mental patient because this is the way that Theo talked about him. But instead, he was basically as animated as his canvases. So here’s what she said about Vincent. “Before me was a sturdy, broad-shouldered man with a healthy color, a cheerful look in his eye, and something very resolute within his appearance.” And this is from her journals. This is where scholars get this. And then she added, he actually looks much stronger than Theo, which is interesting, because I don’t know if she was aware that her husband was going to die very shortly after a syphilis. So next what happened is Theo arranged for Vincent to stay in the village north of Paris in the care of Dr. Paul Gachet. So he hoped that this doctor’s homeopathic approach would cure him.
But history writes that a few weeks later is when Vincent van Gogh killed himself. He shot himself. Now, there is some dispute that he didn’t kill himself. You know, everybody likes a good controversy, but I think the research is pretty clear that he did kill himself. Theo arrived in the village in time to say goodbye to his brother, but he was devastated. He had supported his brother financially and emotionally over the last 10 years in an effort to really cultivate him as an artist, not just because it’s his brother and he loved him, but he felt that there was talent there. However, like I said earlier, less than three months after Vincent’s death, Theo suffered a complete physical collapse. He died of syphilis. He began hallucinating and he died in January of 1891. And so that was less than two years after Jo married Theo van Gogh. Now, she had 400 paintings and several hundred drawings by her brother-in-law. So yes, it is true that Van Gogh has talent, no one’s going to dispute that. However, this was really Jo’s survival strategy. What happened next is in large part thanks to Jo Van Gogh Banger. She’s a small woman. She was riddled with self-doubt, as many of us are. She had no background in art or business. And she faced an art world that was completely male dominated. And it’s only recently that she’s getting credit for everything by the way that she did. It’s because of her that we know Van Gogh as Van Gogh.
So how do we now know about the story? Honestly, this had been buried for a very long time and it wasn’t until, let me get this name right, which I’m sure I’m gonna butcher. I’m so sorry if you speak Dutch, cause I don’t. Luijten? Anyway, Luijten was very interested in researching and did a very thorough research project of Vincent and the brother and his life. But here’s the question. This is the question that the researchers had to answer, and no one had really adequately answered it. How exactly did the tortured genius who alienated dealers and artists and otherwise thwarted his own ambition time and time again, how did he rise to become a star? And not just a star, but one of the most beloved figures in the history of art. And the answer is Jo. Now she was previously known to have played a role in building his reputation, but that role was thought to have been modest and that presumption is probably based on a combination of sexes, but maybe some common sense, since she really didn’t have a background in the art business. However, there were some intriguing clues for those really interested enough to look, could find them. So here are some letters that they found that really prompted researchers to dig into what role Jo played and help uncover the truth about Van Gogh and the truth of his fame. The sources they used to uncover this are first of all the letters, and second was Jo’s own diary. Her diary had been kept under lock and key since her death in 1925.
Remember the brother died, we said, was it 1891? The brother died in 1891 and she died in 1925. So about 30 years later or 35 years later. The diary had been kept under lock and key since her death in 1925. The researchers say it’s not that they were unwilling to acknowledge her role, it’s just that this was outside the norms for what was considered modest for a woman. So Vincent, Jo’s son, remember Jo and they named their son Vincent after the brother Vincent van Gogh, it’s not that he didn’t want the world to know of his mother’s relationship, but they didn’t want her privacy to be violated. I’m not sure if I totally buy that, by the way. I’m just like kind of reading through these details at the same time that I’m helping you understand it as well. I remember learning about Jo when I visited Amsterdam. This was some time ago. It was before the pandemic, so at least six years ago. And it says here in this article, and the article that I’m referring to is in the New York Times.
That has a very good write-up about it. So 2009, they asked Jo’s grandson, Johann van Gogh, if he could see the diary, and they let the researchers read the diary. And that is available at the Van Gogh Museum website and also the library. So here is what they found in the diary. The very first entry in the diary turned out to be a collection of simple lined notebooks, like the kind used by children, like composition books. She started it when she was 17, five years before she met Theo, and she didn’t have a lot of options as a woman. She was very aware of this in those diaries. Like when she was 17, she was writing about really not wanting to lead a narrow life, really wanted to having to achieve something in her life. So this was very exciting. This was like the first clue that she really was a determined person who had a lot of ambition for leaving a legacy behind in her life.
This led, again, I’m totally butchering his name, but I’ll spell it for you and I will put it in the show notes. L-U-I-J-T-E-N. Lushton? I’m not sure. So once he came across the diary, that’s what led to him deciding to write a biography of Jo and he worked on that for 10 years. He in total devoted 25 years of his research career, his academic career, towards working on Van Gogh, Theo Van Gogh, Vincent Van Gogh and Jo Van Gogh. So it’s a very important piece of art scholarship. So let’s back up. Now I wanna give you like the main facts that I knew about. Like I’m kinda giving you a lot of extra details that maybe you don’t need. But remember the main thing was that Vincent Van Gogh commits suicide, Theo dies three months later, and Jo is left with a baby as a widow with several hundred of her brother-in-laws’ paintings. Now she could go back home, like live with her family of origin. That is something she could do. She could start a boarding house. That was something else that she could do. But before leaving Paris, she started a correspondence with the artist Emile Bernard.
One of the few painters whom Vincent did not piss off and still had a good relationship with to see if he might be able to help arrange an exhibition in Paris of her late brother-in-law’s paintings. And Bernard urged her to leave the canvases in Paris instead of taking it with her to her home, home meaning her parents’ home. So his argument was that the French capital was a better place to sell them definitely some sense in this. And perhaps Bernard would be able to sell his work. Now that didn’t happen. If that had happened, Vincent might’ve developed some renown, he might have become to say, like Emile Bernard, but Jo’s instinct told her not to do that and not to trust it with somebody else. So she said, no, no thank you. Very nice of you to offer to sell these paintings for me but I’m gonna do it. And this was amazing. This is part of that ambition and that drive that she had about herself, her purpose in life, and what she wanted to do. What she did decide to do was that she did move all the art, her linens, her silverware, and set up a house and decorated the entire house with all of her brother-in-law’s paintings. In her diary, she had stopped writing in between the time that she moved to Paris with her new husband or her fiance.
And she started writing again her hometown of origin, and she decided that she had two missions in life that her late husband had left her. And her mission in life was to raise the child and sell Vincent’s work. She decided that was her job to do. And I’m laughing now because I’m thinking about how Harry Potter decided it was his job to do the Horcruxes. He couldn’t have anybody help him with that. And this is kind of feeling the same way. It was her job. It was her job to do. She had no training in how to achieve this, but she just got started. In addition to her brother-in-law’s painting, she also inherited a treasure trove of letters that the brothers had exchanged. So she read them. Almost all of them were from Vincent, not from Theo, and her husband had kept them very carefully. It’s not that Theo didn’t write back, it’s just that Vincent wasn’t as careful and fastidious about saving the letters. So there we go. What was interesting about the letters, because Jo had all the documentation about Vincent purpose in creating the art. So she was able to communicate that to other people. She also did a lot of self-education. She did a lot of reading to learn art criticism. She educated herself as much as she could. And she also inspired herself by reading biographies.
She read about George Eliot and she kind of saw herself as being that type of person, how this woman could be under a male pen name. So she saw that now as something that she could do, like having examples of women that she could look up to who were doing ambitious things as well. Now, as a widow, she began to circulate in society. Some of the people she knew in the area were part of a community of artists, poets, intellectuals who founded an art journal called The New Guide. Jo’s diary gives the impression of her attending these events, which would definitely have helped her in her mission to sell Van Gogh’s art. By the end of her first year living on her own and living with Vincent’s paintings surrounding her walls and reading the letters that he wrote to her husband, she had an epiphany. Van Gogh’s letters were part and parcel of the art. This is what I’m always telling you artists, the way you talk about your art, your why, not how did you create it, but your why, just like how I was able to explain to you earlier how the letter said that he was influenced by Walt Whitman when he named the painting Starry Starry Night. That was a key, and Jo saw that. She saw these were the keys to selling these paintings. These letters brought the art and the tragic intensity of a lived life together into a single package. So this is 100% about marketing this tragic genius figure to the public.
Now she did already have the education from having been married to Theo, who dealt with the French impressionists, she did understand that notion of painting authentically. This is what the impressionists were trying to do. They didn’t want to be inauthentic. They appreciated art that looked within for guidance. This is what Monet did. This is what Gauguin did. And not to mention the women who were also part of the impressionist movement, Berthe Morceau, Mary Cassatt. The artist’s biography, meaning Vincent van Gogh’s biography into this story really amplified the artist. Remember, your story matters. Gotta embrace everything that’s weird and different about you. This is what Jo did for van Gogh. The letters that van Gogh wrote to his brother pointed to the audience Vincent had intended. Vincent, who once sought a career as a minister and lived among peasants who humble himself, had wanted to make art that reached beyond the elite and reached directly into the hearts of common people. This is what his intention was of his art. And he also recognized that ordinary working men should have prints in their room which I think is just, it’s kind of hilarious to read that now in the year 2024, when you know like every dorm room for the last 50 years has had van Gogh posters hanging on it. So yes, his dream was realized. One of the other influences that Jo had, she was very influenced by Sunday’s sermons and she wanted to live a life of purpose.
Just before agreeing to marry Theo, she visited Belgium, and the minister whose family she was staying with took her to see the living conditions of the coal mine workers. And this experience shook her to the core and helped fuel what became a lifelong dedication to causes ranging from workers’ rights to female suffrage. Now, she considered herself one of the ordinary people. She did not consider herself part of the aristocracy or part of the elite, especially since she was a widow and she had to work. But after reading her brother-in-law’s words alone in this guest house that she created, this made a huge impact on her. And she wrote in a letter, quote, “‘I felt so desolate that for the first time, “‘I understood what he must have felt “‘in those times when everyone turned away from him. So now she’s going to begin her journey as acting as an agent, an artist agent for Vincent van Gogh. And one of her first moves was to approach an art critic named Jan Veth, who in addition to being the husband of a friend was at the forefront of this new guide circle I mentioned earlier.
Now, Veth was very outspoken in his rejection of academic art and in promoting individual expression. So he’s a good candidate for somebody for Jo to approach about this very avant-garde art that her late brother-in-law had been creating. Now, at first, Veth didn’t like Vincent’s work either. He dismissed it. He put Jo down. And later he admits, well, I was kind of repelled by the violence of Van Gogh’s art and he thought they’re vulgar. This is not, by the way, uncommon. When somebody’s on the forefront, often we have trouble seeing the beauty of something that’s brand new. If you’re not sure if you’ve had this experience before, think about trends and talking about fashion trends, hair trends, beauty trends, where at first you’re like, ooh, wait, what? Like I remember when Bushy Eyebrows were in with Brooke Shields at the very beginning before we were like, yeah, okay, yes, this makes sense. There’s always that initial like, wait, what? Ew. And then you kind of get used to it and like, oh, wait, now I get it. So it takes some familiarity sometimes to warm up to a trend. At first, Jo was very disappointed in Vess reaction because she thought better of him. She thought, wow, he’s actually more conventional than I thought. And apparently, Veth must have also made some sort of misogynist or sexist remark about Jo trying to enter the art world because she complained in her diary, quote, we women are for the most part what men want us to be. But she did realize his importance as a critic, so she swallowed her pride.
And she went back and this is what she wrote in her diary. I won’t rest until he likes them. So remember what my troll friend said? My troll friend said, oh, he never gave up. No, Van Gogh definitely did give up. Jo never gave up. Jo Van Gogh never. That is the real story of why Van Gogh became famous. Now, Jo was definitely onto something when she understood how she could use the letters to sell Van Gogh’s art and her timing couldn’t have been better. So the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, and I think I pronounced that name right, and the only reason I pronounced that name right is because my art director from HarperCollins, his last name was also Huizinga, I’m pretty sure. Anyway, so the Dutch historian, Johan Huizinga, characterized the, quote, change of spirit that began to be felt in the art and literature around 1890. So it was both like literature and art kind of mirrored each other. And there was these ideas that were around two main ideas. One main idea was that of socialism and that of and the other of mysticism, socialism and mysticism. Those were the two main ideas. And here’s the thing, Van Gogh was doing both. He was painting sunflowers, which are weeds. He was painting peasants. So the painting of weeds and the painting of peasants was very much a socialist idea.
The painting of Starry Starry Night, the Walt Whitman Starry Night, that’s a mysticism type idea. So he was kind of straddling both things. So John Veth was among those trying to process this shift from impressionism to something new, that post-impressionist era, that art that applied to individualism, that answers social and spiritual questions. And Jo persisted and he finally came around. And now, instead of being disgusted by it, he’s now writing, quote, the astonishing clairvoyance of great humility. So now he’s warmed up to it. And then he says, once having grasped his beauty, I can accept the whole man. So this type of initial repulsion and then exaltation repeated itself with other critics that Jo was presenting Van Gogh’s work too. So when Jo approached an influential artist named Richard Roland Hulse to ask him to help promote Vincent, she did the same thing. She pestered him because here’s what he wrote initially. Mrs. Van Gogh is a charming woman, but it irritates me when someone fanatically raves about something they don’t understand. So he’s saying she doesn’t understand. But then he came around too and he was somebody who also assisted Jo with the first solo exhibition of Vincent’s art in Amsterdam in December of 1982. Both of these critics complained about Jo’s amateur enthusiasm, and they both also thought it was unprofessional to look at the paintings with the artist’s life story in mind, but they came around.
So over and over again, critics at first resisted the idea of looking at Vincent’s life and work together as one whole, but then they gave in. When they looked at the paintings, they saw not just the art, but Vincent, who was this tortured artist cutting off his ear, clawing at the act of creation. So in their minds, they fused the art and the artist, and that is the persona that Jo wanted them to see. Now her training as a language teacher obviously helped her. She knew French, she knew German, she knew English. I’m assuming she knew Dutch, but I’m not reading that she did. So this definitely came in handy as she expanded her reach, which helped attract the interest of galleries and museums in Berlin and Paris and Copenhagen.
Guess what? She was only in her early 30s. When she was 33, the Parisian art dealer, Ambro Villard, included 20 Van Goghs in a show. Now that’s a big deal. Villard was a huge art dealer. That’s kind of like a go-geon today. Definitely huge during this time. He represented Suzanne, and I think he represented Monet. So he was a big deal. So now he was being exhibited alongside the biggest names in art. And being associated with this avant-garde had a glow effect, a halo effect on him. So that he was shown as being like a trailblazer. Now Jo also knew a lot of business tricks. I mean, she seems like she’s being modest, but really she actually did know some tricks of the trade. So for example, she would hold on to some of Van Gogh’s best works. Rather than selling them right away, she would hold on to them, but include them in shows as quote on loan. This is kind of like today, we might show something as not for sale. So she’s showing them on loan alongside paintings that were for sale in a show.
Everybody wants the art that you can’t buy and it creates a FOMO effect and it increases the sales of everything else. She knew that if you put a few top works on the wall, people are stimulated to buy the artworks next to them. So she did that all over Europe in more than a hundred shows. One of the keys to her success promoting Van Gogh was in selling the art in a controlled, gradual way, slowly introducing Van Gogh to the public. So she really was playing the long game, not the desperate scarcity mindset, let’s just make some quick bucks, I’m a widow here, I need some money. Remember I said she had the boarding house, she decorated the house with all Van Gogh’s art, but she did consider it her mission to sell the art, his art. So she definitely had a strategy. Here’s an example of one of the ways she did do it slowly. There was an exhibit in Paris in 1908. She sent 100 artworks, but she stipulated that a quarter of them, like 25 of them, not be for sale. And the dealer was big, please let me sell all of them. And she said, no, she said no. So that was super, super smart. In 1905, she arranged for a major exhibit at, oh gosh, I’m so bad at pronouncing names, the Steddijk-like museum, is that how you say it, in Amsterdam, which is Amsterdam’s premier modern art museum. So it’s kind of like the MoMA of Amsterdam. Now what’s happening is, in the beginning, remember she had a lot of imposter syndrome, a lot of self-confidence issues.
But as time went on and she was successful in promoting Van Gogh and people were coming around to her point of view of things, now she is starting to really gain confidence in how she could promote him. And she really understood that what she was doing was fine. So now, instead of being this shrinking violet about things and people were agreeing with her, rather than handing over the task of organizing shows, she insisted on doing a lot more. So she rented the gallery, she printed the posters, she assembled the names of important people to invite. She even bought bow ties for the staff. And by now, her son, also named Vincent, is now 15. So he’s a teenager, and he’s getting involved too. In fact, it says in this research I’m reading that
He wrote out the invitations, and this was the largest ever Van Gogh exhibit at the museum with 484 artworks on display. The Stedelik. Stedelik? Oh my gosh. You can criticize my pronunciation of things. I will not be offended. I know I’m terrible at that. Now for this museum show, critics came from all over Europe and the hard work of translating the artist’s vision into the vernacular, into like, understanding how critics should talk about this art. The hard work was already done. Like, Jo already set the foundation and the groundwork by using the letters to really lay that foundation in place so critics knew how to talk about the art in a way that would promote this legacy. If you’re keeping track, this is about 14 years after his death, or maybe 15. Uh, but this is about 14 years after she had the epiphany to sell the art and the artist as a package to package them, to market them this way. Everyone in the art world seemed to know about his tragic story, about his lifelong struggle to find beauty and meaning. And this is what they fell in love with.
So this event in Amsterdam cemented the artist’s reputation as a major figure in the modern era, and the prices for his paintings rose two to three times what they were in the months following. Okay, but there’s one little thing we have to talk about. The art that was during the later period when he was in the asylum in the south of France, which contains the art that’s probably some of the most beloved of his collection really made people uncomfortable, probably because they did know the story. So to some of these early critics, these paintings seemed clearly the product of mental illness, which it was. So this unbridled intensity that Vincent brought to the wheat field under the blazing sun or the lone mulberry tree, they found it hard to take in. However, this is what they also responded to. So it’s kind of like there’s no such thing as bad publicity. So they’re talking about how it lacked the distinctive calm that they really would prefer to see. And here’s one that they really didn’t like. You know which one they really, really didn’t like?
Starry Starry Night. So obviously this is one of the most iconic works of Van Gogh but this also the most singled out for criticism. They were so uncomfortable with it. So uncomfortable with it. And Jo actually was also uncomfortable with this painting because she initially didn’t include it in many of these early exhibitions as she was building Van Gogh’s career. But eventually she did sell that painting. So she held on to the paintings that she considered to be Vincent’s best work but for the Starry Night painting, she had sold it and she didn’t own it anymore and she got the owner of the painting to lend it for the Amsterdam show. I just wanna share a little bit about what reviewers back then said about the show, just to give you a sense of kind of the outrage that it created. So one of them called it a scandal. And he said that this exhibit is really more for those interested in psychology than art lovers. And the one painting he hated the most was Starry Starry Night. So he did not like it. I don’t know this thing, but apparently there’s these fried dough balls that Dutch people eat on New Year’s Eve, and that’s what he thought the stars looked like. However, just like I said, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.
This kind of criticism seemed to bring more attention to the painting rather than less which really further gave validity to the idea of art as a window into the mind and life of the artist, which is really was her strategy all along. So it actually, rather than making that painting less valuable because she was marketing Vincent as art and artist as one package, the tortured artist. So which paintings are gonna become the most popular? The ones that show him as most tortured. And once Jo realized that, she bought the painting back. She bought the painting back. And eventually the painting became part of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, becoming the first Van Gogh in the collection of a New York museum.
Okay, before we wrap up, I do want to add what Jo did towards the end of her life. And she did die in her early 60s when she was 54 years old. So this is now 1916. She came to New York. So this was a very bold move for her. So United States has a very, still tastes and it always lags behind in appreciating the art coming out of Europe. But she wanted a goal of changing that and she saw this as an important opportunity for promoting Van Gogh. So she spent nearly three years in the United States living for a time on the Upper West
Van Gogh’s vision as an artist, and also she spent this time translating Vincent’s letters into English. Here’s something she wrote about that time, quote, I suppose the American taste in art was advanced enough fully to appreciate Van Gogh in which I have been rather mistaken. But changes do come the Montrose Gallery on Fifth Avenue, and shortly thereafter, the Metropolitan Museum featured an exhibition of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, to which Jo contributed four canvases of Van Gogh’s.
All right, my friend. So I hope you learned a lot about Jo Van Gogh. I hope you were as inspired as I was, but also I hope that you gained some insight of how to talk about your own art, how to promote your own art, the importance of really weaving your story into the art and how important that is for collectors to learn about. So that’s it for now. I’ll see you the same time, same place next week. Until then, stay inspired. Bye for now.
Speaker 2: Thank you for listening to the Inspiration Plays podcast. Connect with us on Facebook at facebook.com/SchulmanArt, on Instagram at SchulmanArt, and of course on SchulmanArt.com.
Subscribe & Review in iTunes
Are you subscribed to my podcast? If you’re not, I want to encourage you to do that today. I don’t want you to miss an episode. I’m adding a bunch of bonus episodes to the mix and if you’re not subscribed there’s a good chance you’ll miss out on those. Click here to subscribe in iTunes!
Now if you’re feeling extra loving, I would be really grateful if you left me a review over on iTunes, too. Those reviews help other people find my podcast and they’re also fun for me to go in and read. Just click here to review, select “Ratings and Reviews” and “Write a Review” and let me know what your favorite part of the podcast is. Thank you!