Working with the cooperation of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the authors accessed previously untapped materials to bring an understanding to the mythology of this artist: his early struggles to find his place in the world; his intense relationship with his brother Theo; and his move to Provence, where he painted some of the best-loved works in Western art. The authors also shed new light his erratic and tumultuous romantic life, his bouts of depression and mental illness, and the cloudy circumstances surrounding his death at the age of thirty-seven. While an interesting read, this book had much verbose language and delved into issues that could have been omitted for a much smaller book than 868 pages. Patience is required to read this book. This admirable attempt at a biography of Van Gogh is, unfortunately, in the end, a bloated, overly-indulgent exploration of the minutiae of its subject with not much to show for the effort. It's strange that this is not really the authors' faults. They really went balls-to-the-wall with their research, delving into VG's letters and what-not to try and let his writings and works speak for themselves. The problem is that they take this too far, making the book dense as hell and chock full of so much trivial despair and woes that one, by the end, gets pretty damn sick of Van Gogh already.The bilious structure aside, there's another curious thing about reading this work: it really made me not like Van Gogh at all. Tortured, mentally disturbed genius I can accept, but this guy was a freaking turd. I've never had such an iconoclastic experience reading a biography of a figure I admire. Van Gogh was such a whiny, intolerable, self-entitled prick that I pined for the whittling away of the rest of his face by the time, 300+ pages in, he starts setting down his actual art. I'll confess, I couldn't countenance the further demolishing of one of my favorite artists so I didn't even finish the book, which is rare for me. Too much at once, the bio could've been heavily edited and maybe let something else speak for Van Gogh instead of his incessant whining and wheedling of his brother?Here, let's be safe and say: "for the completist only". People who like Van Gogh's art and who may be inclined to casually read this: maybe don't.
