349 - Van Gogh and God: A Creative Spiritual Quest

Van Gogh and God: A Creative Spiritual Quest
By Cliff Edwards
Chicago, Loyola University Press, 1989. 219 pp. $12.95.

Is there room for still another interpretation of Vincent van Gogh? Apparently so. At least the author of this book thinks the famous painter was deeply influenced by Japanese prints and, by implication, by Zen Buddhist views of nature. The dust jacket "Self-Portrait as Buddhist Monk" suggests the subtitle, "A Creative Spiritual Quest." The author is professor of philosophy and religion at Virginia Commonwealth University. He has studied world religions at Northwestern University, the University of Strasbourg, Hebrew-Union School of Bible and Archaeology in Israel, and the Daitokuji Zen Buddhist Temple and Monastery in Koyoto, Japan.

As numerous studies have already established, van Gogh hoped to follow in the ministerial footsteps of his Calvinist father and grandfather. But he was unconventional in his theological career as in his short but prolific artistic production. As a part-time associate pastor in England, he preached a sermon on Ps. 119 with the theme that we are " strangers and pilgrims" on earth. The sermon, as many have thought, was autobiographical. He had been reading Bunyan, and he wrote his brother Theo that it would be enough to have the Bible, Pilgrim's Progress, and Thomas a Kempis' Imitation of Christ. He himself was " en route" in more ways than one as he drew and painted numerous examples of shoes, bridges, paths, and canals. He also pictured lots of lamps, stars, steeples, cypress trees, and birds-all intermediaries between heaven and earth.

Beyond these obvious trademarks, Cliff Edwards wants us to believe that van Gogh's large collection of Japanese prints, very popular in the Paris of his day, implies a Zen way of thinking about nature in which the person of the painter becomes as "a blade of grass," and the painting itself reflects vivid, contrasting colors drawn with "lightning" strokes. With careful attention to van Gogh's letters and to the wide range of his reading, the author seeks to displace psychological, symbolic, and allegorical interpretations of the artist's troubled life with a holistic notion of spiritual quest, highly sophisticated and advanced for his time.

In the key chapter, "The Oriental Connection," Edwards suggests that Vincent's wide and continuing appeal relates to his "synthesis of Eastern and Western experiences of spirituality." Western psychodynamic interpretations tend to codify Vincent's artistry in terms of his own personal conflicts-with his mother, for example, who mourned the loss of a still-born Vincent the year before the artist's birth; and with his mostly ineffectual and rigid father. Such familiar paintings as "The Potato Eaters," "Starry Night," "Open Bible and Zola Novel," droop-

350 - Van Gogh and God: A Creative Spiritual Quest

ing sunflowers, the self-portrait with bandaged ear, "Wheatfield with Crows," and many more are not, according to Edwards, symbols of personal turmoil and self-conflict but earnest gropings after a special awareness that "all forms of nature resonate with human life." The apparent ominous mood of "Wheatfield with Crows," Edwards insists, does not foreshadow Vincent's deep depression leading to his suicide, but suggests that "for Vincent, a great unifying takes place at the point where shared impermanence and the Eternal are one, and anguish and joy, life and death find their meaning together."

Echoes of the Japanese influence can be detected, for example, in the wispy drawings and paintings that feature almond blossoms and in the 1890 (a month before his death) "Blossoming Stalks" of which, as he wrote to Theo, it seems as if the Japanese artist "studies a single blade of grass." In "The Flowering Plum Tree," which is Eastern in style, Vincent has embellished the margins of the painting (a copy of a print by Hiroshige) with Japanese characters, and in a letter asks rhetorically, "isn't it almost a true religion which these simple Japanese teach us, who live in nature as though they themselves were flowers." Edwards connects this way of speaking with Albert Schweitzer's "reverence for life" and even with "Process" theology and a quote from Schubert Ogden. But, curiously, Edwards doesn't mention the "Pere Tanguy" with Mount Fuji and other Japanese references and allusions, and, because he dislikes the "allegorization" of H.R. Graetz (The Symbolic Language of Vincent van Gogh, 1963), he doesn't pick up the discussion of the Chinese "Yin and Yang" as related to the conjoining of sun and moon, clouds and swirls in "Starry Night."

Any book on van Gogh should contain lots of reproductions, preferably in color and sprinkled throughout the text where they are being described. Edwards and his publishers, probably for economic reasons, settle for a mere sixteen black and white prints at the end of the volume. Incidentally, for "The Potato Eaters," Edwards gives the later lithograph print which, of course, reverses the sequence of the figures in the painting itself. He rejects the idea that the scene is a conscious or unconscious candid shot of the van Gogh family at the parsonage in Nuenen, with the young man (Vincent?) seeking eye-contact with the woman pouring coffee (his mother?). Reversing the sequence helps to obscure the symbolic family interpretation.

Edwards' book appears during the year of the centenary celebration of the painter's death, July 29, 1890. From March to July, 1990 in Amsterdam, a superlative exhibit of nearly four hundred drawings and paintings has attracted tourists and artists from all over the world. "Vincent and Theo," a Robert Altman movie has been showing on European TV; "Vincent and Me" is a Canadian film fantasy; Akira Kurosawa's "Dreams" is a forthcoming film featuring director Scorsese as Vincent. Connoisseur magazine, June 1990, ran an article on "Who Killed van Gogh?", by David Sweetman who has a book in press and who wonders if van Gogh's life might have been saved if Dr. Gachet had

351 - Van Gogh and God: A Creative Spiritual Quest

ordered surgery to remove the fatal bullet. Edwards quotes Vincent's comment to Theo regarding Dr. Gachet that "he is sicker than I am."

So it goes. Unrecognized in his own time, Vincent van Gogh, though dead, is very much alive with the Japanese (Edwards must smile) buying up his paintings for the tens of millions of dollars. In a Foreword, Henri Nouwen says that van Gogh has been for him a "wounded healer," not an idea that would easily fit into Zen Buddhism. The continuing and increasing appreciation of Vincent van Gogh, however analyzed, could be an instinctive human response to his own rubric about paintingexaggerate the essential; leave the obvious vague."

Hugh T. Kerr
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey