VAN GOGH CENTENNIAL : VINCENT AND THEO VAN GOGH; A Dual Biography <i> By Jan Hulsker (Fuller Publications: $39; 470 pp., illustrated) </i>

Study of the deservedly famous letters that passed between the Van Gogh brothers has been a 30-year preoccupation of Dutch scholar Jim Hulsker, author of seven previous books on the artist. In his new “Vincent and Theo van Gogh: A Dual Biography,” he aims to interpret afresh the fraternal relationship and to expand our understanding of Theo--in fact of all Vincent’s family, because “they deserve to be given more attention.”

Hulsker fails to give his book the urgent, narrative shape that it needs to qualify as good biography, and the general reader may find his writing a bit stiff and cluttered with discussion of his chief archival sources, which include unpublished correspondence between Theo and other family members. However, patience with this slow, painstaking chronicle will be rewarded by, among other things, a sense of the concrete comings and goings and changes in family culture of two Van Gogh generations.

The elder generation was made up of Vincent’s liberal, countrified, impoverished parents and some worldly uncles and aunts; the younger generation comprised friends, lovers, cousins--and the two brothers and their four other siblings, many of whom seem gifted while suffering, like Vincent, from an “ineradicable lack of self-confidence.”

In this context, the well-known story of Theo’s lifelong support of his eldest brother’s work and the artist’s fits of infatuation and self-abuse unfolds as a tale not only of an important collaboration (Vincent always insisted that his art was “ours”) but also of often unbearable but inescapable mutual reliance founded on a compromising “madness” in both men. In a letter to their mother soon after Vincent’s death, Theo wrote, strangely: “If he could have seen how people behaved toward me when he had left us and the sympathy of so many for himself, he would at this moment not have wanted to die.” Only a few months later, Theo himself began behaving like a madman, and died.