Van Gogh may be the world’s most popular--and misunderstood--artist. As a major show at LACMA opens, new theories on the legend abound that go . . . : Beyond the Broad Brush Strokes

What do you know about Vincent van Gogh?

That he was a crazy artist who cut off part of his ear and gave it to a prostitute following an argument with Paul Gauguin?

That he was a Dutch minister’s son who tried to find salvation through painting after an unsuccessful attempt to follow in his father’s footsteps?

That he poured out his soul and chronicled his creative efforts in a series of letters to his art-dealer brother, Theo?

That he suffered from--pick one--epilepsy, dementia, schizophrenia, manic depression, sunstroke, syphilis, an inner-ear disorder or addiction to absinthe and that he committed himself to an asylum in Saint-Remy-de-Provence, France, near Arles?

That he shot himself in the chest during a fit of depression and died two days later in Auvers-sur-Oise, a small town north of Paris?

That his troubled life was the subject of “Lust for Life,” a best-selling book by Irving Stone that was published in 1934 and made into a film, directed by Vincente Minnelli and starring Kirk Douglas, in 1956?

That he only sold one of his paintings during his lifetime, but his work now commands the world’s highest prices at auction?

Everyone knows something about Van Gogh, whether it be fact or fiction. Indeed, so many people have developed theories about what made him tick--and paint--it seems as if everyone is a Van Gogh expert. Arguably the world’s most popular artist, he lived from 1853 to 1890 and painted dark scenes of poverty-stricken peasants as well as vibrant landscapes, still lifes and portraits. But he is generally known as the quintessential mad genius whose work is frequently interpreted in terms of his legendary life story.

Van Gogh is already well known in Los Angeles too, of course, but the buzz about him has become much louder with announcements of the imminent blockbuster exhibition “Van Gogh’s Van Goghs: Masterpieces From the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam,” opening next Sunday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where the show could attract as many as 900,000 visitors during a 17-week run.

Most visitors will arrive with preconceived ideas about the artist and his work; some will depart with altered perceptions. But all those who attend the specially ticketed exhibition will become participants in the ongoing construction of a collective body of knowledge, experience, belief and mythology.

It might seem that everything there is to say about Van Gogh has already been said--or written in thousands of books and articles, or filmed in 82 movies--but the urge to develop new theories and expand or correct the already voluminous record is stronger than ever. More than a century after his death, he is still a source of fascination to both the public and scholars.

The current edition of Books in Print lists about 100 books on Van Gogh by art historians, sociologists, physicians and journalists, and that doesn’t include some of the latest publications. Still others are in progress.

A ‘Funny Field’ for Art Historians

“There is still a wide range of subjects to be looked at,” said Debora Silverman, a professor of history and art history at UCLA who just wound up a year as a Getty scholar. The author of several articles on Van Gogh’s craft and how his Calvinist faith shaped his workmanlike style of drawing and painting, she is finishing a biography, “Van Gogh and Gauguin in Arles: The Search for Sacred Art,” to be published soon by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Van Gogh scholarship is “a funny field,” Silverman said, because it is highly specialized. Although many scholars have delved deeply into specific aspects of the artist’s work, a coherent view of how all the pieces of his career fit together has not emerged, she said.

European scholars, including Louis van Tilborgh and Sjaar van Heugten, curators at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, are engaged in ongoing studies of the artist’s work. Ronald Pickvance, an independent British scholar, has done important research and organized two major exhibitions for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, “Van Gogh in Arles” in 1984 and “Van Gogh in Saint-Remy and Auvers” in 1987. There’s also activity in Japan, where Tsukasa Kodera has written a book, “Vincent Van Gogh: Christianity vs. Nature,” and edited another, “The Mythology of Vincent Van Gogh.”

The first Van Gogh catalogue raisonne--a catalog of the artist’s complete works--published in 1928, was loaded with errors and revised in 1970. But many questions persist among scholars, so a new catalogue raisonne is being prepared by Zurich-based experts Roland Dorn and Walter Feilchenfeldt.

A great deal of valuable documentary work has been done, but there is no single, definitive book that examines Van Gogh’s work in the full context of his life and times, Silverman said.

Part of the problem is that the romantic drama of “Lust for Life” has led to the popular perception of Van Gogh as a brilliant lunatic. “It takes a lot of work to break down that myth,” Silverman said.

But she also contends that many scholars have viewed Van Gogh in such a limited context that even the standard, academic view is incomplete. All too often he is lumped with the French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, his religious beliefs are ignored, and his late paintings get most of the attention, she said.

Although Meyer Schapiro, a highly revered American art historian, wrote about Van Gogh’s humanism way back in 1953, and Richard Kendall’s essay in the catalog of the current exhibition argues that evangelism was a primary motivation for the artist, modern art history is largely a secular pursuit. In the case of Van Gogh, his humanistic and religious concerns have been often forgotten or regarded with a degree of suspicion, Silverman said.

Modern formalists focused on stylistic concerns and tended to view Van Gogh’s work as part of a Paris-based phenomenon. With the rise of Marxist, feminist and other socially oriented critics in the 1980s, Van Gogh was dismissed as a bourgeois artist who had forsaken the Dutch country folk depicted in his early work, while his professed sympathies with laborers were sometimes thought to be bogus.

Silverman sees herself as part of a new generation that is trying to “recontextualize Van Gogh” by “emphasizing the continuity and coherence” of his work. His Dutch upbringing and Calvinist beliefs--particularly those that pertain to the sacredness of humble labor--should be taken seriously because they are integral to his art, she said.

Silverman argues in her writings that “Calvinist imperatives led Van Gogh to develop a pictorial language of labor” closely related to weaving. In an interview, she said that he used the coarse fabric of canvas and interlocking brush strokes to emulate the activities of pre-industrial workers with whom he identified. Far from slashing at the canvas during fits of delirium, he built his paintings in a very methodical way, she said.

Van Gogh and the Art Market

Another American art historian, New York-based Cynthia Saltzman, has written a book, “Portrait of Dr. Gachet: The Story of a Van Gogh Masterpiece,” inspired by the artist’s grip on the art market. In the late 1980s, when art prices hit their peak, Van Gogh’s work was at the pinnacle, setting one record after another. “Sunflowers” was sold for $39.9 million in 1987; “Irises” brought $53.9 million later that year. (The painting is now in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum.) In 1990, just as the market began to drop, “Portrait of Dr. Gachet” was sold for $82.5 million, still the highest price ever paid at auction for a work of art.

It has taken several years for prices to edge back up after the crash, but just last November, a small Van Gogh self-portrait was sold at Christie’s New York for $71.5 million. The astonishing sale inspired speculation that it might not be long before an artwork--most likely a Van Gogh painting--brings $100 million at auction.

In her book, Saltzman uses the improbable tale of a Van Gogh portrait to explore a broad range of social and political issues that have shaped the art market. The painting, depicting the homeopathic physician who treated the artist shortly before his death, was first sold for $58 in 1897. Changing hands seven times, “Portrait of Dr. Gachet” rose in price to $53,300 in 1938, when it passed into the collection of Siegfried Kramarsky, a German-born Jewish banker whose heirs consigned it to the 1990 auction.

Saltzman reconstructs the painting’s journey from the artist’s hands to private European collections to the Stadtische Galerie, a museum in Frankfurt. The Nazis confiscated it in 1937 as “degenerate art,” then sold it. The buyer, in turn, sold it to Kramarsky, who brought it to New York when he fled from his home in Amsterdam. More social history than art history, the book nonetheless illuminates the vast array of forces that came to bear on a single--albeit extraordinary--painting.

A Plethora of Medical Opinions

Van Gogh is also a continuing source of interest to physicians, who have offered more than 100 different diagnoses of his presumed afflictions. The notion that he was a madman wasn’t published until some 20 years after his death, but psychiatric investigations proliferated in the late 1920s and 1930s. By the early 1940s nearly a dozen diagnoses of Van Gogh’s ills--both physical and mental--had been published in about 20 studies. Most of them attribute his problems to some form of epilepsy or schizophrenia.

Van Gogh’s health and mental stability have been a popular topic ever since then. In 1990 a study in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. suggested that the artist suffered from Meniere’s disease, a disorder of the inner ear that was little known during his lifetime and has often been misdiagnosed as epilepsy. However, the diagnosis was disputed in a subsequent issue of the journal.

Only a few weeks ago, another controversy erupted in the press. It pitted Wilfred Niels Arnold, a biochemist at the University of Missouri Medical School, who contends that Van Gogh suffered from a liver condition called acute intermittent porphyria, against psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who believes Van Gogh was afflicted with manic depression. But they agree on one thing: His problem may have been complicated by absinthe abuse.

Los Angeles-based psychiatrist Alan H. Blanc, one of many doctors who have studied Van Gogh’s letters, is fully aware of arguments among his peers about the artist’s afflictions. But that hasn’t prevented him from joining the discussion. He recently led a UCLA Extension seminar, “Probing the Psychological Mysteries of Vincent van Gogh,” and he’ll deliver a lecture on the artist at the Orange County Museum of Art on Feb. 2.

Blanc is also working on a Van Gogh biography. What he has in mind is an examination of a rejected child who grew up to be a tormented artist but wrote beautiful descriptions of his artistic perceptions. Van Gogh was conceived as the replacement for his parents’ son, also named Vincent, who died at birth one year to the day before the artist was born, but the second Vincent was the product of grief and he wasn’t wanted, Blanc said.

He also contends that Van Gogh painted what he saw until Gauguin encouraged him to tap into his imagination and memory, and that the new approach may have led Van Gogh to painful reflections on his unhappiness. He probably severed part of his ear during a bout of temporary insanity, Blanc said.

Fakes and Tourist Destinations

The art world tends to ignore--if not ridicule--physicians’ explanations for Van Gogh’s problems, particularly if they are cited as reasons for his artistic style. But art experts have their own conflicts over the artist.

The hottest one in the past few years is an ongoing dispute about the authenticity of several paintings, including “Garden at Auvers” in a French private collection, “Woman From Arles” at the Musee d’Orsay in Paris and the “Sunflowers” image that was purchased for a record $39.9 million in 1987 by a Japanese insurance company. Those who have condemned some of the paintings as fakes contend that they may have been painted by Emile Schuffenecker, who worked in the same stockbrokerage as Gauguin and also became an artist, or Dr. Paul Gachet, the subject of the famous portrait.

Meanwhile in the popular press, Van Gogh--along with nearly every place where he picked up a paintbrush or hung his hat--is frequently the subject of articles geared to various audiences. U.S. News & World Report, among many other magazines, has reported on the restoration of Auberge Ravoux, the cafe below the artist’s garret at Auvers-sur-Oise, where he died in 1890.

Amateur athletes also love Van Gogh, according to a romantic account in Runner’s World of how an American tourist acquired a deeper appreciation of Van Gogh’s art by jogging on a trail at Auvers-sur-Oise. Also focusing on the village where Van Gogh died, Business Week informed its readers that a visit to Auvers-sur-Oise is “a more intense experience” than seeing Claude Monet’s home at Giverny, “the standard art lover’s day trip from Paris.”

Travel enthusiasts can find pitches for tours to Van Gogh territory on the Internet as well, but that isn’t all. Electronic searches turn up a rock band (Go Van Gogh), a hit song (Don McLean’s “Vincent”) and restaurants named for the artist. In Southern California, Van Go’s Ear, an all-night cafe in Venice, has been a hangout for the coffeehouse set, while the Van Gogh chartered shuttle service has provided transportation to art events.

Another Look at the Making of a Saint

Van Gogh has permeated the public consciousness, but it isn’t a recent phenomenon. Although it is often thought that the artist died in obscurity and only won recognition relatively recently, that is far from the truth. French sociologist Nathalie Heinich has explored the progress of his reputation from admired artist to cultural hero to saint in her book “The Glory of Van Gogh: An Anthropology of Admiration.”

According to her account, 22 articles about him were published in the 10 years after his death, and the number of articles and books escalated in subsequent decades: 35 from 1900-1909, 79 from 1910-19, 220 in the 1920s, 288 in the 1930s. The first retrospective exhibition of his work was held in the Netherlands in 1892, only two years after his death; a seminal retrospective was staged at the world’s fair in Paris in 1937. The first biography was published in German in 1910, 24 years before Stone’s bestseller.

Heinich casts a skeptical eye at the process of turning a wretched but enormously gifted artist into a sanctified icon, noting that his example has made abnormality appear to be normal for an artist. But like many Van Gogh observers, she also finds the transformation fascinating. “What makes Van Gogh particularly interesting is that he represents today, for a very wide audience, the first great artistic hero,” she writes in the preface of the book.

What the artist himself would make of all this is open to question. But one thing seems obvious: However unwittingly, he brought some of the controversy and adulation on himself by writing so much about his thoughts, feelings and artistic struggles in his famous letters to his brother--and by leaving so much open to interpretation.

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“Van Gogh’s Van Goghs: Masterpieces From the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. Daily, 9 a.m.-9 p.m. Next Sunday-May 16. Tickets--issued for specific days and hours--are available through Ticketmaster at (213) 462-2787; tickets also can be purchased at the museum starting Monday. Prices: adults, $17.50 weekdays, $20 weekends; seniors, $10 weekdays, $15 weekends; children age 6 and older, $5 every day. Museum general information: (323) 857-6000.