Faith’s Labors Lost--and Rediscovered

Twelve years ago, when UCLA art historian Debora Silverman embarked on her latest book, she had a relatively straightforward project in mind--a biography of Vincent van Gogh. She had some new insight into his work and planned to take a fresh, scholarly look at the Dutch modern master known to the public as a mad genius who cut off part of his ear and as the creator of vividly colored, expressionistic paintings that command stratospheric prices at auction.

Silverman got going on the project in 1989, after studying a little known series of Van Gogh’s paintings and drawings of weavers and looms. She learned that he likened himself to a weaver who constructed paintings with strands of colored pigment instead of yarn. She also discovered correlations between a perspective frame he had built to teach himself to draw and the looms depicted in his art.

“The book started out as an interpretive biography of Van Gogh, highlighting his emphasis on craft labor,” Silverman says. “I was wondering why he was so identified with labor, and I thought there was a lot to be studied, so I started reading his letters and looking at his background in art-as-work.”

In her early research, Silverman discovered that Van Gogh’s conception of artistic labor was shaped by his upbringing in the Dutch Reformed church. Several years later, when she began to gather material on the period in 1888 when he worked with painter Paul Gauguin in Arles, she was astonished to find that Gauguin’s aesthetic was also shaped by religious education, but of a very different kind.

She intended to characterize their troubled association as “Protestant modernist meets secular egotist,” but discovered that Gauguin, a lapsed Catholic, was as preoccupied with religious conflicts as his Protestant colleague. This newfound knowledge and a mine of unexplored material were irresistible to Silverman, who takes a broad view of art history and teaches cultural history and French history at UCLA.

Instead of the planned biography, she wrote “Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art,” a lavishly illustrated book published late last year by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. It compares the work of the two painters, and examines how their work was influenced both by traditional theologies and their personal quests for spirituality.

Given her change of direction, the project took much longer than Silverman had anticipated, but her effort has been rewarded with favorable reviews and a prestigious award. On Tuesday, Silverman was presented with the PEN/Architectural Digest Award for Literary Writing on the Visual Arts. She shared the honor with Yale art historian Leonard Barkan, author of “Unearthing the Past,” a tale of Renaissance artists’ and scholars’ search for buried treasures of classical antiquity.

In honoring Silverman, the judges praised the unusual breadth of her inquiry and the “rich and compelling” nature of her story.

“The joy of Debora Silverman’s book about the two painters is that she has offered a reevaluation without engaging in mere academic revisionism,” the citation says. “Through a formidable array of contemporary texts and previously undiscovered visual sources, she presents us with the painters not merely as the two last Romantics ... but as thinking figures vitally placed within the most urgent debates of their time on the nature of modern religious feeling.”

Looking back on the process that led to the book, Silverman says she had thought Van Gogh was a Calvinist but discovered that he was actually affiliated with the Dutch Reformed church, which had “a very strong tradition of love of the visual” and encouraged its members to build “a collective, corporate community where the self was defined in relation to others. There was no discrete self without reference to kin and community and divinity.”

The popular notion that Van Gogh was a detached, self-involved genius is completely antithetical to his culture, she says. Both his church and family celebrated the sanctity of labor and communal service. His parents helped village peasants, and his high school promoted the arts as a vocation and a form of service.

“With that background, I began to write a book about how Van Gogh technically developed himself as a craft artist, by building a tool [the perspective frame], training his eye and framing the landscape,” she says. “That went on throughout his career and it had really never been studied.” Neither had his interest in weaving, which influenced his perception of color theory, as a process of interlacing different colored yarns.

“I was following these multiple strands of labor identification in his religious heritage and then how it shaped his stylistic practices,” she says. “When I got to the period leading to Arles, I thought I would have a couple of chapters on Van Gogh’s encounters in Paris with Seurat, Signac and Japanese prints to show how he assimilated these lessons and conversations in his own idiom.

“The next phase was his meeting with Gauguin in Paris and their collaboration in Arles. There were a lot of interesting parallels in their backgrounds, but I found some mention of Gauguin’s education in Orleans under Bishop Dupanloup. And that struck me--perhaps more than someone who hadn’t been involved in French history--because I knew that Dupanloup was the great educational reformer in France after the revolution of 1848. He is known as the promoter of the Falloux Law, which assured the future of French Catholicism by legalizing state funding for parochial education.

“It turned out that Gauguin had been educated at Catholic seminaries in Orleans, so I started thinking about how he presented himself as a martyred artist,” she says. “There is a trope in his work: life as Calvary, full of suffering, burden and anguish. Most art historians attribute that to his manipulative, self-promotional tactics, and that’s part of the story. But when I looked into his writings and this educational system, I found that in his later work, he was probably as preoccupied with religion as Van Gogh was, but in a very different way.”

Both artists had left their churches and were attempting to use painting to resolve their unanswered questions about their own traditions, she says. That discovery so surprised her and riveted her attention that Silverman decided to reframe her book as a far more ambitious and complicated comparative study of two giants in the history of modern art.

It’s the differences, rather than the similarities, that stand out in the book. Gauguin was a voluptuary who exiled himself to Tahiti, identified with Christ and wrestled with human misery, carnal affliction and ravages of the body. He portrayed himself as a genius and flattened anyone who got in his way. On the other hand, Van Gogh, the earnest laborer, yearned to be of service in a utopian, artistic brotherhood.

Their worlds collided in Arles, where they “sifted through their cultural and religious baggage,” as Silverman puts it, while working together, sometimes on the same subjects and at the same sites. And that gave her an opportunity to examine how their backgrounds influenced their painting styles and techniques.

It also led her into religion, which plays a major role in earlier art history but rarely appears in writings about the development of modern art. Religion is making a comeback in social history and other fields, Silverman says, but there’s a history yet to be written on why Modernism has been seen almost exclusively in secular terms. She isn’t planning to write it, but she’s pleased to have opened up new territory that may lead to other illuminating investigations.

Even if Silverman didn’t approach her subject directly, it seems to be a natural for her. A native of New York, she was educated at Princeton University in New Jersey, where she became immersed in its European cultural studies program. While there, she fell under the spell of Carl E. Schorske, an interdisciplinary historian who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for his book “Fin-de-Siecle Vienna.”

She earned her bachelor’s degree in 1975 with a major in European cultural studies. In graduate school, she majored in cultural history and minored in art history, earning her doctorate in 1983--two years after she joined the faculty at UCLA.

“Van Gogh and Gauguin” is not her first book. Silverman is also the author of “Selling Culture: Bloomingdale’s, Diana Vreeland and the New Aristocracy of Taste in Reagan’s America,” a study of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute under the direction of Vreeland, published in 1986, and “Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siecle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style,” an exploration of links among the decorative arts, republican politics and the new science of neurology in France during the 1890s, published in 1989.

Her latest book is a milestone, however, and Silverman is particularly pleased that it has won a PEN award. “It’s very exciting for me because I struggled to write it in a way that would be available to people who are not experts and, at the same time, respond to scholarly debates and precedents,” she says. “In a way, the award is a celebration of trying to maintain that balance. I wanted to offer an interpretive framework to scholars, so that there would be new readings of major paintings by Van Gogh and Gauguin, and I know that scholars will pick it apart. But I also wanted to make it accessible and clear, to give other people new ways to look at Van Gogh and Gauguin.” *