I have been
meaning to write a short post about the Vincent Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam (Van Gogh Museum - The Museum about Vincent van Gogh in Amsterdam - The Netherlands). My husband and I toured the
museum in August; I found it to be one of the most interesting and
emotionally-engaging art museums I have ever visited. I cannot remember that I have
ever been moved to tears by an art exhibition, but this one had that effect on
me. Van Gogh’s life lends itself to this type of reaction—he suffered from
epilepsy, depression, and lack of self-confidence, and at the age of 37 shot
himself in a wheat field in Auvers, France and died two days later. He was very
close to his brother Theo who supported him at different times during his life;
Theo died six months after Vincent and the two of them are buried side by side
in Auvers. After Vincent’s death, Theo’s wife saw to it that Vincent’s
paintings received the recognition they deserved; she came across in the
exhibition as a generous and compassionate woman who had great understanding
for her husband Theo and his close relationship with Vincent.
I think the
museum did a great job in depicting the emotional depth of the relationship
between Vincent and Theo—you really felt and understood the empathy and love
that Theo had for Vincent, and the utter humanity and frailty in their individual
lives. I found myself thinking—‘there but for the grace of God go I’ as the
expression goes. Because we all suffer from lack of self-confidence or from
depression at times; and if you have experienced these then you have empathy
for others who are weighed down or destroyed by them. By the time I got to the
section that showed a photo of the gravesite where both brothers are buried, I was
quite sad. I have never seen the Robert Altman film from 1990 about the Van
Gogh brothers—Vincent & Theo—but I
want to get a hold of it so that I can. It received very good reviews when it
came out; I don’t know how I missed it--perhaps because I had just moved to
Oslo and was not paying attention, or perhaps because the movie never opened in
Oslo at all.
It is not
easy to watch people you know and love sink into depression or mental illness. I
have seen that happen in my own family and in friends’ families as well. It is
terrifying to watch the descent into severe mental illness like schizophrenia; daunting
to witness what chronic depression can do to a person’s overall health. It
makes you realize that the brain is the last great frontier in a research sense—how
the brain works, why do certain aspects of normal brain function go awry, what
are emotions really and where are they based? There are so many questions that
remain unanswered to date, and one can only hope that some of them get answered
in our lifetime.
