front cover of Death on a Starry Night
Death on a Starry Night
Betsy Draine and Michael Hinden
University of Wisconsin Press, 2016
When art historian Nora Barnes returns to France for a Van Gogh conference in the charming medieval village of Saint-Paul-de-Vence, she’s expecting a vigorous debate about whether the famed artist’s suicide was actually a homicide. But on the night before the conference, an elderly French woman who’d promised to reveal important evidence is found face down in the village fountain, and her Chanel briefcase is nowhere to be seen.
            During a week of academic squabbling, dining, romance, and suspense, the quirky conference members, one by one, fall under police suspicion and the amused gaze of Nora’s husband, Toby Sandler. But someone wants to stop Nora and Toby’s amateur sleuthing, and what happens next is no joke.
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A Real Van Gogh
How the Art World Struggles with Truth
Henk Tromp
Amsterdam University Press, 2010

In 1928, after eleven years of extensive research and editing, Dr. Jacob Baart de la Faille finally finished the first catalogue raisonné of Vincent van Gogh’s work. Soon after, however, de la Faille discovered that he had mistakenly listed dozens of forged works as genuine in the catalog. He quickly set out to set the record straight but was met with strong resistance from art dealers, collectors, critics, politicians, amongst others—all of whom had self-interested reasons to oppose his corrections.

            
To this day, the international art world struggles to separate the real Van Goghs from the fake. A Real Van Gogh begins with the story of de la Faille and moves into the late decades of the twentieth century, outlining the numerous clashes over the authenticity of Van Gogh’s works while simultaneously exposing the often bewildering ramifications for art critics and scholars when they bring unwelcome news.

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Solar Dance
Van Gogh, Forgery, and the Eclipse of Certainty
Modris Eksteins
Harvard University Press, 2012

In Modris Eksteins’s hands, the interlocking stories of Vincent van Gogh and art dealer Otto Wacker reveal the origins of the fundamental uncertainty that is the hallmark of the modern era. Through the lens of Wacker’s sensational 1932 trial in Berlin for selling fake Van Goghs, Eksteins offers a unique narrative of Weimar Germany, the rise of Hitler, and the replacement of nineteenth-century certitude with twentieth-century doubt.

Berlin after the Great War was a magnet for art and transgression. Among those it attracted was Otto Wacker, a young gay dancer turned art impresario. His sale of thirty-three forged Van Goghs and the ensuing scandal gave Van Gogh’s work unprecedented commercial value. It also called into question a world of defined values and standards that had already begun to erode during the war. Van Gogh emerged posthumously as a hero who rejected organized religion and other suspect sources of authority in favor of art. Self-pitying Germans saw in his biography a series of triumphs—over defeat, poverty, and meaninglessness—that spoke to them directly. Eksteins shows how the collapsing Weimar Republic that made Van Gogh famous and gave Wacker an opportunity for reinvention propelled a third misfit into the spotlight. Taking advantage of the void left by a gutted belief system, Hitler gained power by fashioning myths of mastery.

Filled with characters who delight and frighten, Solar Dance merges cultural and political history to show how upheavals of the early twentieth century gave rise to a search for authenticity and purpose.

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Van Gogh. Self-Portraits
Edited by Karen Serres
Paul Holberton Publishing, 2022
An exhibition catalog tracing the evolution of Van Gogh’s self-presentation in his art. 

This volume accompanies an exhibition at London’s Courtauld Gallery, the first to explore the full chronological range of Vincent van Gogh’s self-portraits. 

The myth of Van Gogh today is linked as much to his extraordinary life as it is to his world-famous paintings. His biography has often shaped the way his self-portraits have been (mis)understood. Spanning his entire career, this volume explores these highly personal paintings, analyzing the artist’s self-representation in context to reveal the role it plays in his oeuvre. Of particular interest is the striking way the evolution of Van Gogh’s self-representation can be seen as a microcosm of his development as a painter.

In addition to the celebrated Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, the exhibition showcases a group of major masterpieces brought together from international collections, including the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, among others. Beautifully illustrated, this exhibition companion includes detailed entries on each work, an appendix illustrating all of Van Gogh’s self-portraits, and three insightful essays on the theme.
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Vincent's Arles
As It Is and as It Was
Linda Seidel
University of Chicago Press, 2023
A vivid tour of the town of Arles, guided by one of its most famous visitors: Vincent van Gogh.
 
Once admired as “a little Rome” on the banks of the Rhône, the town of Arles in the south of France had been a place of significance long before the painter Vincent van Gogh arrived in February of 1888. Aware of Arles’s history as a haven for poets, van Gogh spent an intense fifteen months there, scouring the city’s streets and surroundings in search of subjects to paint when he wasn’t thinking about other places or lamenting his woeful circumstances.
 
In Vincent’s Arles, Linda Seidel serves as a guide to the mysterious and culturally rich town of Arles, taking us to the places immortalized by van Gogh and cherished by innumerable visitors and pilgrims. Drawing on her extensive expertise on the region and the medieval world, Seidel presents Arles then and now as seen by a walker, visiting sites old and new. Roman, Romanesque, and contemporary structures come alive with the help of the letters the artist wrote while in Arles. The result is the perfect blend of history, art, and travel, a chance to visit a lost past and its lingering, often beautiful, traces in the present.
 
 
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Vincent's Books
Van Gogh and the Writers Who Inspired Him
Mariella Guzzoni
University of Chicago Press, 2020
“Books and reality and art are the same kind of thing for me.”
 
One of the most famous artists in history, Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) was also a man with another powerful passion—for books. An insatiable reader, Van Gogh spent his life hungrily consuming as many books as he could. He read, reread, and copied out books in Dutch, English, and French. He knew many passages by heart from works by Dickens, Zola, Shakespeare, and Maupassant, among many others. As he wrote to his brother, Theo, in one of their hundreds of letters: “I have a more or less irresistible passion for books.”
 
In Vincent’s Books, Mariella Guzzoni explores Van Gogh’s life as a voracious bookworm, noting what he read, what he wrote about, and how his love of reading influenced his art. She walks us through his life, chapter by chapter: from the religious aspirations of his early adulthood, to his decision to be a painter, to the end of his tragically short life. He moved from Holland to Paris to Provence; at each moment, ideas he encountered in books defined and guided his thoughts and his worldview. Van Gogh wrote with eloquence and insight about what he was reading in his letters to Theo, referring to at least two hundred authors. Books and readers are frequent subjects of his paintings, and Guzzoni highlights over one hundred of these works, such as Still Life with Bible in the Van Gogh Museum and his vivid paintings of l’Arlesienne.
 
A gorgeously illustrated biography that will appeal to any booklover, Vincent’s Books takes us on a fresh, fascinating journey through the pages of a beloved artist’s life. 

Explore Van Gogh’s musings on his favorite writers, including
Thomas à Kempis, Charles Blanc, Honoré de Balzac, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Guy de Maupassant, Charles Dickens, Erckmann-Chatrian, Homer, Victor Hugo, Pierre Loti, Jules Michelet, William Shakespeare, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Émile Zola
 
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