Jo van Gogh-Bonger
How does an artist achieve lasting fame? A champion, ideally, one who outlives or survives the artist in question. Emily Dickinson had Mabel Loomis Todd, Sir Richard Burton had Isabella Burton and Vincent Van Gogh had his sister-in-law, Jo van Gogh-Bonger. Some not only promoted the art and the artist, they created legends. Jo helped create the cult of the Tortured Artist.
Johanna “Jo” van Gogh-Bonger married Theo van Gogh and inherited, almost by accident, the entire afterlife of Vincent van Gogh. When both brothers died within a short span of time, Jo found herself widowed, with a young child and an apartment full of unsold paintings, journals, and letters. From that moment on, she undertook one of the most extraordinary acts of artistic midwifery in modern history.
Jo had trained as an English teacher before meeting Theo Van Gogh. Theirs was a love match, Jo loved Theo and his Parisian art world. Theo opened the door to a larger more vibrant life, and she was deeply grateful to him. It was magical, but tragically within two years, she lost first her difficult brother-in-law Vincent, and then her beloved husband. It was a devastating double blow.
What remained was a child to raise and hundreds of Vincent’s paintings, all willed to her. Plenty of men were eager to advise her. Émile Bernard was one of several who offered to “take the paintings off her hands.” That phrase says everything. The paintings were seen as a burden, perhaps even an embarrassment, and Jo as a widow in need of rescue. But she did not hand them over.
Instead, she dug into her own resources. She moved to the country and ran a boarding house, cooking, cleaning, and caring for guests while raising her son. Beside the practical work of survival, she set herself to promoting and selling Vincent’s work. Jo catalogued the paintings, preserved the correspondence, arranged exhibitions, placed works strategically with dealers and critics, translated and published letters, and fought for prices that reflected growing interest. Her labor was persistent, unglamorous, and nearly invisible. Yet it changed art history.
She was among the first to insist that the artist and the art should be understood together. At the time, many critics still judged painting in more formal and moral terms. Joseph Alberdingk Thijm, a professor of aesthetics and art history in Amsterdam, argued that artists had a duty to uphold Christian ideals and to render nature in a way that was “firm, clear, purified.” Jo had a different intuition. Living with Vincent’s paintings and letters, she understood that the two illuminated one another. The canvases were not complete without the words, and the words gained power beside the canvases.
She also sensed that the culture was changing. New currents of socialism, symbolism, mysticism, and post-Impressionist experimentation were reshaping how people thought about art. Jo recognized that Vincent’s work belonged to this new emotional vocabulary. She did not ask critics and dealers merely to assess technique or subject. She asked them to feel. What did the painting do to the nervous system? What suffering or striving did it register? What did it reveal about the inner life of the artist at the moment of creation?
That may sound obvious now, but it was not obvious then. Jo helped teach viewers to read Vincent not just as a painter of flowers, fields, and bedrooms, but as a man whose pictures were records of emotional intensity. As she sold and loaned the work, critics gradually began to understand her point. The paintings were not simply representations of objects. They were expressions of effort, anguish, beauty, and witness.
We relate to Van Gogh and his paintings because they represent his story. And we all love a good story. Jo knew this and helped create Vincent’s.
We would not have Starry Night hanging in so many dorm rooms and postcards and museum gift shops as the emblem of genius fused with pain.
That was Jo’s doing.
Words by Jo van Gogh Bonger – A memoir of Vincent Van Gogh – 5
full profession just the favorite brother
and his needs: materials, particulars, tools.
difficult lost occurs convinced of love
spoke to excepted loneliness
a side of moonlight, of wishing
a hard unfinished day filled
with an especially strong sunset
high misfortunes while others complained
she was silent against force,
fresh anxiety clearly nervous
easier to change the third surrounding
living improved richness absorbed and harmonized
spent fussy hours in Paris
emotions suffer in hope
it was a giant duty.
