Vincent van Gogh from a female perspective
I was gifted the book “The Secret Life of Sunflowers” (by Marta Molnar, 2022, 399 pages) and told I would like it. Usually, this kind of gift ends up not being what it was purported to be by the gift-giver.
However, there are exceptions, and this was one of them. In a book that is really two books with alternating chapters and totally different time frames and characters, it is a bit of a bipolar read. But there are connections that one can follow if reading the complete book as designed.
On the other hand, one could, as I did, read each story separately and get two good reads for the price of one. The storyline that captivated my interest the most was the story of Vincent van Gogh and his brother Theo as told from the perspective of Theo’s wife Johanna Bonger. Done with what was obviously meticulous research, Marta Molnar has created a wonderfully written biographical map of the brothers van Gogh from a female’s intimate first-person perspective.
The story begins with Johanna’s romantic encounter with Theo and his persistent flirtations that she initially resists, not wanting to commit to anything permanent, but rather seeking to live an independent life of her own. But as things often happen, the aggressor often wins out and in this case Theo’s love for Johanna wins out and they are married. Almost from the get-go after the wedding, Vincent becomes a major player in the story’s narrative — with all his trials and tribulations many of us know about having read the myriad biographies of this famous artist. But Vincent’s life, here, is couched in the perspective of the young Johanna and the life she is leading with Theo, whose main focus is on being promoter and caretaker for his brother. Through all of this familiar history, Molnar gives us exquisite dialogue between the three main characters that is so well done as to come off almost visually as a painting itself, with Molnar creating pictures for us readers coming out of the mouths of her characters.
In “The Secret Life of Sunflowers,” starting in 1887, we travel from Amsterdam in the Netherlands, to Paris (1988, 89, 90,), then back to Amsterdam (1890) where Theo sets up a gallery of Vincent’s paintings for sale with the idea of supporting Vincent so that he can continue painting. As Molnar writes and Johanna ponders, “The paintings on the walls reminded me daily why Theo believed in Vincent. Winter might have ruled outside, but our home was bathed in summer. The pale pink of almond blossoms were joined by the robust blue of irises, and the indomitable yellow of sunflowers. At times, I felt as if the colors were singing together and calling me to dance. I swore the miracle of Vincent’s painting would not remain forever locked away in our apartment.”
We get all the drama of those years and journeys back and forth from the Netherlands and Paris, including Vincent’s bipolar mental issues and relative poverty, as well as a glimpse of the Paris arts scene during that time period including many now-famous names in the visual arts world, including Monet, Holst, Gauguin, Degas, Renoir, Cezanne, etc. In what becomes a love story, Johanna has fallen madly in love with her husband, Theo, and is fully ensconced in his life and work promoting his brother’s work; and we, as readers, are there in Paris and the Netherlands with them, romantically, and in all the prolific activity and trauma of the times.
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But as we know, all good things must come to an end and Vincent dies at an early age and without the kind of artistic recognition both he and Theo were predicting. With Vincent’s death, Theo goes into a deep depression which finds him, eventually, in a mental hospital followed by an early death. This leaves Johanna, not only a grieving widow, but the sole heir of Vincent’s collection of well over a hundred paintings and a box of hundreds of letters written to Theo in Vincent’s hand. The rest of the story is Johanna’s journey to becoming an art dealer herself, and the primary promoter of Vincent’s paintings. After inquiring with some of the most notable art dealers and gallery owners in Paris, London and the U.S., and getting nothing but rejections, she returns to Amsterdam in a last-ditch effort to sell Vincent’s work.
“Clouds covered the sky, the sun unable to break through to warm the air. I did not take that as an omen. It was just Dutch winter. But I was shivering by the time I reached Arti et Amicitiae’s white neo-classical building on Gracht Ronkin,” she writes.
With determination and a little “help from above,” she gains an audience with the owner of the gallery and convinces him to take on Vincent’s work. And the rest, as we say, is history.
This is the end of the Van Gogh sections of “The Secret Life of Sunflowers” Meanwhile, one hundred and thirty-five years later, the story in Molnar’s “2nd book” takes place in New York with the story of Emsley Wilson and the discovery of Johanna’s diary recounting her romantic history of the Impressionist arts movement of the 19th century. But the review of “book 2” is for another time, yet one that is also well-told from Marta Molnar’s talented pen.
(Thomas Crowe is a regular contribuor to Smoky Mountain News and Smoky Mountain Living and is the author of the award-winning memoir “Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods.”)
