'Van Gogh': Portrait of a complex man

VAN GOGH: The Life, by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith. Random House, 953 pp., $40.

Vincent van Gogh's autobiography is painted in luminous, powerful brushstrokes, the supreme portrait of the artist. "As my work is," he said, "so am I."

"Van Gogh: The Life," the intricate and panoramic biography by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, is a provocative work about the volcanic man and his art.

Van Gogh's story has been romanticized and mythologized, especially in fiction and on film. For decades, his image has been fashioned as much from Irving Stone's popular novel, "Lust for Life," and the Oscar-winning 1956 movie starring Kirk Douglas, as it has been from scholars and historians.

As much as any artist, he's now part of popular culture. He's everywhere, from posters and address books to song and music, television to Legos, Christmas ornaments to puppets -- including at least one with a detachable ear. There are times when his "Still Life: Vase With Fifteen Sunflowers" seems reproduced almost as often as the face of a certain woman with an enigmatic smile.

Naifeh and Smith treat "the life" with remarkable detail and, despite its imposing length, a very accessible narrative. In that way, it's similar to their "Jackson Pollock: An American Saga," for which they earned a Pulitzer Prize. This is an insightful and important work, unquestionably the essential biography for years to come.

There are flaws, of course. Too often, Naifeh and Smith make it seem that great art flowed from the emotion of the moment, going directly from the artist's immediate state of mind to the canvas. And the book doesn't fully address van Gogh's mental condition and spiral into depression.

But, subtly, it does underscore the connection between life and art in a "slow-igniting, fast-burning career." What matters most is that their van Gogh is alive with the brilliance of cadmium yellow and cobalt blue.

The authors describe his terrible childhood, innumerable failures and humiliations, and the deep loneliness and despair of "such a tormented soul." Their picture, however, isn't all sympathy. It's fuller, also unveiling an abrasive, estranged, manipulative, obsessive, often delusional man.

"Van Gogh: The Life" has gained some notoriety for questioning whether the artist shot himself. Naifeh and Smith speculate that he was killed by a teenager whose ways make him seem a character out of Caravaggio.

"All that can be said with certainty is that he died of a gunshot wound," they write. "No physical evidence of the shooting was ever produced." The mythology, however, is that his "Wheat Field With Crows" amounted to a suicide note.

Naifeh and Smith offer a "hypothetical reconstruction" based in part on interviews given by the possible killer, full of "faltering denials" and "boisterous confessions." While tantalizing, it's not entirely convincing.

The tragedy and the mystery are partners. What is sure is that van Gogh's grave is in Auvers, next to his beloved brother Theo's. The simple, spare stone has his name and years of birth and death. Above are the words, "Ici Repose" -- here rests.

After reading the tumultuous "Van Gogh: The Life," you'll think it's the only time he ever did.