Lust for Life (1956) dir. by Vincente Minnelli.

When I pause to think about Vincent van Gogh, what he became, or rather, what his work became, the spectacle never ceases to amaze me. Vincent, as he liked to be called (his paintings are signed “Vincent”, not “Van Gogh”), was the consummate outsider, a man who couldn’t hold down a job, was almost literally so drunk on the words of Christ that he alienated his colleagues and flock, who couldn’t sell a painting (yeah, he sold one), couldn’t keep friends, lovers, or family any closer than arm’s length (in part, because that was the length at which they kept shoving away this overly melodramatic man), a man who killed himself at 36 and never got to witness what he’d become: the superstar of all artists.

Who else is there? Pick a name—don’t think about it, just say a name!—and, for the most part, everyone, every fool who buys Thomas Kinkade shit to the bummed out mopes with their Edward Hopper prints (me), to the fans of the Impressionists, modernists, you name it, well, they would blurt out Van Gogh. Picasso, O’Keeffe, Monet, Pollock, Keane, Kahlo… whether you like Vincent or not, that’s probably the one that gets the quick blurt. In any other artistic field, I can’t think of a single name that so dominates. Fiction, poetry, music of all genres, film, theater, sculpture… that same million would have thousands upon thousands of different names. Sure, this million may produce a few different artists. But almost everyone, and I’m guessing we’re talking in the 90%, would say Van Gogh.

And why not? Everyone’s seen one of Vincent’s prints or reproductions in a book, postcard, etc., and while I’m sure there are people who dislike his work, well, I’m not sure I want to know those people. You almost can’t help but be amazed when witnessing one of his paintings in person, and the prints, like watching movies on a small screen, make you want to seek out his art, to gaze at the thick swaths of paint, the raging sun there on the canvas, the writhing plant life. I’m lucky to live in Minneapolis, where the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA) owns Olive Trees, one the paintings Vincent made at the Saint-Paul Asylum in Saint Rémy. I have stared at that painting many times, made trips just to see it—I’ve literally walked in, stood and stared and then sat and stared, stood again, sat again, turned to leave, then turned back and stared and then left. I bet I’m not alone. Though this is the case with most other artists’ paintings as well, you truly have to see a Vincent in person to appreciate its intensity.

Though, perhaps, not always. In the mid-90s we had a coffee table book of Vincent’s work and was babysitting our friend’s son, Reef, who was three years old. He was on my lap and we were thumbing through this book of very colorful pictures, which he seemed to enjoy. We came upon one of the many paintings in which Vincent had plucked the sun out of the sky, burning his hands and face and soul, and, using paint that was suddenly made of the same starstuff, put it onto the canvas, radiating life and energy, and even death. Upon seeing this reproduction, Reef immediately turned his face and shaded his eyes and said, “Oh, the sun!” I had to turn the page so he could gaze again at the master’s work.

I’m going to try and think the best of people right now, because there’s this thing in Minneapolis right now called “Immersive van Gogh”, which seems like just about the worst thing ever. Honestly, I almost coughed up a pile of money to see it, because I thought it was a traveling exhibit of Vincent’s paintings—I simply couldn’t imagine a traveling exhibit of, as one lovely crank called it, “screen saver-like animations” of Vincent’s paintings floating all over you (you should totally read that review, it’s fantastic). So pervasive is this fucking Immersive Van Gogh that if you ask Google a question about the Art Institute’s Van Gogh, you get this:

So, the nice part: I do think people want something like this, foolishly, because they want to immerse themselves into Vincent’s work. If we’re insane enough about something, we want more–sometimes that means reading everything about the artist, sometimes it means buying shit like prints or mugs or trinkets… sometimes it means devouring their work. Like that child, we see these paintings and we almost want to eat them, or be eaten by them, to be taken in completely. This is a very human response. Of course, this profound feeling is being taken advantage of by this dumb exhibit, which I promise you I’ll never see, not if you paid me. Maybe if you paid me, but it’d have to be a lot of money.

Madman, holy fool, human, victim of mental illness and of a cruel, cruel time—Vincent van Gogh is a great character whose life, like most people’s actually, was a great story. Enter Hollywood. For there’s more than one way to immerse people into a painter’s life and wring a few bucks from them: make a movie. There’s been quite a few documentaries and films, and most of them are utter garbage, even when they have a great pedigree. 1990’s Vincent and Theo, by Altman and 2018’s At Eternity’s Gate by Schnabel are both ridiculous art-house pictures that utterly fail to capture the joy and passion that tormented Vincent as much as his loathing for hypocrites and his physical, psychological and spiritual pain. The second casts a very old Willem Dafoe as Vincent and the first seems to think that Vincent lived every minute of his life as if it were pure misery. There was a documentary called Vincent from 1987, in which John Hurt sounds as though he gulped downers and narrated the artist’s letters to his brother. I’ve read the letters and they’re a masterwork all their own, again, filled with joy and despair and passion. Hurt seemed capable only of making them feel like the dull broodings of a narcissistic bore. And I like John Hurt. I haven’t seen Loving Vincent, billed as the world’s first painted animated film! That sounds abominable.

Then there’s the very Hollywood, very Minnelli, very Kirk Douglas Lust for Life, based on a novel by Irving Stone, who made a long and fairly dull career writing novels about the lives of notable people. It’s amazing how popular Stone’s books were. His bibliography is a great look at what once used to entertain white middle-class Americans in the 20th Century. After all, who wouldn’t love a long, melodramatic novel about the life of Eugene V. Debs, Jessie Benton Frémont, John Noble, Charles Darwin or President Andrew Jackson and his wife Rachel Donelson Jackson? A lot of readers, I guess, since he wrote thirteen of these (bestsellers all) over the course of three decades. When I was deep in an obsession about Vincent, I read Lust for Life, and then promptly forgot it.

But the movie! Well, the movie is directed by Hollywood’s Vincent, Vincente Minnelli, whose love of bold, outrageous color makes him perfectly suited for the Hollywood version of Vincent’s life.

I would argue that this is the very best film about Vincent’s life because while it may have not been as accurate in addressing his mental illness (though it does do a pretty good job), and definitely had to downplay his relationship with a prostitute, it captures, perfectly, how insane it must have been to be Vincent van Gogh.

Vincent is played by Kirk Douglas, in what I would call the role of his long lifetime. Douglas’ features, especially under a red beard, seem very similar to Vincent (at least as he appears in self-portraits). But look at him! Douglas embodies Vincent in a performance that is just riveting. And Lust for Life is about the most grubby, squalid and yet vibrant movie I know from that era. Douglas usually commits to his roles like a maniac, anyway, and while that gets old in many of his other films, here it’s astounding: he is covered in filth and oil paint through much of the movie, wearing this crazy sheepskin vest and rubbing his paint covered hands on his thighs, chest, ass, holding the paintbrush in his mouth, gritting his teeth at his own growing lunacy or at the fierce mistrals which burned his face and threw his canvases willy-nilly. I don’t know if Douglas was suffering from migraines throughout, and then smoked something to give him a look as though every leaf and stone and blade of grass were profound mysteries, but he seems caught between genuine holy torment and the beatific glow of one newly enlightened. As critic Robert Hughes put it, “Van Gogh confronted the world with an insecure joy. Nature was to him both exquisite and terrible. It consoled him, but it was his judge. It was the fingerprint of God, but the finger was always pointed at him.” Kirk Douglas embodies that battle between the exquisite and the terrible perfectly.

Minnelli does a remarkable job of recreating Vincent’s world, from the worn out table where the Belgians gummed their hot potatoes to his little blue room where he slept to the night cafe where he guzzled absinthe and wondered if God and Gaugin hated him. In a theater, with Douglas scooting about the silver screen like a madman and Anthony Quinn as a disreputable Gaugin (he’s also the best Gaugin), not to mention all the character actors playing Vincent’s mailman, Dr. Gachet, the prostitute, people you come to know in his paintings, the effect is, well, shall we say… immersive?

The best movies are immersive, you lose yourself in the characters and the story, in the special effects and art direction, and here, in Lust for Life, you can almost feel the hot mistral grinding sand into the damp oil painting. In one of its most effective scenes, Douglas’ Vincent is crossing the Auvers town square. A director less confident might have shown the townsfolk and their goings-on as insane in and of itself, cynically, that this world couldn’t handle Vincent, that this poor man was hounded by a society that didn’t care. A scene like that is in the movie, in an earlier moment, following Vincent’s self-mutilation and the small town’s making fun of him for that. But in the moment when he actually was pushed to shoot himself, Minnelli simply captures a happy day in the life of these rural townspeople, totally nonjudgmental, and then simultaneously shows us how, for someone like Vincent, it’s all simply too much. Too much color, too much noise, too much touching, feeling, eating, dying… he is at once a desperate outsider and a suffering insider, and he must do something to silence the inferno that burns in his skull.

In his last 70 days, Vincent painted 70 canvases, masterpieces all, and seemed almost to be drowning in color and emotion. I can see how the passion of Vincent makes people almost insane themselves, trying to reach toward this burning soul. Lust for Life, for me, comes closest to witnessing artists (Minnelli, Douglas, the entire production) desperately trying to summon their talents in the service of someone they consider to be the beyond them, a man almost literally scorched by the surface of the sun on a daily basis. The result is, at once, gorgeous, hypnotic, at times ridiculous, always entertaining, and, ultimately, should make you want to seek out Vincent’s paintings. The work of artists pointing you to artists, not the work of technicians and profiteers who clearly couldn’t give a crap about Vincent, except how he can make them a buck.