At Eternity's Gate: The Spiritual Vision of Vincent van Gogh

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About the Author

Kathleen Powers Erickson received her Ph.D. in the history of Christianity from the University of Chicago, specializing in the religious life of nineteenth-century Europe. She continued her historical interest in nineteenth-century culture with extensive study in the university's department of art history. Concerned mainly with the contexts in which artists create, she has also written on the spiritual elements in the art of Kandinsky, Gauguin, and Picasso. She has published and lectured widely on Van Gogh 's life and work. Erickson is currently a freelance writer and photographer in the Chicago area.

I wrote "At Eternity's Gate" because I felt van Gogh's religious life had been almost completely ignored by his other biographers. For example, this book has the only discussion available (in English or Dutch) of van Gogh's theological background and his family's role in the various controversies that plagued the church in the nineteenth century. I also go into great detail discussing van Gogh's illness, a type of epilepsy coupled with depression that affected his religious life and his artistic choices, particularly with regard to subject-matter. While I am primarily a historian of Christianity, with a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, I also studied art history there, with my emphasis on the contexts in which artists create. I discuss some well-known works, such as "Starry Night" and some other religious works that are barely mentioned in art history texts, such as "The Resurrection of Lazarus" and "The Good Samaritan." My primary concern is not with formal art criticism, but simply to tell the complex, compelling story of van Gogh's journey of faith.

Synopsis

Based on Van Gogh's personal correspondence, this biography shows the artist's pilgrimage of faith, from his early religious training through his evangelical missionary periods to his struggle with religion and modernity. 24 illustrations.

Reviews

Amazon.com: Few images in modern art have so captured the attention of the public as Van Gogh's Starry Night, a painting that reveals all the light and glory hidden in an ordinary evening sky. In this very readable study of Van Gogh, essentially a spiritual biography, Kathleen Erickson explores the intense spirituality of the painter, from his early religious training and evangelical missionary work to the crisis that occurred when the church rejected his more radical way of following Christ. Erickson argues (against many Van Gogh scholars) that the artist's mature work reflects not a rejection of Christ so much as a rejection of a dogmatic church, seeing instead in the famous images of his art a profound connection to Christian symbols. Throughout, she helps us to discover the source of the power in Van Gogh's stars and sunflowers.

Publisher's Weekly: Erickson's account of the spiritual dimension of Vincent van Gogh's work is an important corrective to widespread assumptions . . . Drawing extensively on van Gogh's correspondence, Erickson argues convincingly . . . that his abandonment of institutional Christianity . . . was not so much an abandonment of religion as a move to synthesize Christianity and modernity via mysticism . . . A lucid and accessible contribution to understanding the religious character of van Gogh's artistic vision.

Journal of Religion and Health: Erickson does van Gogh a considerable service by returning to the voluminous letters he wrote, in order to help the reader see the roots and meaning of his devotion. She views van Gogh as essentially a mystic inspired by the Gospels and by the writings of John Bunyan and Thomas a Kempis. Their words and images were internalized and remained with the artist in spite of his break with organized Christianity. . . . Erickson provides yet another corrective by carefully reconstructing the etiology of van Gogh's mental disturbances that resulted in an extended hospitalization after the celebrated event in which he severed a part of his own ear and presented it to a local prostitute. By returning to van Gogh's letters and utilizing a finely tuned clinical understanding, Erickson plausibly concludes that the artist suffered from epileptiform illness with attendant depression. She thus provides an alternative view to the varied and sometimes poorly researched conclusions that have led previous scholars and clinicians to arrive at a wide variety of diagnostic hypotheses. . . . Erickson offers a portrait of van Gogh as a visionary struggling to find the means to express his felt spiritual experience. In so doing, she provides us with an enlarged and richly nuanced understanding of the interdependence of suffering, faith, and the act of creation.

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette: The conventional view of Vincent van Gogh is that he was a great painter who lost his faith and, finally, lost his sanity as well. . . . But now, thanks to Kathleen Powers Erickson, such interpretations are no longer tenable. Erickson has performed an invaluable service to the disciplines of art history and spiritual biography. Her brilliant book "At Eternity's Gate: The Spiritual Vision of Vincent van Gogh" corrects numerous misconceptions about this complex man and clarifies the nature of his artistic calling. . . . By illuminating van Gogh's life, Erickson has allowed it, in turn, to illuminate his canvases. Paintings which were formerly "works of art" now seem more like icons; Erickson has enabled us to see beyond their painterly surfaces and glimpse the spiritual forces that inspired them. The paintings become, in a sense, windows that are transparent to the divine reality behind them. More than just a series of magnificent paintings, the works of Vincent van Gogh, after Erickson, now appear as the artist had intended - a visual record of the human soul trying to understand its Creator, while struggling with its afflictions along the earthly road of trials, and making its way, at last, through eternity's gate and into the Celestial City. It is a magnificent trip, and Erickson is a worthy guide along its path.