Books: Passionate Painter

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In spite of their dissimilarity the two got along fairly well till one day van Gogh suggested in all seriousness that they paint pictures together, each contributing the thing he was best at. Gauguin laughed all the way to the town brothel. There one of the girls told van Gogh that if he could not give her a five-franc piece for a Christmas present he might at least make her a gift of one of his big lop-ears. Next day, with no apparent provocation, van Gogh hurled an absinthe glass at Gauguin. The day following, he left a parcel at the brothel. It was his right ear, which he had cut off, wrapped up with clumsy neatness. Gauguin left, and soon after the Mayor ordered van Gogh locked up in the insane ward of the hospital. After that there was no telling when the mad fit would seize him, and he would scream till his throat was inflamed. At the asylum at Saint-Remy they let him paint, off & on, eventually released him in care of a doctor, nearer Paris and Theo. But the doctor, an art connoisseur, enraged van Gogh by his cavalier treatment of artists whom his patient revered. One day he terrified the doctor by appearing with a revolver in his hand. But van Gogh only laughed awkwardly, went to his room and shot himself in the stomach. As he lay dying he said to Theo: "Did you ever know such an awkward and helpless fellow as me? I can't even manage to use a revolver properly."

The Author, who takes a deep view of artists, thinks van Gogh was less gifted with imagination and talent than the average man. "But if the word artist . . . is a synonym for a man of such moral tenor that he only sets a further goal to his aspiration as his consciousness gains in the deepening perception of Nature and her laws, then Vincent was an artist and the greatest of our time."

As tireless a traveler as Keyserling, "the travel-philosopher," Julius Meier-Graefe, 66, has nearly finished his journey. Along the road he has seen and called attention to many an overgrown but inspiring ruin. He wrote the first history of painting of the 19th Century, started an arts & crafts shop, founded a literary journal (Pan), made European collectors aware of Manet, Degas, Renoir, Cezanne. He went to Spain to bend the knee to Velazquez, returned a blazing disciple of El Greco. Though he is a frequent contributor to International Studio and Cahier d'Art, few of his more than 40 books have been translated. Some of them: Spanish Journey, Pyramid and Temple, Degas, Cezanne, Dostoevsky.

Soap-Box

UPSURGE—Robert Gessner—Farrar & Rinehart ($1).

One by-product of the industrial revolution, the soapbox, has left its mark on all consciously "proletarian" writing. Curbstone oratory, more effective in the open air than in the echoing covers of a book, is drawing bigger crowds than once it did, and publishers, their anxious fingers on the public pulse, are beginning to prescribe this form of mild dynamite. Though alert Publisher Farrar finds Upsurge "impossible to describe," he admits that this manifesto-poem is "frankly a message."