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Books and Arts; Book Review;Vincent van Gogh;Paint a palette blue and grey
文藝；書評；文森特·威廉·梵高; 調色板上那一抹晦暗;
Van Gogh: The Life. By Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith.
《梵高：生命》；史蒂芬奈菲與格里高利懷特聯合著；
Vincent Van Gogh seemed made for a bittersweet Hollywood biopic. The dazzling colours and dashing brushstrokes of his sunflowers, cornfields and cypress trees are among the most familiar and loved works in the history of art, fetching record-breaking sums in auction rooms. The inevitable biopic was called “Lust for Life”. But as an enormous and engrossing new biography shows, van Gogh's lust for conflict was strongest of all.
梵高仿佛就是為一部五味雜陳的好萊塢傳記影片而生。他畫筆下的向日葵，麥田和柏樹名垂藝術史，以其絢爛的色彩和有力的筆觸被人們熟知與欣賞，并在拍賣會上連創拍賣紀錄。顯然，這部傳記名字本應為“生活的渴望”，但隨著一本關于梵高生命的引人入勝，鴻篇巨制自傳的上市，原來梵高對矛盾的渴望才是最強烈的。
The book describes a lonely, bad- tempered alcoholic, a syphilitic who liked to bite the hands that fed him. It in no way devalues the quality of the painting, of course, but this portrait by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, two prolific authors who seem to like writing about drunken artists (Jackson Pollock was an earlier subject) demolishes any romance that still attaches to the artist's life.
這本自傳描述了一位寂寞，壞脾氣的酗酒者，和一位喜歡啃咬那對養活自己雙手的梅毒病患。如此的描述絕對沒有使梵高的畫作貶值，但是史蒂芬奈菲與格里高利懷特---這兩位比較喜歡酗酒藝術家題材（他們曾以杰克遜·波洛克作為題材）的多產作家，已經將籠罩在梵高身上的藝術浪漫氣息驅散殆盡。
The book is composed, like a pointillist painting, of thousands of factual details. Nothing is sacrificed to curtail its length; the only concession is to remove the footnotes from the text. (There are enough of these to fill 5,000 typewritten pages and they are all to be found on the book's website.) But the story has a momentum that justifies the time it takes to tell it, and the authors conclude by making a plausible case for van Gogh's accidental death rather than his suicide. No gun was found; the fatal bullet entered the body at the wrong angle and seemed to have been fired from too far away for the wound to have been self-inflicted. Strong circumstantial evidence suggests that van Gogh was the victim of schoolboy bullies.
這本自傳包含了數以千計零零散散的事實，并沒有為了削減長度而犧牲任何的細節，其唯一的讓步就是將稿件中的附注刪除（事實上，這些附注足以填滿5000張打印紙，并且它們都在這本書的官網上面）。就算是這樣，書中的故事也值得讓我們有動力花時間細細品味，加之本書的兩位作者合理地解釋了梵高的離世---死于一場意外而非自殺，首先事故現場沒有找到槍支；并且那顆致命子彈以錯誤的角度進入了梵高的身體，因為從傷口來看，子彈是從非常遠的地方所發射而不是以自殺的方式發射的。有力的間接證據顯示梵高的死竟歸咎于一群小混混。
Van Gogh's earliest job with an art dealer took him to The Hague, and then Paris and London, but his youthful passion was to be heard as a preacher. His first sermon was delivered, in heavily-accented English, by the River Thames in Petersham, but congregations did not respond to him. Only when he accepted that he would not become a minister, as his father had been, did he turn to art. Since he earned no money van Gogh simply assumed that he was entitled to a share of his brother Theo's salary, demanding 150 francs a month from him at a time when the wage of a French schoolteacher was 75 francs a month.
梵高在古皮爾藝術公司的第一份工作使他來到了海牙，并隨后幾經輾轉，到過巴黎，倫敦工作。但他年輕時的激情主要用在了布道上面，當他第一次在泰晤士河旁的佩特香以帶有濃重口音的英語向眾人傳道時，信眾們紛紛不予理睬。當他決定不追隨父親的腳步成為一位牧師后，他才走上了藝術之路。因為沒有穩定的收入，梵高竟認為自己有權分享弟弟提奧的工資，不加思考地要求他每月給自己150法郎，要知道他作為普通學校教師的弟弟月工資只有75法郎。
Van Gogh first concentrated on dark charcoal drawings of Dutch peasants. “When I draw I see clearly,” he said. Theo saw clearly that they did not sell, and suggested colourful landscapes instead. Van Gogh was eventually converted to the idea of colour by Rembrandt, and he started to paint bright orange and brown sunflowers in Paris in 1886, hoping they might impress a particularly voluptuous Italian model. His conversion to colour and landscape was not complete, however, until he went south to Arles in 1888.
梵高首先想到的是利用荷蘭農民常用的黑木炭作畫，“畫畫時我能看得更透徹”他曾這么說。提奧清楚地知道這些畫是沒有銷路的，所以建議梵高畫一些充滿色彩的風景畫。最終，在倫勃朗的影響下，梵高開始了在圖畫中使用彩色和變換創作主體（畫風景）的轉變，并在1886年于巴黎開始繪制亮橘和亮棕色的向日葵，希望這些畫作能引起一些沉溺于酒色的意大利模特們的興趣。這種繪畫風格上的轉變直到1888年梵高南下來到法國阿勒斯時才趨向成熟。
When he persuaded Paul Gauguin to join him in Arles, van Gogh believed that they would inspire each other's work. It was a tragic delusion. Gauguin, the more forceful personality, wanted to draw in the studio, van Gogh to paint in the open air. Van Gogh was quick, Gauguin was languid. Gauguin worked from the imagination and memory, van Gogh surrendered himself to nature. The Arlesiennes adored Gauguin and ignored van Gogh. The two painters quarrelled bitterly. When Gauguin announced he was leaving for Paris on December 23rd 1889, van Gogh reacted by slashing his own left ear, slicing through to the jaw. Confined to asylums as a psychotic, he did not stop painting, but he was dead of a bullet wound only 18 months later, not long after he sold his first painting. He was 37. Decades passed before it was widely appreciated he was a genius. It has taken even longer to fully understand that his life was a disaster.
在阿勒斯時，梵高勸說保羅·高更加入他的創作隊伍，他相信他們倆能激發彼此的靈感，有所裨益。但這卻是個悲劇的幻想，高更，擁有更強勢的性格，想在工作室作畫，而梵高卻傾向在室外工作；高更工作經常無精打采，拖拖拉拉。而梵高工作卻雷厲風行；高更將靈感寄托于想象和回憶；而梵高將思想臣服于大自然。但阿勒斯人顯然更中意高更而把梵高忽略了，隨后兩人大吵一架，當高更在1889年12月23日宣稱自己將前往巴黎時，梵高將自己的左耳割下，傷口長至下顎，他像一個精神病患者一般將自己困在心靈的枷鎖中，卻沒有停止作畫。18個月之后，當梵高賣出了自己的第一幅畫后不久，他就死于槍傷。當眾人終于認識到他是一個天才時，幾十年已經過去了，如果我們想完全看清他生命中悲劇的一面，或許還需要更長的時間。
