Steven Naifeh - Van Gogh and the Artists He Loved

Acknowledgments

During our work on Van Gogh: The Life, Greg Smith and I were astonished by how warmly the most eminent scholars on Van Gogh welcomed us into their field. We had written a biography of the American artist Jackson Pollock but had never written on Van Gogh. One of those scholars was Ann Dumas, curator at the Royal Academy in London, who has graciously written the superb afterword to this book. Two others were Chris Stolwijk, general director, RKDNetherlands Institute for Art History, and former head of publications at the Van Gogh Museum, and Susan Stein, curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, both of whom generously read the manuscript for this book, encouraged me, and helped make this project successful in many other waysalthough, of course, any errors of fact or judgment remain mine.

For her vital help with the book, I also thank Gregs and my close friend Rianne Norbart, who we met at the Van Gogh Museum, where she was head of Communications and Development, and who is now unit head, Culture Sector, Department of Culture and Tourism Abu Dhabi. Rianne improved our lives, as she does everyones she meets, with her brilliance, warmth, and passion for art.

Nienke Bakker, curator at the Van Gogh Museum; Sjraar van Heugten, former curator at the Van Gogh Museum and now an independent curator; Monique Hageman, research assistant at the Van Gogh Museum; and Albertien Lykles-Livius, head of Rights and Reproductions at the Van Gogh Museum, have all been crucially helpful in locating images of works for this book, reminding me of the extraordinary universe of knowledge that that institution represents and of the generosity with which it makes that knowledge available to scholars and writers everywhere.

This book accompanies a series of related exhibitions, including one at the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio. I am grateful to the director, Nannette Maciejunes, and the chief curator, David Stark, for mounting the significant exhibition Through Vincents Eyes. The title is Greg Smiths, who always imagined assisting in the preparation of exhibitions on Van Gogh and the artists he loved. I am also grateful to Della Watkins, director of the Columbia Museum of Art in South Carolina, who supervised the elegant exhibition Van Gogh and His Inspirations at her museum in 201920.

Robert Kashey and David Wojciechowski of Shepherd Gallery and Joseph Gibbon of Shepherd Gallery Services read the manuscript and reviewed the illustrations for me. They brought their encyclopedic understanding of nineteenth-century art to every aspect of this book, as they have done for the past three decades to the art collection that Greg Smith and I assembled. Many of the works from this joint effort appear in the pages of this book.

Several other friends and family members read the book for me and provided support and encouragement so important that it literally could not have been written without their help. In particular, I thank my close friends Scott Hiott, Robert Rich, and David Samson, whose literary advice, visual acuity, and wisdom were indispensable at every point. I thank my mother, Marion Naifeh, to whom the biography of Van Gogh was dedicated, for making this bookfor making everythingpossible.

Working with some of the same people who worked on the biography eased the sadness of my not being able to write this book, as I wrote every other book, with Greg Smithhowever much his overwhelming influence is felt on every page and in every word. You can imagine how gratifying it was to be able to reassemble much of the teamthe family, reallywho worked on the biography of Van Gogh.

I couldnt have written this book without the help of Elizabeth Petit. Together with Beth Moore, she managed the research for Van Gogh: The Life, and they still manage the Van Gogh Facebook and Instagram pages, which together have more than 1.1 million followers. As with the biography, Elizabeth helped with sources, with rights and reproductions, and also with important advice on structure. For this book, her husband, Brad Petit, also provided essential help with structure and language. Time and again, I was impressed byand benefited richly fromthe enormous talent and care he brought to the manuscript. I am deeply in their debt.

Mel Berger, Gregs and my extraordinarily gifted agent at William Morris Endeavor for thirty-five years, and our friend for thirty-five years, represented this book as he has all of the others during that time.

And how very fortunate I am that this book, like Gregs and my biography of Van Gogh, found a home at Random House, the ideal publisher, and that Susanna Porter, who brilliantly edited the biography, has now edited this book as well. Greg and I were always grateful to Susanna for shaping the manuscript of the biography and shepherding the book through the complicated publishing process with such enthusiasm, grace, and wonderful intelligenceand once again I owe her an enormous debt of gratitude.

Three other people helped reconstitute the original family: Emily DeHuff, the copy editor, who brought to this project, as to the first one, her exquisite professionalism and her acute ear for language; Barbara Bachman, the gifted designer, who worked miracles with this book as she did with the biography, creating a design worthy of the artist it celebrates; and Vincent La Scala, the production editor, who helped manage the production process for both books with great expertise and much-appreciated rigor.

Some of the others at Random House who worked on the biography have left in the intervening decade, but I am all the more grateful to those who have joined the original family for embracing this new book: Sincere thanks, especially, to publisher Andy Ward and the others who lead the great publishing house, notably Robin Dresser, editorial director, and Tom Perry, senior vice president and deputy publisher. Emily Hartley, editor; Robert Siek, senior production editor; and Richard Elman, senior production director, also played crucial roles in creating the book that you have in your hands.

I thank several photographers who took photographs of the works in Gregs and my collection: our friend Brent Cline, and also Drew Baron of the Columbia Museum of Art, Glenn Castellano, and Patrick Lorenz. I also thank Gregs and my friend Esteban Negrete, who managed the photography sessions so deftly.

I am very grateful to the many institutions, and the people who represent them, who made photographs of works from their collections available for reproduction in the book: The Albertinum/Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden; Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; Amgueddfa CymruNational Museum of Wales, Cardiff; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Art Institute of Chicago; Ateneum Art Museum, Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki; Cincinnati Art Museum; Cleveland Museum of Art; Columbus Museum of Art; Dallas Museum of Art; Dordrechts Museum; Emile Bhrle Collection, Zurich; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Galleria Nazionale dArte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome; Gemldegalerie, Berlin; Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Hiroshima Museum of Art; Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood House, Kenwood, Great Britain; Krller-Mller Museum, Otterlo; Kunsthalle Hamburg, Hamburg; Kunstmuseum Basel, Kupferstichkabinett; Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague; Kunstmuseum Solothurn, Dbi-Mller-Stiftung; Landesmuseum fr Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Oldenburg; Mauritshuis, The Hague; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Michele and Donald DAmour Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, Massachusetts; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Muse dOrsay, Paris; Muse National du Chteau de Versailles; Muse du Louvre, Paris; Muse Rodin, Paris; Muses royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels; Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; Museu de Arte de So Paulo Assis Chateaubriand; Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Museum der bildenden Knste, Leipzig; Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; National Gallery, London; Nationalmuseum, Stockholm; Neue Pinakothek, Bayerische Staatsgemldesammlungen, Munich; Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen; Ordrupgaard, Copenhagen; Oslo, Nasjonalgalleriet; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; Seattle Art Museum; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Southampton City Art Gallery; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati; The Armand Hammer Collection, Los Angeles; The Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation, on long-term loan to the Princeton University Art Museum; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art; The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow; The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg; The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation); Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford; and Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud, Cologne.