Toronto historian raises provocative ideas, unable to carry them off

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Self-portrait of Vincent Van Gogh dated 1887. (AP)

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After an unhappy stint as a lay preacher in a Belgian mining town, Vincent van Gogh turned from religion to art. As Modris Eksteins writes in this uneven but still intriguing cultural history, the 20th century turned art into religion.

Van Gogh has become a kind of saint, martyred in the cause of passion, struggle and authenticity. Eksteins, professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, examines the cult of van Gogh, while looking also at van Gogh's shadow, a slippery, self-created German art dealer named Otto Wacker.

In 1932 Wacker was accused of passing off forged van Goghs. For Eksteins, Wacker's trial -- in which rival art experts contradicted each other, and even themselves -- becomes emblematic of the Weimar Republic, the fraught and fragile liberal democracy that emerged in Germany in 1919 and collapsed under the onslaught of Nazism -- and indeed of the whole crisis of truth, authority and authenticity in the tumultuous 20th century.

"More than ever today," Eksteins writes, "Van Gogh is ours, and we are van Gogh. And Otto Wacker is one of us."

The setup of Solar Dance might seem familiar to fans of Ecksteins' widely read and critically acclaimed Rites of Spring.

In this original and audacious 1989 work, Eksteins used the succès de scandale of the 1913 performance of Russian-born composer Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring as a framework to examine the cataclysm of the First World War.

Unfortunately, this work lacks Rites' compelling central metaphor. Wacker is an interesting oddity, a "20th-century mutant," as Ecksteins calls him. (He started as a dancer in the notoriously louche night clubs of between-the-wars Berlin, then became a seemingly enthusiastic Nazi party member, and later an earnest teacher of Communist Party-approved "social dance" in East Germany.)

But Wacker's trial, as a bored news correspondent at the time complained, "had become too detailed to remain interesting." (Another infamous art fraud case, involving Nazism and the chaos of wartime Europe, is covered with a lot more page-turning verve in Edward Dolnick's The Forger's Spell.)

And Ecksteins' connections sometimes feel strained. He uses the "solar dance" as the book's organizing principle, "the theme of the sun, as life-giver and -taker."

But is van Gogh's love of the yellow Provencal sun really connected to the Nazis' obsession with the cleansing fire of war?

Ecksteins doesn't set out to give a comprehensive account of van Gogh (who is the subject of the recent and exhaustive bio by Americans Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith).

Instead, he uses van Gogh as a prism to illuminate the contradictions and complexities of modernism and modernity.

The results are learned, often elegant, but ultimately unsatisfying. Having raised some provocative ideas, Ecksteins seems unable to carry them through.

In particular, his assertion that "the Weimar mood has become our mood," which he backs with a few quick connections between Marlene Dietrich and John Lennon, Christopher Isherwood and Sid Vicious, seems uncharacteristically perfunctory.

Winnipeg journalist Alison Gillmor writes a biweekly visual arts column for the Free Press.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition February 4, 2012 J8