On the couch of historical shame, that which has systematically forgotten women and that today we can only understand as a painful comparative grievance , there is an important gap for Johanna van Gogh-Bonger (Amsterdam, 1862). Traditionally relegated to the secondary role of "sister-in-law" or "wife of", Jo's figure is perhaps the most important to understand the resonance of the surname Van Gogh in the universal history of art.
This is at least understood by Hans Luijten, permanent curator of the Van Gogh Museum in the Dutch capital and author of Todo para Vincent, an extensive biography resulting from five years of research on the woman who put the author of Calavera on the market with a cigarette . «He worked strategically to be able to place Van Gogh's paintings, looking for the best intermediaries throughout the Netherlands and part of France. In the same way, he contacted all the writers and art critics with influence to talk about Vincent in the newspapers and magazines of the time, ”explains this professor of Renaissance literature who has been researching about the fourth century Great mystery of the Brabant painter. His work, which is based on the detailed analysis of three decades of diaries by Theo van Gogh's wife and which has already been published in Dutch, will be translated into English before the end of the year.
According to Luijten, Jo's importance with the Van Gogh legacy is explained through two major milestones. First, the exhibition she organized next to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1905, 15 years after Vincent's death and 14 after her husband's death. In it, in addition to exposing the most lively work of the painter of the months of Arles, he was in charge of establishing contact with the most wealthy and important art dealers of the time. This step, which is key for the paintings to become famous throughout the Old Continent, may be more important but less known than their great contribution to the tortured mysticism of Van Gogh: the publication, in 1914, of the first volume of correspondence that the Artist kept with his brother.
Through more than 800 letters, Johanna conditioned, translated into English and made public the fraternal conversations in a period of time from August 1872 to July 1890, a few months before the painter's death. The importance of the documents, which Theo bequeathed to his wife, not only helps to understand Vincent's complicated creative process, but also immediately became the main study guide and blog of the creators of the creator of Starry Night.
Although at the dawn of World War I the art of Van Gogh was already something in vogue, "the letters did the rest, because the writer and the painter go hand in hand," says Luijten, who discards the monetary motive in the Johanna's motivations. "It is common to associate her widowhood situation with economic despair, but Jo's determination to make Vincent van Gogh's art known has more to do with the ideas of modernity and transcendence that her husband transmitted," says the expert, while recalling the infamous criticisms that his first exhibitions received: "They blamed him for assigning Vincent the status of God of art."
Beyond the numbers, which speak of a woman capable of selling 192 paintings and some, such as Sunflowers , for 15,000 Dutch florins of the time (about six million euros adjusted for inflation), Luijten's biography discovers a hipster Jo for which the role of a widow suffered was not enough and that, not even during her married years, did she cease to be socially involved. This is explained, to a large extent, by her early musical training at birth in a family dedicated to the piano and also to her extraordinary ability for languages, which led her to live in London during her youth.
In the capital of the British Empire he had his first contact with art, since he visited the National Gallery and the British Museum on numerous occasions, where he worked for several months as a punctual translator for German, French and Dutch. There she met many of the gallery owners who would later help her raise Vincent's legacy, but also a group of women of her age who involved her in the incipient suffrage movements of the time.
Of obvious contagion, the young Jo who had crossed the English Channel endorsed the precepts of the internationalist left and imported them into her own country. In addition to vindicating at the street the right to vote of women, who could see materialized in the Netherlands as soon as the Great War ended, Theo's widow joined the then newborn Social Democratic Party of Workers (germ of the current Labor) and fought for a moderate political arm of the labor movement. In fact, and according to his biographer, Jo came to attend a meeting with Leon Trotsky and offered seminars in his own house "on the rights of women and how to aspire to a better life", with the rank of founder of the section female propaganda
On his stay in London, Luijten adds that "he was key in the development of his social conscience", because his greatest effort, as he wrote, was always "to live in a noble way." In England, Jo also came into contact with the performing arts and poetry, and thus investigated the figure of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, about whom he wrote a dissertation analyzing his famous Ozymandias .
After returning to Amsterdam, marrying Theo and being widowed, life did not stop for Jo. In 1901, ten years after burying the oldest of the Van Gogh brothers, he married fellow artist Johan Cohen Gosschalk. Unfortunately, he died a few years later and, after moving Theo's grave from Utrecht to Auvers-sur-Oise to rest with Vincent, he left for New York.
In 1925, at the age of 62, surrounded by her son and her four grandchildren, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger died with the great goal of her life fulfilled, that of seeing Vincent van Gogh's work recognized throughout the world and without detach himself from the painting he considered most valuable: Almendro en flor, the oil on canvas that the artist painted to celebrate the birth of his nephew.
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