Beauty and brokenness

In Van Gogh Has a Broken Heart: What Art Teaches Us About the Wonder and Struggle of Being Alive (Zondervan, 256 pp.), Russ Ramsey seeks to deepen our “understanding of human experience” and make us “fearless when it comes to loving art.” He shares stories of sorrow, danger, and heartbreak about artists and their works, hoping these narratives will “remind us not just that this world can wound us, but that wounds can heal.”

Ramsey, the pastor of Christ Presbyterian Church in Nashville, is particularly interested in the proximity of beauty to suffering. Great sorrow and struggle can beget great art, which should give us hope in the midst of our own sorrows. Ramsey illustrates this by recounting episodes from the lives of some of Europe and America’s most beloved artists, as well as a handful of more obscure figures. Ramsey limits his canvas to Western painting since the Renaissance, attending entirely to representational art. This decision leaves out much important artwork (I can’t say I miss the abstract), but one reason for this book’s power is that it’s about art that resonates with him.

Readers of Ramsey’s previous book, Rembrandt Is in the Wind (2022), or his Art Wednesday column for the Fathom Magazine website will be familiar with his conversational and insightful tone. Like an enthusiastic gallery guide, Ramsey deftly combines personal anecdotes, biographical snippets, Scriptural exegesis, and artistic interpretations. Highlights include his interpretation of Rembrandt’s late work Simeon in the Temple, an enlightening account of the relatively obscure Italian Renaissance painter Artemisia Gentileschi, and an insightful look at the effect macular degeneration had on the styles of Edgar Degas and the more obscure contemporary musician and painter Jimmy Abegg. The book invites the reader to participate in Ramsey’s analysis by including a 16-page insert with more than 30 color images of the paintings he discusses.

Although most of the names in the book will be familiar to casual admirers of art, Ramsey delights in exploring obscure works and angles. The chapter about the Mona Lisa, for example, has little to do with Leonardo da Vinci, focusing instead on the painting’s theft in 1911. His look at Norman Rockwell focuses on the artist’s work about the civil rights movement.

Every chapter ends with a different lesson to glean from the paintings under discussion. His chapter about Albert Bierstadt and the Hudson River School, for example, connects the theory of the sublime to the book of Exodus and ends with an excellent consideration of how the sublime in art and nature can remind us of the infinite, eternal, and divine. Unfortunately, he gets there only after lamenting that Euro-American settlers were not more like a romanticized version of Native Americans. His lesson from Van Gogh’s self-mutilation is, “Be gentle. This is a hard world.”

Ramsey’s points occasionally fall flat. When he analyzes J.M.W. Turner’s dramatic late-career change in artistic styles, he concludes that it “was somehow connected to his pain. He was looking for something—chasing a vision of a new world.” Yet he has no evidence to support this supposition, and we do not know what that pain could be. Isn’t it possible for an artist to venture into new styles without a personal crisis or psychological breakdown?

Nonetheless, Van Gogh Has a Broken Heart shows the merits of making art a part of our personal and spiritual lives. Ramsey demonstrates just how fulfilling this can be when he describes a surprising encounter with one of the paintings in his own “personal collection” that brought him to tears. What’s more, the book is commendable for dwelling on the mingling of two seemingly disparate phenomena that can help us understand humanity more richly and Christ more fully: beauty, which reminds of us of the glory of God; and suffering, which reminds us of Christ’s sacrifice and the redemption that arose from it.

— Christopher J. Scalia is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and co-editor of On Faith: Lessons From an American Believer