Van Gogh painted everything - except gay

The All-Painter, Gays Excepted – What We Do with Van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh painted everything. Sunflowers, starry nights, pairs of shoes, peasants, bedrooms, fields, crows, himself – over and over again, himself. He looked at the world with an intensity that was pathological and at the same time the greatest thing painting has ever produced. He painted as if every brushstroke were a breath, as if he would die if he stopped.

But he didn't paint any gay pictures. Not a single man desiring another. Not a single scene showing love between men. In a body of work exceeding nine hundred paintings and a thousand drawings: none.

That's no small thing. That's a gap we're filling.

A Life on the Edge

Vincent Willem van Gogh was born in Zundert in the Netherlands in 1853, the son of a Protestant pastor. He was the second child – but the first to survive. His older brother, also named Vincent Willem, died a year before his birth. Vincent grew up with the awareness of being a replacement, a name that was already taken. That shaped him.

He was not an easy child. Stubborn, intense, socially awkward. School didn't interest him, conventions didn't interest him. What interested him was the world – how it looked, how it felt, how it smelled. He was an observer long before he was a painter.

At sixteen, he began working as an art dealer for Goupil & Cie, his uncle's company. He worked in The Hague, in London, in Paris. He saw art, a lot of art – but he sold it, he didn't paint it. Not yet. Instead, he fell in love, unhappily, multiple times, always with women who didn't want him. He became religious, fanatically religious, went as a lay preacher to the Belgian coal mines, lived with the poorest, gave away everything he had.

The church dismissed him. Too extreme, too uncontrollable, too unrepresentative of what the church wanted to project.

And then, at twenty-seven, he started painting.

The Discovery of Color

Van Gogh's early works are dark. The Potato Eaters, 1885 – peasants around a table, the light of a single lamp, faces as if dug from the earth. This is not a beautiful picture. It's not meant to be a beautiful picture. It's meant to be true.

Then came Paris. Theo, his brother and lifelong supporter, lived there, and Vincent moved in with him. Paris in 1886 was the capital of modern art – the Impressionists, the Pointillists, Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin. Van Gogh absorbed everything. And color exploded.

What came next is art history. Arles, the yellow color, the sunflowers, the bedroom. Saint-Rémy, the starry night. Auvers-sur-Oise, the wheat fields, the crows, the shot.

Van Gogh painted over nine hundred paintings in ten years. That's one painting every four days. That's not painting – that's obsession. That's a man who knows time is short, even if he doesn't know how short.

The Male Body in Van Gogh – and What's Missing

Van Gogh painted men. Sowers, weavers, prisoners, postmen, doctors, himself. He showed the male body at work, in exhaustion, in the dignity of poverty. But he never desired it. Never in the way that interests us.

Yet the material would have been there. The men in Arles – the soldiers, the workers, the fishermen. The bodies he saw daily. The intensity with which he looked at everything. Van Gogh saw nothing indifferently. Everything he looked at burned itself into him.

What would he have painted if he had directed that intensity towards the love between men? If he had looked at two men the way he looked at the sunflowers – with that greed, that desperation, that will to capture the fleeting?

The answer is in his style. Van Gogh's brushwork is physical. It's not smooth, not academic, not distant. It's movement, energy, skin. If Van Gogh had painted a body that was desired – a male body seen by another man – that body would have been more alive than any other in art history.

Gauguin, the Yellow Color, and What Happens Between Men

We need to talk about Gauguin. Paul Gauguin came to Arles in October 1888, at Van Gogh's invitation, who envisioned an artists' house, a community, a brotherhood. For two months they lived together, painted together, argued together.

What happened between them art history has dismissed as "friendship" and "artistic rivalry." But look at the letters. Look at how Van Gogh writes about Gauguin – the admiration, the dependence, the despair when Gauguin leaves. The evening Van Gogh cuts off his ear is the evening Gauguin announces he will leave Arles.

That's not just friendship. That's something for which there was no language in 1888 – at least none that Van Gogh would have been allowed to use.

KUNSTWERK BILDER names it. Not as speculation, but as what the intensity of this relationship suggests: two men who were too close for what their time allowed.

What We Do with Van Gogh

Van Gogh's style is unmistakable. The swirling lines, the thick layers of paint, the light that doesn't glow but burns. No painter before him and hardly any after him used color in such a way – as emotion, as body, as a scream.

KUNSTWERK BILDER appropriates precisely this language. We take Van Gogh's brushstroke, his power of color, his ability to turn the inside out – and we paint what he did not paint. Two men who love each other, in Van Gogh's colors. The sensuality of the male body, in Van Gogh's light. The tenderness between men, captured with Van Gogh's intensity.

What would have happened if Van Gogh had directed the gaze he had for sunflowers towards a man he loved? We show it. With Van Gogh's skill, and that's what's so valuable. 

Gay Art. Gay art for your home. KUNSTWERK BILDER.