VAN GOGH, STALIN AND THE TRAPS OF THE FUTURE

By Leonardo Padura and - - Reprint | | Print |

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HAVANA, Oct 2 2007 (IPS) - The macabre contrast between the multi-million-dollar transcendence of Van Gogh\’s paintings and the life the painter led, of privation and uncertainty, reveal in an exemplary fashion that the present is not always able to render individuals even a small measure of justice, not to mention a glimpse of what the future would hold for his work and memory, writes Leonardo Padura Fuentes, a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into a ten languages. In this article, the author writes that although the events of the past cannot be changed in the present, when we see that a few of Van Gogh\’s irises and a self-portrait have become symbols of the beauty of human creation across the world, we understand that the memory of the future is adjusted with a perspective and equity that the present lacks. How many of the owners of the truth or the adored of the moment will be denied \’\’not three but many more times\’\’? However much they try to reinforce their pedestals, many of their statues will be gone tomorrow. Will those who live only for posterity ever learn this lesson? I doubt it, but the lesson will have an effect, in general sooner than later.

In reality the idea of writing such a card came to me a few weeks ago when I saw the film Vincent and Theo, a devastating story of madness, genius, and incomprehension, which relates all of the physical and moral woes that befell these brothers before they went to their final resting place in the desolate French cemetery beneath a few very poor ceramic pots in which anonymous admirers frequently leave sunflowers.

However, what convinced me that a card was needed, and what sparked my small but clear indignation, was reading the list of the twenty paintings sold for the highest prices ever paid, which was circulated more and more feverishly since the Jackson Pollock’s Number 5 captured first place at 140 million dollars.

On this list, where, as would be expected, the name of Picasso, the winner, figured repeatedly, the work of Vincent Van Gogh appeared three times, for his Portrait of Doctor Gachet, Self-Portrait of the Artist Without a Beard, and The Irises, which sold for 82, 71, and 54 million dollars, respectively, in years as ”remote” as 1990, 1988, and 1987, which would have to mean that today they might sell for double that.

The macabre contrast between the multi-million-dollar transcendence of the paintings and the life the painter led, of privation and uncertainty (artistic as well), reveal in an exemplary fashion that the present is not always able to render individuals even a small measure of justice, not to mention a glimpse of what the future holds for their work and memory.

The grandiose destiny that awaited a few sunflowers and irises painted on canvas made me think that throughout history there have been few men who, like Joseph Stalin, worked so resolutely for the benefit of the memory of the future (”transcendence”, if you will). If the case of Stalin comes to me, so distant from what Van Gogh’s life was and what the world today celebrates –and pays for– as his genius, it is because it is a paradigm of paradigms, a pathology par excellence: a man who with complete awareness of what he was doing, worked incessantly for the most blazing immortality, and actually enjoyed it during his lifetime when he embodied the very spirit of the World Revolution, received every possible title, and emerged at the end of WWII as the most powerful man that had ever existed on this earth, reigning over more land and more subjects that the most powerful Caesars or Popes ever had.

It is as hard to imagine Van Gogh living and dying a millionaire as it would be for Stalin, sick with megalomania, to imagine how the future would treat his acts and works. To guarantee that future, he assassinated, jailed, repressed, enslaved (directly and indirectly) millions of human beings. It would have been inconceivable that Stalin, at the end of his life, when the world lay at his feet, could have suspected that all of his glory would soon collapse onto what he himself used to call ”the rubbish heap of history” and that the innumerable images of him would begin to disappear from his empire until they vanished altogether from the visual iconography of the twilight of a 20th century that Stalin had significantly shaped.

A similar fate has befallen hundreds of prophesied figures and messiahs, great and minor, of the political, cultural, and social worlds, who lived with an eye both to the present and the future. In our era the justice of time has been responsible for the toppling of large numbers of statues and the raising of large numbers of others. History is usually stubborn despite the efforts of Stalin and his disciples to dominate and rewrite it. Time has the bothersome habit or putting things in their place when they lose strength.

And though the events of the past cannot be changed in the present, when we see that a few of Van Gogh’s irises and a self-portrait have become symbols of the beauty of human creation across the world, or that the mummy of a ”father of the progressive peoples” is stripped of honours and rank, we understand that the memory of the future is adjusted with a perspective and equity that the present lacks for the most diverse reasons: incomprehension, fear, stupidity, colliding events, and manipulation.

But what will determine the way the powerful and successful of today are remembered in the future? Of the faces that dominate the political and social iconography of the present, how many will survive the test of time and remain on their pedestals? How many of the current owners of the truth or adored of the moment will be denied ”not three but many more times”? However much they try to prevent it, many of their statues will be gone tomorrow, erased by the implacable evolution of memory in the future. Will those who live only for posterity ever learn this lesson? I doubt it, but the lesson will have an effect, in general sooner than later. Meanwhile a few simple wheat stalks remind me of the indestructible greatness of a man who lived only to create beauty, though it was missing from his both his life and his death. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)