Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Picasso, Rembrandt, van Gogh. Four transcendent talents, and one passionate madman, whose lack of artistic talent never mattered as much as his belief in painting.They're the Big Five in the existence of art as cultural collateral. Since its commodification as long as fifty thousand years ago, art as fetish or economics or spirituality has defined the human experience since our ancestors left the African savannah where Man was born. Language, psychology, music and luck are the pillars of our survival as a species, and these are reflected in our works of art, from the first carvings in bone of headless pregnant figurines to the latest glitz junk of Art Basel.

But the Big Five, four geniuses and a tramp, are our wind vanes, showing us where the aesthetics of civilization are blowing. You can construct much of our art history simply by following the strokes of these five painters, but among them one stands out as distinct from the others: Vincent van Gogh. How did he get this stature? Even Vincent's brother Theo, who faithfully sent money for paints and lodging to Vincent for five years, thought Vincent's paintings were garbage. Long after his death, nobody treasured a van Gogh painting, unlike the other four painters that make up the Big Five, who died as legends and masters, while van Gogh's death led to a pauper's grave. How did this happen?

Do you have three minutes to take an interesting quiz about Vincent van Gogh? There is no reward for doing so, and you can jump straight to Wikipedia and spend half an hour becoming an expert on van Gogh's life, or answer the following questions and learn not just some truth about Vincent, but also some insight about the way you perceive and value art. Comments and PMs always welcome, and I'm very interested in your video or audio answers to these questions to put them into my long-ignored project on van Gogh, which is a book, a movie, a musical and a ballet and doomed probably to some sort of purgatory of unfinished intent.

Thank you! Here are the questions, and please let them spark without reason from your thoughts. The first impression of what you know in response to the question is my key to understanding and explaining why Vincent has the stature he does in art history.  

It's unfair to leave you hanging, and sending you to Wikipedia will only result in more misinformation. Wikipedia is fabulous, one of the best things about the Internet, but the van Gogh is fed by a false narrative that begins with Vincent's death in 1890, and continues today for a variety of reasons. If all his paintings were to be put onto the open market today, more than a billion dollars would change hands. The figure is probably closer to five billion dollars, since oil sheiks and social media moguls and insurance CEOs would bid against each other for the artworks and their surefire protection against inflation.

So below the video, and below the artwork I've created to promote the dance video that accompanies a part of the symphony I've created with Peter Fox, called "Vulkano," which in turn is part of a larger thesis called "Vincent & Johanna," you'll find the answers to the questions in a draft-sketch form. This little dialogue should jump-start a larger literary piece that the Corona Time can allow me to complete.

Vincent was born into an upper middle-class family in North Brabant, the Catholic province located in the south of Holland on the Belgian border. He was sent to boarding schools at a young age, but left formal education at age 15. He is claimed as both a Dutch and Flemish son.

On his father's side, there were art dealers and ministers. On his mother's side were merchants. Education was an enormous priority in the van Gogh household, and Vincent grew up with nannies and servants. His father had a large house as a result of being the local preacher, a charismatic man who cast a long shadow over Vincent.

Vincent hated boarding school, but was a smart student who left school without demonstrating much talent in any academic discipline other than language and reading.

Vincent's career as a painter spanned about a decade.

Vincent's first job was a sales assistant at the art gallery of his uncle, where he stayed for four years and earned the trade of art acquisition and selling. He was chastised often for ridiculing the poor taste of the gallery's clients. He lasted around six years in three branches of the gallery, in the Hague, London and Paris. He was good with languages, and learned to blend into different cultures although he had a rude attitude and was prone to interrupting and disrespecting his elders. Despite the fact that his uncle was his boss, Vincent was fired at age 23.

Theo was Vincent's younger brother. He adored Vincent, and followed him into the family's art gallery business, where he became the avant garde expert on impressionism, basically representing the first impressionists at the family art gallery in Paris at the moment impressionism bloomed. Meeker than his older brother, Theo quickly fit into the gallery's commercial aims, and was good enough dealing traditional artworks that his uncle let him manage a small collection of impressionist paintings which did not sell.

Vincent has been labeled as bipolar, schizophrenic, depressive, anxious, poisoned by mercury, but he was suffering from the third and most lethal stage of syphilis. The diagnosis of neurosyphilis is still resisted by the art world, even as it acknowledges Theo's death as a result of neurosyphilis. Both brothers were habitual brothel users, and Vincent lived for a long time with a working prostitute. The prevalence of syphilis among males in Europe in the late 1800's is estimated at between 10% to 30%.

Vincent was a dedicated preacher, dazzled for years by his fervent beliefs, even as his younger brother Theo was a committed and faithful atheist who refused to acknowledge any church or religion. By the time Vincent started painting, he had been kicked out of several parishes and had lost any respect for organized religion. As he painted outdoors, Nature won his worship.

More than 2,000 paintings by Vincent were in Theo's possession when Vincent committed suicide. The van Gogh family demanded that the paintings be destroyed because they were an embarrassment to the family's reputation as purveyors of valuable artworks. Theo died insane shortly after Vincent's suicide, and the paintings ended up in the hands of his wife, Johanna Bonger.

As seen above, Theo was one of the world's most successful art connoisseurs, and the earliest champion of the Impressionists. He found Vincent's early works too depressing, and urged his brother to get lighter and brighter and more saturated. Legend has it that Theo supported his brother as an artist, which is revisionist history. Vincent had frightened and antagonised his parents to the point that his father paid him a support fee every month as long as Vincent did not live in the same town as the rest of the family. Theo found out about these payments, understood that his preacher father lived well but did not make much money, and took over the payments himself. Vincent did not know the money was coming from Theo, and was furious when he found out. For ten years, Theo ignored his brother's progress as a painter, and instead encouraged him to become a draughtsman, drawing bridges and civic works. Vincent had zero aptitude for illustration, since his perspective was nil. In the last year of his life, Theo looked at Vincent's paintings differently, as he became a husband and a father and found some comforts in Vincent's landscapes that he did not glean from the Impressionists. 

Mostly through Theo, Vincent had quite a reputation as a serious art critic and general bon vivant with Gauguin, Emile Bernard, Toulouse Lautrec, Pissarro, Monet, Degas, Seurat and Rousseau. Vincent also took some ill-fated and unproductive lessons from the leading classical painters in France.

Vincent voluntarily entered into a progressive asylum for the insane in the south of France, where he was the calmest and sanest patient surrounded by true madness, a daily nightmare of unhinged thinking and behavior. He had three month-long breakdowns during the course of his year-long stay. Theo never traveled to visit. Still, Vincent produced some of his greatest paintings during that time.

More than 800 letters from Vincent to friends and family survived his death as well as the death of his brother Theo. More than 600 of these letters were written to Theo, and less than 40 were written from Theo to Vincent. Idle when not painting, Vincent was a copious writer. In my opinion, he would have won the Nobel Prize for literature if he had lived long enough; Winston Churchill, in comparison, won a Nobel in literature for his writing. Theo's letters were mostly short notes with money enclosed. It is easy to go through the letters of the brothers and see Theo concentrating on his work and barely acknowledging Vincent's life as a painter. The letters have recently been open-sourced by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, but Johanna Bonger was the original editor and compiled the first edition of the letters before the First World War. It is clear to me that she censored some of the letters as well as some of the paintings to better package her brother-in-law as the chief martyr in the history of modern art. She succeeded perfectly, and she is an amazing story in her own right.

Two recent movies used the murder of Vincent van Gogh as the starting point of their perspectives, so the movies emerged limping to be quickly forgotten. Kirk Douglas as the heroic martyr was the first champion of Vincent's giant stature in art, but that movie is an advertisement to Eisenhower-era collectors of art, clearly urging the public to fill up the empty walls of their houses with anything of color or industry. The two more recent movies are hardly worth watching, and the newest, "Eternity's Gate" by Julian Schnabel, was a huge disappointment to me because Schnabel's bio-pic of the fantastic Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas is one of the most brilliant depictions of a suffering artist that any medium has ever produced.

Let me know which it is!

The painting is called the Potato Eaters, and was the first complex oil effort from Vincent while he lived with peasants in hard-scrabble conditions. Theo was surprised at the sudden improvement in Vincent's approach, but nevertheless labeled the painting "too dark" for the marketplace.