It takes effort to come to grips with the paintings of Vincent van Gogh. Seemingly every aspect of his brief career—roughly ten years—and his short life—he killed himself at thirty-six—has been so thoroughly probed, analyzed, documented, and even popularized that it’s almost impossible to see his best known efforts. Despite the obvious intensity of feeling that emanates from Van Gogh’s paintings, it’s difficult to ignore the horrible familiarity of those writhing sunflowers and thick-set figures, those tipped interiors and sun-baked landscapes, in order to confront them freshly and directly. It’s not easy to get past the distancing layers of association surrounding them, banish the memories of the countless reproductions of his work—not to mention the pop culture versions of his biography—and concentrate on what is really there before us.

Whatever we think about Walter Benjamin’s theories about the effects of mechanical reproduction on perceptions of works of art, whether we agree with him that the “aura” of celebrated paintings and sculptures is weakened by the proliferation of their images or, on the contrary, believe that media-bred familiarity can turn particularly famous works of art into pure “aura”—icons of themselves, devoid of physical presence—it’s clear that ubiquity affects our responses. Understanding Van Gogh’s real achievement and accounting for his significance to the evolution of modernism can be, as they say, challenging. It’s altogether too easy merely to recognizethose archetypal images, know where they are located on our mental maps of the history of art, and let it go