Curators at the Metropolitan tell a wonderful story about efforts to attract visitors to an exhibition devoted to the Romantic painter Théodore Chassériau, a celebrated figure in mid-nineteenth-century France, but today not exactly a household name. After a long, unproductive meeting with the marketing department, an exasperated staff member finally burst out, “Why don’t we just call it ‘Van Gogh’”? She had a point. The Dutch-born Post-Impressionist’s name is immediately recognized, even by people who aren’t certain whether it’s “van Go,” “van Gog,” or “van Guh-hch” and who might have trouble identifying any of his paintings unless they had sunflowers in them. The story of van Gogh’s short, troubled life, or at least a version of it that emphasizes his isolation, lack of sales, and instability—and that sliced ear—is so well known that it has become the signature myth of the artist as misunderstood genius. (Not that the basic facts lack drama—born in 1853, Vincent van Gogh dedicated himself to art only in 1880, aged twenty-seven, after failing as an art dealer, a teacher, and a minister; depressed by the lack of attention to his work, and probably suffering from an increasingly debilitating form of epilepsy, he killed himself in 1890.) “The van Gogh’s ear school of art history” is code, among some of my colleagues, for gallery tours led by well-intentioned docents who concentrate on sensational anecdotes instead of aesthetic or historical concerns. A bitter joke among curators is that the show attendance-conscious museum trustees would most like