Range, page 13
When he was thirteen, the boy was admitted to a brand-new school housed in a hulking former royal palace. It was so far from his home that he had to board with a local family. His mind was elsewhere during class, but he was a good student, and spent his free time memorizing poetry.
The art teacher was the faculty celebrity, an education pioneer who argued for design to become a central part of the national economic engine. That crusade was so successful it led the federal government to mandate freehand drawing classes in every public school. Rather than holding forth from the front of the class, the teacher arranged students in the center and meandered through them like a sewing needle, giving personal attention. Most students adored him. But he made no impression on the boy. As an adult, the boy would complain that nobody had ever told him what perspective was in drawing, even though it was so central to the teacher’s tenets that knowledge of perspective was written into the new law expanding art education.
The boy didn’t like living with strangers, so he left the school just before he turned fifteen. For the next sixteen months, he did little other than take long nature walks. That could not go on forever, but he had no idea what else to do. Fortunately, his uncle owned a fantastically successful art dealership, and had just been knighted. He offered his nephew a job in the big city. Making art had not inspired the boy, but selling it did. He turned the observational intensity he had practiced in nature to lithographs and photographs, categorizing what he saw just as he had his beetles. By twenty, he was dealing with important clients and traveling abroad for sales trips. The young man confidently told his parents that he would never have to look for a job again. He was wrong.
He was a country boy in the city, without enough social grace to smooth over disagreements with his boss, and he disliked bargaining, which felt like trying to take advantage of customers. He was soon transferred to a London office that did not deal directly with customers, and then at twenty-two he was transferred again, this time to Paris. He arrived in France amid an artistic revolution. On walks to work, the young man passed the studios of artists who were in the process of becoming famous. And yet, as with the art teacher, as a pair of his future biographers would write, “None of it registered.” He was too busy with a new obsession: religion. Years later, when he and his little brother discussed those revolutionary artists, he would say he had “seen absolutely nothing of them.”
When he was finally dismissed from the dealership, he went to work as an assistant teacher at a boarding school in a seaside town in England. Working fourteen-hour days, he taught classes from French to math, oversaw the dorm, took the kids to church, and acted as the handyman. The school was simply a business venture for the owner, and the young man was cheap labor. He found another job as a tutor, this time at a fancier boarding school, but after a few months he decided he would become a missionary in South America. His parents talked him out of that, insisting that he needed to “stop following [his] own desires” and return to a stable life course. His mother wished he would do something in nature that would make him “happier and calmer.” He decided to follow in his father’s footsteps; he would train to become a full-fledged pastor.
In the meantime, his father arranged a job as a bookstore clerk. The young man loved books and worked from 8 a.m. until midnight. When the store flooded, he astounded his colleagues with his sheer physical endurance as he carried pile after pile of books to safety. His new goal was to get accepted to a university so that he could later train as a pastor. Again, he unleashed his tireless passion. He worked with a tutor, and copied by hand the text of entire books. “I must sit up as long as I can keep my eyes open,” he told his brother. He reminded himself that “practice makes perfect,” but Latin and Greek did not come easily to him. He moved in with an uncle, a stern war hero who urged him simply, “push on.” The young man resolved to begin work before his peers rose and finish after they slept. His uncle would find him reading in the wee morning hours.
And still, he floundered in his studies. Nearing his twenty-fifth birthday, the young man heard a sermon about how the economic revolution had made certain citizens, like his art-dealer uncle, fabulously wealthy, while others had been thrust into abject poverty. He decided to forsake university to spread the Word more quickly. He opted for a shorter educational course, but was not adept at giving the succinct, punchy sermons that the school mandated. He failed in that program as well. But nobody could stop him from preaching, so he headed for coal country, where inspiration was needed most.
When the young man arrived and saw the blackened sky, he likened it to the shading of a Rembrandt. There he would preach to workers so downtrodden that they referred to the world above the mineshaft as “up in Hell.” He dove in to spiritual service with his usual verve, giving away his clothes and money, and doting night and day on the ill and injured. They were legion.
Shortly after he arrived, a series of explosions killed 121 miners and sent gas streaming out of the ground, fueling a pillar of fire like some monstrous Bunsen burner nestled below the earth. The suffering locals marveled at the young man’s endurance as he tried to soothe families. But they also found him odd; the children he taught did not listen. Soon, his makeshift ministry was finished. He was twenty-seven, and despondent. A decade after an exuberant start as an art dealer, he had no possessions, accomplishments, or direction.
He poured his heart out in a missive to his little brother, now a respected art dealer himself. He likened himself to a caged bird in spring who feels deeply that it is time for him to do something important but cannot recall what it is, and so “bangs his head against the bars of his cage. And then the cage stays there and the bird is mad with suffering.” A man, too, he exhorted, “doesn’t always know himself what he could do, but he feels by instinct, I’m good for something, even so! . . . I know that I could be a quite different man! . . . There’s something within me, so what is it!” He had been a student, an art dealer, a teacher, a bookseller, a prospective pastor, and an itinerant catechist. After promising starts, he had failed spectacularly in every path he tried.
His brothers suggested he try carpentry, or look for work as a barber. His sister thought he would make a fine baker. He was an insatiable reader, so perhaps a librarian. But in the depths of his despair, he turned his ferocious energy on the last thing he could think of that he could start right away. His next letter to his brother was very short: “I’m writing to you while drawing and I’m in a hurry to get back to it.” Previously, the man had seen drawing as a distraction from his aim of reaching people with truth. Now he began to seek truth by documenting the lives around him in drawings. He had stopped drawing freehand as a child when he realized he was a clumsy draftsman, so he started at the very beginning, reading Guide to the ABCs of Drawing.
In the coming years, he would make a few very brief attempts at formal training. His cousin-in-law was a painter and tried to teach him watercolor. The cousin would later be listed on the man’s Wikipedia page as the sole entry beside “Education.” In truth, the man struggled with the fragile touch required for watercolor, and the mentor/mentee relationship ended after a month. His former art-dealer boss, now an esteemed tastemaker in the art world, pronounced his drawings unworthy of being displayed for sale. “Of one thing I am sure,” the boss told him, “you are no artist.” He added flatly, “You started too late.”
When he was nearly thirty-three, he enrolled in art school alongside students a decade younger, but lasted only a few weeks. He entered the class drawing competition, and the judges harshly suggested he revert to a beginner’s class with ten-year-olds.
As he had between careers, he pinballed from one artistic passion to another. On one day he felt true artists only painted realistic figures, and then when his figures came out poorly, the next day true artists only cared for landscapes. One day he strived for realism, another for pure expression. This week art was a medium for declaring religious devotion, next week such concerns encumbered pure creation. One year he decided all true art consisted only of shades of black and gray, and then later that vibrant color was the real pearl inside the artist’s shell. Each time he fell fully in love, and then just as fully and quickly back out.
One day, he dragged an easel and oil paints—with which he had almost no experience—out to a sand dune in a storm. He ran in and out of cover, slapping and slathering paint on the canvas in staccato strokes between gusts of wind that peppered the painting with grains of sand. He squeezed color right from the tube onto the canvas when he had to. The viscous oil paint and the speed required to apply it in the storm freed his imagination and his hand from the crippling deficiencies that plagued him when he strove for perfect realism. More than a century later, his definitive biographers would write of that day, “[He] made an astonishing discovery: he could paint.” And he felt it. “I enjoy it tremendously,” he wrote his brother. “Painting has proved less difficult than I expected.”
He continued to whipsaw from one artistic experiment to another, avowing and disavowing, roundly condemning the attempt to capture sunlight in paint only to reverse course and place his canvas outside in the sunlight to do just that. He obsessed over deeper and darker blacks in colorless works, and then dispensed with that in an instant and forever in favor of vibrant color, his about-face so thorough that he would not even use black to depict the night sky. He started piano lessons because he thought musical tones might teach him something about color tones.
His peregrinations continued for the few remaining years of his short life, both geographically and artistically. He finally forsook the goal of ever becoming a master draftsman, and then one by one left behind all of the styles that he had previously claimed to be critical, but at which he had failed. He emerged with a new art: impetuous, slathered with paint, erupting with color, laden with no formality other than to capture something infinite.* He wanted to make art that anyone could understand, not haughty works for those with privileged training. For years he had tried and failed to capture every proportion of a figure accurately. Now he let that go so entirely that he left figures walking among trees with faces left blank and hands like mittens.
Whereas he had once demanded live models to portray and images to copy, now he wielded his mind’s eye. One evening, he looked out his bedroom window toward the rolling hills in the distance and, as he had with birds and beetles as a boy, watched the sky pass for hours. When he picked up the brush, his imagination transformed a nearby town into a tiny village, its towering church to a humble chapel. The dark green cypress tree in the foreground became massive, winding up the canvas like seaweed in the swirling rhythm of the night sky.
It was just a few years from the recommended relegation to a drawing class for ten-year-olds. But that starry night, along with scores of other paintings in his new style, the one he devised amid a succession of failures, would launch a new era of art and inspire new conceptions of beauty and expression. Works that he dashed off in hours as experiments over the final two years of his life would become some of the most valuable objects—culturally and monetarily—that have ever existed in the world.
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It is a myth that Vincent van Gogh died in anonymity. An ecstatic review cast him as a revolutionary months before he died, and made him the talk of Paris. Claude Monet, the dean of impressionism—the movement Van Gogh ignored, lamented, and then innovated upon—declared Van Gogh’s work the cream of an annual exhibition.
Adjusted for inflation, four of Van Gogh’s paintings have sold for more than $100 million, and they weren’t even the most famous ones. His work now graces everything from socks to cell phone covers and an eponymous vodka brand. But he reached far beyond commerce.
“What artists do changed because of Vincent Van Gogh,” artist and writer Steven Naifeh told me. (Naifeh, with Gregory White Smith, wrote “the definitive biography,” according to a curator of the Van Gogh Museum.) Van Gogh’s paintings served as a bridge to modern art and inspired a widespread devotion that no artist, perhaps no person, has equaled. Teenagers who have never visited a museum tape his art to their walls; Japanese travelers leave the ashes of their ancestors at his grave. In 2016, the Art Institute of Chicago displayed together all three iconic “Bedrooms”—pictures meant “to rest the brain, or rather the imagination,” according to Van Gogh; the record number of visitors forced them to create impromptu crowd control strategies, with a TSA-precheck-style express lane.
And yet had Van Gogh died at thirty-four rather than thirty-seven (life expectancy in the Netherlands when he was born was forty), he might not even merit a historical footnote. The same goes for Paul Gauguin, a painter who briefly lived with Van Gogh and innovated a style known as synthetism, in which bold lines separated sections of brilliant color, without the subtle gradations of classical painting. He, too, became one of the few artists to crack the $100 million barrier. He spent the first six years of his professional life with the merchant marine before he found his calling: bourgeois stockbroker. Only after the market crash of 1882 did Gauguin become a full-time artist, at the age of thirty-five. His switch is reminiscent of J. K. Rowling’s. She “failed on an epic scale” in her twenties, she once said, personally and professionally. A short marriage “imploded,” and she was a single mother and unemployed former teacher on welfare. Like Van Gogh in the coal country and Gauguin after the crash, she was “set free” by failure to try work that better matched her talents and interests.
They all appear to have excelled in spite of their late starts. It would be easy enough to cherry-pick stories of exceptional late developers overcoming the odds. But they aren’t exceptions by virtue of their late starts, and those late starts did not stack the odds against them. Their late starts were integral to their eventual success.
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• • •
“Match quality” is a term economists use to describe the degree of fit between the work someone does and who they are—their abilities and proclivities.
Northwestern University economist Ofer Malamud’s inspiration for studying match quality was personal experience. He was born in Israel, but his father worked for a shipping company, and when Malamud was nine the family moved to Hong Kong, where he attended an English school. The English system required that a student home in on an academic specialization in the last two years of high school. “When you applied to a college in England, you had to apply to a specific major,” Malamud told me. His father was an engineer, so he figured he should do engineering. At the last moment, he chose not to pick a specialty. “I decided to apply to the U.S. because I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” he said.
He started with computer science, but quickly learned that wasn’t his thing. So he sampled subjects before settling on economics and then philosophy. The experience left him with an abiding curiosity about how the timing of specialization impacts career choice. In the late 1960s, future Nobel laureate economist Theodore Schultz argued that his field had done well to show that higher education increased worker productivity, but that economists had neglected the role of education in allowing individuals to delay specialization while sampling and finding out who they are and where they fit.
Malamud could not randomly assign people to life in order to study specialization timing, but he found a natural experiment in the British school system. For the period he studied, English and Welsh students had to specialize before college so that they could apply to specific, narrow programs. In Scotland, on the other hand, students were actually required to study different fields for their first two years of college, and could keep sampling beyond that.
In each country, every college course that a student took provided skills that could be applied in a specific field, as well as information about their match quality with the field itself. If students focused earlier, they compiled more skills that prepared them for gainful employment. If they sampled and focused later, they entered the job market with fewer domain-specific skills, but a greater sense of the type of work that fit their abilities and inclinations. Malamud’s question was: Who usually won the trade-off, early or late specializers?
If the benefit of higher education was simply that it provided skills for work, then early-specializing students would be less likely to career switch after college to a field unrelated to their studies: they have amassed more career-specific skills, so they have more to lose by switching. But if a critical benefit of college was that it provided information about match quality, then early specializers should end up switching to unrelated career fields more often, because they did not have time to sample different matches before choosing one that fit their skills and interests.
Malamud analyzed data for thousands of former students, and found that college graduates in England and Wales were consistently more likely to leap entirely out of their career fields than their later-specializing Scottish peers. And despite starting out behind in income because they had fewer specific skills, the Scots quickly caught up. Their counterparts in England and Wales were more often switching fields after college and after beginning a career even though they had more disincentive to switch, having focused on that field. With less sampling opportunity, more students headed down a narrow path before figuring out if it was a good one. The English and Welsh students were specializing so early that they were making more mistakes. Malamud’s conclusion: “The benefits to increased match quality . . . outweigh the greater loss in skills.” Learning stuff was less important than learning about oneself. Exploration is not just a whimsical luxury of education; it is a central benefit.
