Van Gogh's 'Life' in print

For 10 years, Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith in their attempt to write the definitive biography on artist Vincent Van Gogh, poured through the archives of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and studied previously untranslated Van Gogh family letters and never–before–published photographs. The amount of work they compiled into a database, with the assistance of eight researchers ad 18 translators, was so immense it required custom software as well as a group of digital scholars put in place to manage it.

This laborious work paid off as Naifeh and Smith's 953–page book "Van Gogh: The Life" (Random House 2011; $40) was recently named a New York Times Notable Book. Chock full of previous unknown aspects of the artist's life, its biggest assertion is that Van Gogh did not commit suicide as long thought. The authors, both graduates of Harvard Law School, instead believe the shooting was accidental involving two young boys and a malfunctioning pistol.

"The version of the suicide is not credible," says Smith noting that Van Gogh didn't own a gun and one was never found where the shooting took place. "Why would he have ended his days?"

"This was not the most difficult period of his life," agrees Naifeh. "Why would someone set to go painting if he plans to commit suicide? Van Gogh was covering up his own murder"

The authors, who wrote the biography "Jackson Pollock: An American Saga," winner of the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for biography which also inspired Academy Award–winning 2000 film "Pollock," also reveal other aspects about the artist's short life.

These include that Van Gogh suffered from a type of epilepsy that impacts the highest brain functions like memory, perception, consciousness and identity. And some of his family believed that he had driven his father to an early grave.

But rest assured, even if some of the previous thought incidents in the artist's life didn't occur, there is one that did.

"He definitely cut off his ear," says Naifeh.