A book about Vincent van Gogh, his posthumous success, and its cultural implications has won the $40,000 British Columbia’s National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction.
Solar Dance: Genius, Forgery and the Crisis of Truth in the Modern Age, authored by University of Toronto history professor Modris Eksteins, looks at the roots of the modern era via an account of the life and work of Vincent van Gogh.
In his book, Eksteins relates the celebrity cult of van Gogh to the cultural and psychological underpinnings of the Nazi rise to power, and the issues of reproduction, forgery and expert witness in the Wacker trial to the broader crisis of truth in our world today.
As the prize’s documents noted, “Solar Dance is as rich in imaginative speculation as it is in its wealth of detail. It will provoke deep thinking about the nature of genius, about authenticity in life and art, and about the contradictions of our age.”
Eksteins has long specialized in German history and modern culture. His other books include Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (1989) and Walking Since Daybreak: A Story of Eastern Europe, World War II and the Heart of Our Century (1999).
The other finalists for the 2013 British Columbia’s National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction were George Bowering for Pinboy: A Memoir, Robert R. Fowler for A Season in Hell: My 130 Days in the Sahara with Al Qaeda and Candace Savage for A Geography of Blood: Unearthing Memory from a Prairie Landscape.
