The whole truth about Van Gogh’s ear, and why his “mad genius” is a myth (theguardian.com).
“Madness terrified Vincent van Gogh, yet he also wondered if it was inseparable from artistic genius. … For the modern age, it is Vincent himself who embodies that fatal creative malady. Yet, a new exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam questions what it sees as a romantic myth about the Dutch artist, who lethally shot himself in a cornfield at Auvers-sur-Oise in 1890. Using a combination of art, written documents and a severely rusted revolver that was found by a farmer in 1960 in that same cornfield, On the Verge of Insanity argues that far from inspiring his art, Van Gogh’s illness was an impediment to his talent. It stopped him working for long periods, and he heroically defied its totally uncreative effects to create some of the most powerful art in history.”
Seemingly though, perhaps it is the impediments we likely all have that bring out the best in us—creative or not—for little comes of that which is is easy. Painting also wasn’t his first career choice, that being a desire to become a pastor which, alas, his temperament made him unsuited for.
Do I detect though that “efficiency” is heaped in to what determines a great “artist” and determined that he was unable to fulfil his potential. Impediment to his talent or not, Van Gogh painted furiously, produced over 2100 artworks in just over a decade, so surely the real impediment his troubled soul gave was that his life was so tragically cut short and a sad fact that—supposedly—he sold only one painting during his lifetime (about.com).
And that perhaps highlights an impediment which personally I find more troubling, and I’m sure he did too, being the manner in which such an odd, intense and deeply troubled socially awkward friendless loner who did not want to be alone was viewed during in his lifetime, never fitting in and not particularly wanted around, rather than the praise, affection and adoration that is heaped on him long after his recognition.
“Other evidence in the exhibition, including his last works of art that reveal his dark psychological state, backs up the museum’s belief that Van Gogh died by suicide, after a long illness that tormented him, and led the people of Arles to mob him and demand his incarceration in an asylum.”
Updates/Follow Ups
6th August 2016
Vincent van Gogh: myths, madness and a new way of painting (theguardian.com).
“This sensational show … is full of fascinating documents that tell a sad story of a man struggling with his declining mental health until finally, in despair of ever getting well or living independently, he chose suicide. It presents a lucid narrative of the final phase of Van Gogh’s life. Yet it is ultimately a pedantic and misleading exhibition whose pursuit of clinical accuracy misses the mystery of Van Gogh’s life and art.
“The straw man the curators want to tear down is the myth that Van Gogh’s genius lay in his ‘madness’, that he painted in the fever of hallucinations and took inspiration from illness. … In 1922 the psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn published The Art of the Insane, which features his collection of his patients’ paintings and drawings, illustrating what he sees as a unique form of creativity. His belief in the creativity of mental illness was clearly inspired by expressionism and its cult of madness that goes back to Van Gogh himself. Prinzhorn’s ideas are still influential today in the booming world of ‘outsider art’.
“The Van Gogh Museum can’t stand the notion of Vincent van Gogh as an outsider artist. Its new exhibition is part of a longstanding struggle to free his paintings from such melodramatic views. … Was he ‘mad’ when he painted his Sunflowers? Not clinically—at least, his illness had not been diagnosed—but what Van Gogh did in his mature paintings was to channel his capacity for overexcitement into a unique onrush of creativity. What he took from impressionism was the freedom to paint the colours he wanted. And he found he could live and paint for days on end in a storm, an ecstasy, a dream of colour.
“His heroism was not the depressive struggle of a sane man against an utterly destructive illness that this exhibition chronicles. A less myopic look at his art and letters reveals a much more ambiguous dealing with his own dark side. He had a capacity for getting carried away. When he put this into art he created paintings that carry us all away.”
And had he not been an unacceptable, difficult “outsider” and been accepted in art circles instead, would he had just stuck to whatever dogma and not struck his own expressionist path?
31st October 2016
And, if his “mad genius” was a “myth”, was his jealousy—or more correctly, feeling of abandonment?
Van Gogh “cut off his ear after learning brother was to marry” (theguardian.com).
“It is the most famous act of self-mutilation in the history of art, but the exact motivation—love? Jealousy? Rage?—for Vincent van Gogh’s decision to cut off his ear has remained unknown for more than a century. According to a new study of his time in Provence, the gruesome procedure was in fact inspired by the news his brother Theo, his most loyal confidant and financial supporter, was about to marry after a whirlwind romance. The research throws doubt on the popular theory that Van Gogh took a razor to his ear after a passionate row with fellow artist Paul Gauguin.”
Vincent’s dependancy and passive aggression against his brother are well documented, which it seems is as much a part of the tortured “myth”—or reality of mental illness— as anything else.
Recent/related stories
- A peek at Van Gogh’s ear replica grown from relative’s cells that a German museum exhibits (Pick of the Week 4th June 2014)
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