“Van Gogh’s Ear” by Bernadette Murphy

Last fall, we attended the opening of the “Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers” exhibition at the National Gallery in London. It was the Gallery’s 200^th anniversary year, and the exhibition lived up to the pre-event publicity, and then some. The show included almost every painting Van Gogh (1853-1890) did while he was in the south of France from February 1888 to May 1890. The sheer size of the show was staggering, and it included many of Van Gogh’s most iconic works – the Sunflower series, The Yellow House, The Bedroom, The Starry Night, Irises, and so many more. 

On of the concierges at our hotel heard us waxing eloquent, and he suggested a book about Van Gogh’s ear, published in 2017. I wasn’t quite sold; a book devoted to the artist cutting off his ear? But my wife surprised me with it as a Christmas present.

 

It’s an incredible story that reads almost like a detective novel. 

 

Van Gogh’s Ear: The True Story, written by Bernadette Murphy, covers the last two-and-a-half years of the artist’s life. It’s the period of his incredible productivity, the short but significant relationship with Paul Gauguin, his confinement at a nearby asylum, his return to his yellow house, his subsequent confinements amid his rapidly disintegrating mental state, and eventually his death in July of 1890. And it includes the story of his ear.

 

In fact, it was the ear that started Murphy on her Van Gogh quest. She was living not far from Arles, and she became interested in the story of Van Gogh reportedly cutting off his ear, or by the time she started her research, the story that had become cutting off just the lobe. 

 

Bernadette Murphy

The research she undertook was more than impressive; it was mind-blowing. She assembled a data base of people who were living in Van Gogh’s neighborhood in Arles at the time he lived there. She searched what medical records were available and census data. She traveled to Marseilles and Amsterdam. She followed every lead over the course of years. Eventually, she would find the answer to the question about the ear in library archives in California, of all places.

 

In the process, she discovered far more. She learned the identity of the “Rachel” with whom Van Gogh left the grisly remains wrapped in newspaper. She traced back the history of mental illness in his family. She learned what precisely happened “the night of the ear.” She discovered the errors and mistakes other biographers and art historians had made. Given that this was her first book, I can’t imagine the art critics establishment was particularly pleased. But she found answers to questions many had had in the past and had tried but failed to answer or answer incompletely. What’s clear is that her dogged determination and ability to research served her – and her readers – ultimately very well indeed.

 

Our concierge said the book might bring us to tears at points. Surprisingly, he was right. This artist, so misunderstood and often ridiculed during his life, became one of the greatest painters ever in his death. 

 

Related:

 

The National Gallery exhibition catalog, Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers, is available at Amazon and other booksellers.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

From Out-of-Print to Global Hit: The Surprising Resurgence of Michael McDowell’s Blackwater Novels – Julia Steiner at CrimeReads.

 

Tides – artwork by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

Lost Boys: State of the Nation (Britain) – Centre for Social Justice.

 

3 Reasons Your Art Might Fail (and how to ensure it doesn’t) – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review.

 

Who’s Afraid of Tom Wolfe? – Jeannette Cooperman at The Common Reader.

Martin Gayford’s “The Yellow House”

A few years ago, I was in Amsterdam on a business trip, for a series of meeting at a hotel right near Schiphol Airport. You can likely guess how much of Amsterdam you see from a hotel conference room. But we finished at noon on the final day; my flight home wasn’t until the next morning, and so I grabbed a taxi and gave the driver a simple three-word instruction.

"Van Gogh Museum."

My wife and I had been to Amsterdam in 1999, but the museum was closed. She had seen it on a business trip in the 1970s.

I stood in line with everyone else, paid my admission, and then wandered. And the painting that captured me, like it has captured so many other people, was “The bedroom” (and that’s it at the top). I even bought a tile reproduction of it, which still sits on a desk at home.

The painting has a history. Vincent Van Gogh first painted it in October 1888, and sent a drawing of it to Paul Gauguin. Shortly after, with a little urging from Van Gogh’s brother (and Gauguin’s agent) Theo, Gauguin moved to Arles, and moved into the extra bedroom of the house Vincent was renting. The house was painted yellow, irregularly shaped to fit the streets around it, and neighbor to a somewhat disreputable grocer and a brothel.

Martin Gayford’s The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles is the story of what happened.

For nine weeks stretching from October into December of 1888, Gauguin and Van Gogh were housemates. They painted, often together. They ate together. They visited the brothel together. Gauguin brought some financial management to the household. From the beginning, Van Gogh was thrilled, and Gauguin a bit wary. Gauguin was seeing his works recognized and, more importantly, sell to buyers. Van Gogh was not, and his mental state was deteriorating. At the end of nine weeks, Gauguin moved out, and Van Gogh mutilated his ear.

But what happened during those nine weeks was important for the two painters and their art.

It’s a fascinating story. Gayford, an art critic for Bloomberg News and the author of a number of books on art and artists, has painstakingly constructed the story from contemporary accounts, biographies, and letters both artists wrote to Theo Van Gogh and other artists and friends. The impetus for the work, Gayford writes, came from the exhibition in Amsterdam in 2002, “Van Gogh and Gauguin and the Studio of the South.” (It also was shown at the Art Institute of Chicago later that same year.)

The two couldn’t have been more different. Gauguin seems almost larger than life, in control, a successful career underway. Van Gogh seems smaller, a nervous man, ignoring the taunts and ridicule of the children of Arles who observe the eccentric painting wandering around the town.

The work reads almost like a novel, yet Gayford remains true to his sources. Van Gogh’s mental state is deteriorating, and the tension of the story builds towards an inevitable crisis.

Gayford has written books on sitting for a portrait by Lucian Freud, Michaelangelo, and artist David Hockney, among numerous other subjects. He brings a critic’s eye to the story of Gauguin and Van Gogh, helping us understand the art they created during that short period as much as the lives each man lived. Gayford also provides the context of local life in Arles, the age of Impressionism, and what larger events were happening in France.

The Yellow House is a fine story, told extremely well.

Painting: The bedroom by Vincent Van Gogh, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. The illustration of the book cover is that for the UK paperback edition, which is different from the cover for the US edition. I purchased my copy at the National Gallery of Art in London, but both editions are available from Amazon.

Flowers at church

Sunflowers on either side

of the altar, black centers

fringed in yellow, looking

upward as they tend to do,

upward to find the sun,

sunflowers from Arles

painted repeatedly

as he slipped into madness

painted originally

by God.

Was God in the yellow house,

the yellow room in Arles,

the odd-shaped room

and the odd-shaped man

in the odd-shaped house

on Place Lamartine,

in Arles.

 Paintings: Top, Vase with Twelve Sunflowers by Vincent Van Gogh (1888); bottom, The Yellow House in Arles by Vincent Van Gogh (1888).

The geology of Auvers

Layers of stone

textures of time

rest heavily upon the artist,

the brother, the painter

the agent, supporting

                the brother, the painter

the wheat field behind

                (in three dimensions)

perhaps above

                (in two dimensions)

thickly laid strokes

                of photographic paint

but without crows

                this time, all time

This poem is submitted for the Poetics prompt of "texture" by dVerse Poets. To see more poems, please visit dVerse Poets.

Photograph: Gravesite of Vincent and Thos Van Gogh, Auvers-sur-Oise, France.

Painting: Wheat field with Crows (1890), Vincent Van Gogh, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. The painting was finished a few weeks before Vincent Van Gogh’s death. His brother, Theo, died six months later. There is a wheat field behind the wall shown in the photograph.

Sext

It is the hour of blue
and yellow, precisely
the mid-point of day,
a sun arcing overhead,
umbrella of light.
No return is possible;
only a waning and
growing shadows
to be accepted. And
so we rest, our work
piled high around us,
a coarsely sewn pillow
for barefoot dreams.

This poem is submitted for Open Mike Night at dVerse Poets. To see more poems, please visit the site. The links will be live at 2 p.m. Central time today.


Illustration: Noon Rest from Work by Vincent Van Gogh, Musee d’Orsay, Paris.