When Vincent van Gogh got out of hospital in January 1889, with a white bandage covering the place where his left ear had been, he immediately went back to work in his house next to a cafe in the southern French town of Arles. A still life he painted that month looks like a determined attempt to hold on to the things of this world, to quell his inner turbulence by concentrating on the solid facts of his life. Around a sturdy wooden table he has laid out a symbolic array of the simple pillars of his existence. Four onions. A medical self-help book. A candle. The pipe and tobacco he found steadying. A letter from his brother Theo. A teapot. And one more thing: a large, emptied bottle of absinthe.
Has he drunk the absinthe since leaving hospital? Does its emptiness represent a promise to swear off the stuff from now on?
The first thing to be said about this painting is that it is revolutionary. It is a new kind of art. The very idea that a collection of objects, painted with fiery brushstrokes in heightened luminous colours, with ridges of thick impasto in some places and bare canvas in others, can reveal the state of someone’s soul was utterly new. Van Gogh was its originator. In the months after this mostly self-taught Dutch artist in his mid 30s arrived in Arles in February 1888 he invented a new kind of art that would come to be called expressionism.
In the process he drove himself mad.
That probably sounds like a dangerously Romantic way of putting it to curators of On the Verge of Insanity: Van Gogh and His Illness, an exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. This sensational show – how strange to see the rusty gun, found in a field at Auvers-sur-Oise, that the museum is “80% sure” Van Gogh shot himself with, in 1890, at the age of just 37 – 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. It has been decades now since radical psychiatrists such as RD Laing celebrated mental illness as a sane response to an insane society. My old Penguin copy of Michel Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish has Van Gogh’s painting of prisoners walking in a futile circle in a claustrophobic walled yard on its cover: he painted this in the asylum, based on a print of Newgate prison by Gustav Doré that his brother sent him. The Doré is in this exhibition. In another book, Madness and Civilisation, Foucault contrasts the openness to madness that supposedly once filled the world with Bosch-like creativity with the modern world’s punitive isolation and medicalisation of the “mad”.
Van Gogh’s expressionism became the best known avant-garde movement in northern Europe in the early 20th century and the image of his “madness” was deeply carved into it. When the German expressionist Ludwig Kirchner painted himself as a wounded soldier with a severed hand in 1915 – his real injuries were mental, not physical – he drew on the legacy of Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear to create a study in shell shock. 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. For instance, it rejects what it sees as sensational interpretations of his 1890 painting Wheatfield with Crows: just because it was done near the end of his life and has crows like vicious slashes of blackness cutting into the deep wet blue of the sky, don’t go thinking this is a confession of inner agony. In any case, as this exhibition shows, this disturbing work was not Van Gogh’s last painting, as it’s widely thought to be. His real last canvas is on display: it is a tangled and dreamlike study of tree roots. The jagged strokes, expressive unreal colours – the tree roots are blue – and empty areas of canvas are just as suggestive as those menacing crows. He left this painting unfinished when he killed himself.
When it comes to the material reality of Van Gogh’s last days, this exhibition is harrowing. It even has a drawing of him on his deathbed. His last letter, which Theo found in his pocket, has stains on it which forensic scientists have not yet been able to prove or disprove are blood.
Compelling evidence, but precise as the exhibition is about Van Gogh’s decline – from cutting off his ear to entering an asylum to suicide – it ignores huge and haunting questions about how his troubled life shaped the greatness of his art.
You don’t need to subscribe to the 1960s views of Laing or Foucault to think this exhibition medicalises Van Gogh’s mental health too much. What it shows is perfectly accurate on its own terms. Van Gogh entered the realm of doctors and asylums after he removed his ear on 23 December 1888. That upsetting story is told with great clarity. Here you can see not only his moving portrait of Dr Felix Rey who saved his life after his horrific act of self-harm but the petition signed by many of his neighbours in Arles to have this strange, scary, foreign artist locked up. Haunting portraits of his fellow patients in the asylum include a man with one eye whose condition eerily mirrors Van Gogh’s own one-eared state.
The trouble is, the artist’s problems began long before he was diagnosed with mental health problems. No one knows to this day what precisely his illness was: all the rival theories, from epilepsy to syphilis to schizophrenia, are explored in the exhibition. By concentrating on the period in which he was receiving medical attention, however, it implies that before he fell out with his fellow artist Paul Gauguin in the Yellow House in Arles, Van Gogh was a sturdy rational character of infinite sobriety. He was “sane”, then became “insane”. Actually that is how long-dead 19th-century doctors diagnosed him. For a real understanding of Van Gogh’s mental health you have to look much further back in his life and take a lead not from psychiatry but from the novels and paintings he loved.
Above all, you have to read his letters. The Van Gogh Museum has published the fullest edition of these outpourings – the most sustained literary self-examination of any artist – and they reveal a man liable to get overexcited, hugely impractical, formidably intense, often isolated, and incapable to his own sorrow of maintaining happy relationships with women.
Does any of that make him “mad”? No, but it made him troubled, unhappy, difficult, all his adult life. Our intimate access to Van Gogh’s life starts when his letters to Theo begin, when Vincent was in London working for an art dealer. He soon got into trouble: the red-haired lodger in a house in Brixton fell in love with his landlady’s daughter and made embarrassing declarations to her. Then he left his art dealing job, tried teaching, walked across Kent, decided to become an urban missionary and preached a long introspective sermon to baffled suburbanites.
By the time he reached Arles his financial dependence on Theo, who had stuck with the art trade and was now a dealer in Paris, was unquestioned. No one in his family expected him any longer to get a proper job, or to marry. As a member of the 19th-century bourgeoisie he was a total failure.
Without his brother he would have died in a ditch, or perhaps killed himself much sooner. Van Gogh himself wonders in his letters – before he was ever treated as such by the medical profession – if he is “cracked.” The academic vogue for seeing him as a sensible hard-working artist who unfortunately became ill at the end of 1888 is misplaced. He was always going off on passionate tangents. What words apply to this man who could live in conventional society? One might be manic. Another might be bohemian.
Van Gogh arrived in Arles from Paris, where he’d completed his long adult education in art and, thanks to Theo’s contacts, leapt from provincial mature student to a member of the avant garde. The artists he encountered and identified with included Toulouse-Lautrec, Seurat and Emile Bernard, who became almost as loyal a correspondent as Theo. There were plans at one point for Bernard, who passionately believed in Van Gogh’s genius, to join him in Arles. In the event it was the far less giving Gauguin who came to stay.
These artists called themselves the impressionists of the “petit boulevard” – as opposed to Monet and Renoir, the increasingly successful impressionists of the “grand boulevard” – and saw themselves as revolutionary social outsiders who took every physical and mental risk to create a new art. Madness was in the unwholesome air they breathed. Syphilis was one source of danger – Manet had died from it, and one of Van Gogh’s favourite writers, Maupassant, might lose his reason to it. Insanity was seen as a professional risk for the modern artist: in his novel The Masterpiece, Van Gogh’s literary hero Zola portrays an impressionist painter whose pursuit of the new leads to madness and death. It was published in 1886, two years before Van Gogh’s arrival in Arles. Zola based his doomed character on his friend and former schoolmate Cézanne.
As soon as he felt the southern sun on his back, Van Gogh exploded into genius. All he had learned about art through years of hard work crystallised and he was transfigured. He knew his work was infinitely better than anything he had ever done. He also knew he was discovering a completely new way to use colour to express emotion. He painted in bursts of ecstatic creativity: a series of orchards, a nightmarish cafe scene, the exterior of the cafe by night. A series of sunflowers whose colours express joy.
All this bold experiment, which Van Gogh knew was unprecedented and a different way of seeing, was done at huge risk to his health and sanity. That is how he tells it in his letters. By the time Gauguin arrived that autumn, Van Gogh was exhausted, ready to break.
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.
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