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10/11/96 For Vincent Van Gogh, work was paramount
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7/5/95 Collapse of resiraints and breakdown of family
23/5/87 When writer and man come together again
The Sunday Times, Page 4
For Vincent Van Gogh, work was paramount
WHEN Vincent Van Gogh cut off part of his left ear with a razor on Dec 23, 1888, he bled so profusely that he had blood dripping all over the floor of his Yellow House in Arles, south of France.
The two lower rooms and the little stairway that led to his bedroom were stained with blood.
He used wet towels to stanch the blood as he washed the piece of cut ear and put it in an envelope.
Afterwards, he put on a Basque beret and, pulling it far down to hide his wound, left his house. He went to the town brothel, where he presented the envelope as a gift to a prostitute named Rachel. Poor woman, she fainted when she saw what was in the envelope.
There was a big commotion, and Roulin the postman, who was also a personal friend of the artist, was summoned to take him home.
Earlier in the night, after dinner, Van Gogh had gone after his housemate Paul Gauguin in a path outside the house with the same razor.
"My look at that moment must have had great power in it, for he stopped and lowering his head, set off running towards home," the French painter recorded in his journals.
The night before, Van Gogh had flung a glass of absinthe at him in a cafe.
After the razor encounter, Gauguin decided to check into a hotel instead of returning home, and early in the morning, he found a crowd collected in the square near the house.
The police superintendent at the door demanded to know what he had done to his friend, for he was dead, he said.
But once upstairs in Van Gogh's room, Gauguin found that his friend was still alive, although he lay lifeless in bed, rolled up in his sheets.
His first impulse was to bolt. He told the policeman: "Be kind enough, monsieur, to awaken this man with great care, and if he asks for me tell him I have left for Paris. The sight of me might prove fatal to him."
In his journals, he says: "Once awake, Vincent asked for his comrade, his pipe and tobacco; he even thought of asking for the box that was downstairs and contained our moneyña suspicion, I dare say!
"Vincent was taken to a hospital where, as soon as he had arrived, his brain began to rave again."
Gauguin was down and out when he accepted the generous offer by Van Gogh to stay with him in Arles. He joined him in October. The Dutch painter, who had settled in Paris, had moved down to Arles earlier in the year.
The box kept whatever little money Van Gogh's brother Theo sent to him, and to Gauguin, in exchange for his pictures.
Gauguin had found "our common finances" as disordered as the house and was the one who organised the box.
"We kept a box- so much for hygienic excursions at night, so much for tobacco, so much for incidental expenses, including rent. On top of it lay a scrap of paper and a pencil for us to write virtuously what each took from this chest."
THAT episode was Van Gogh's first breakdown. Subsequent breakdowns led the residents of Arles to petition for him to be confined in an asylum. He had long periods of lucidity in between two further violent attacks. On July 27, 1890, he killed himself with a gun. He was only 37, and had sold only one painting in his 10 years of ceaseless work.
When he first moved to Arles for what he thought would be the clarity and simplicity which exemplified Japanese art- he was very much influenced by the ukiyo-e prints of Hokusai, among others- the town was still carpeted in snow. There, almost immediately, he painted his Landscape With Snow, which you can view at The Masterpieces From The Guggenheim Museum Exhibition at the Singapore Art Museum.
His own favourite, he told his brother in a letter after he recovered from his first breakdown, was a painting of his own bedroom. Colour does everything in the work: the walls are pale violet, the wood of the bed and the chairs is the yellow of fresh butter, the sheet and the pillows very light lemon green, the coverlet scarlet.
Bedroom In Arles is my favourite Van Gogh painting. I was drawn to it when I had the good fortune to look at it up close at the Art Institute of Chicago some years ago. It spoke to me of a kind of artless simplicity that I associated with Zen art.
There was a time when I was very much taken up by the romance of bohemian squalor which stories about artists like Van Gogh and Gauguin perpetuated. Now, I see inspiration instead in Van Gogh's faith in art and his commitment to the vocation, despite the impoverished circumstances and the lack of recognition. Work was a constant refrain in his letters to his brother.
"There is no anguish greater than the soul's struggle between duty and love, both in their highest meaning," he said.
He chose duty. "... it is of the greatest importance not to deviate from one's duty, and that one should not compromise with duty. Duty is absolute."
In another letter, he said: "Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and a continuous observation."
In Arles, he wrote his brother: "I am in a continual fever of work."
After his breakdowns, work took on an even greater urgency. He wrote from the asylum: "Life passes like this, time does not return, but I am dead set on my work, just for the very reason that I know the opportunities of working do not return.
"Especially in my case, in which a more violent attack may destroy forever my ability to paint.
"During my attacks I feel a coward before the pain and suffering- more of a coward than I ought, and it is perhaps this very moral cowardice which, while formerly I had no desire to get better, makes me now eat like two, work hard ..."
WHAT drove him? "Either in figure or in landscape I should wish to express not sentimental melancholy, but serious sorrow.
"In short, I want to reach so far that people will say of my work: He feels deeply, he feels tenderlyñnotwithstanding my so-called roughness, perhaps because of this...
"This is my ambition, which is ... founded less on anger than on love, founded more on serenity than on passion. It is true that I am often in the greatest misery, but still there is within me a calm pure harmony and music.
"In the poorest huts, in the dirtiest corner, I see drawings and pictures. And with irresistible force my mind is drawn towards such things."
