Art Comparison

The whole truth about Van Gogh's ear, and why his 'mad genius' is a myth

Madness terrified Vincent van Gogh, yet he also wondered if it was inseparable

from artistic genius. In letters to his brother Theo that prove him one of the great writers

as well as artists of the 19th century, he broods more than once on an 1872 painting by

Emile Wauters called The Madness of Hugo van der Goes, which shows the

15th-century Flemish painter – looking a bit like Stanley Kubrick on an intense day – as

a victim of mental illness.

For Van Gogh this painting captured the dark romantic association of genius and

insanity. 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.

When his art, which went almost entirely unsold in his lifetime, started to attract

acclaim after his death, this painter of dazzling yellows and hallucinatory blues became

seen as cursed by some desperate, mysterious inner pain. The radical French dramatist

Antonin Artaud, who spent the later years of his own life in asylums, called Van Gogh a

man “suicided by society” and in the 1956 film Lust for Life, he is portrayed by Kirk

Douglas as a character tragically unable to control the torrents of emotion and energy

that make him a great artist.

This image of Van Gogh as a “mad genius” arguably originates in his own art. In

his Self-Portrait with a Bandaged Ear (1889), he dwells on the wound he gave himself

when he sliced at his ear with a razor blade in Arles in December 1888 and presented

the resulting chunk of severed flesh to a local prostitute. He shows us his maimed face,

but it gazes at us with the blue eyes of a visionary. This is not an objective record of a

misfortune but, in its hypnotic intensity, a portrait of the artist both martyred and

liberated by madness.

The Van Gogh Museum show reveals important new evidence about the loss of

Van Gogh’s ear. A recently discovered letter from Dr Felix Rey, who treated his wound,

explains the full horror beneath the bandage in his 1889 Self-Portrait. It confirms Van

Gogh did not just slice off his earlobe, as has been widely assumed, but his entire left

ear. This makes it clearer than ever what an extreme act of self harm it actually was –

and how it forewarned of his suicide.

It also disproves the theory advanced by maverick art historians in 2009 that it

was Van Gogh’s friend Paul Gauguin who sliced off his earlobe with a sword. You might

take off a lobe in a sword fight but the radical amputation that Dr Rey describes is more

likely to be a sustained effort with a razor by a man compelled to serious violence on

himself.

Similarly, the bizarre claim by American biographers Steven Naifeh and Gregory

White Smith that Van Gogh did not kill himself but was shot by someone else, is

challenged by the rare display of the gun he probably used.

This small calibre, 7mm pocket revolver was found where Van Gogh shot himself

in the chest and its extreme corrosion suggests it has been in the ground since the 19th

century. The pocket gun of a type called Lefaucheux à broche helps explain why the

bullet glanced off a rib into Van Gogh’s abdomen and why he took 30 hours to die from

a point blank wound.

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.

There can be no conclusive diagnosis but Van Gogh suffered from bouts of

depression and mental paralysis that periodically crippled him. When he was ill he could

not work. Painting, far from a release of his inner demons, was a controlled and steady

labour through which he tried to stay sane. He always told his friends to smoke a pipe

because that too, he claimed, was a bulwark against madness.

In his painting Van Gogh’s Chair, this simple, steady rustic seat serves as a symbolic

portrait. This is how he wanted to see himself – humble and practical, a reliable friend.

On the straw seat, he has left the pipe and tobacco he hoped might remedy his inner

darkness. He has gone out into the fields.