Housemates from Hell
Sebastian Smee
THE YELLOW HOUSE: VAN GOGH, GAUGUIN AND NINE TURBULENT WEEKS IN ARLES by Martin Gayford Fig Tree/ Penguin, £18.99, pp. 356, ISBN 9780670914975 ✆ £15.19 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 You know the plot already: Van Gogh and Gauguin establish themselves in the south of France, juiced up with communal idealism, hoping to make a go of it: ‘a studio of the south’. They fall out, Vincent cuts off his ear, delivers it to a local prostitute, goes home and falls asleep. Gauguin leaves the next morning, eventually ends up in Tahiti. There’s a movie, starring Kirk Douglas, a spate of blockbuster exhibitions, and even a song by Don McLean.
Is this a story that really needs revisiting?
Actually, yes. The melodrama of those two months in Arles has been oversold, it’s true. But here is a book to remind us that the episode is not just a gigantic myth; that it is tragic, pathetic, unfathomable, and so strange it simply has to be real.
Moreover, in important ways the story has changed. Some savvy detective work by a small army of scholars has recently provided new answers to the main questions: Why did things turn sour? And what made Van Gogh — what would make anyone cut off his ear?
Martin Gayford, one of Britain’s best and most lucid art critics, has done a splendid job harnessing a lot of fiddly information, including a back story full of obscure but critical detail, and turning it into a narrative free from both pedantry and breathlessness.
Gauguin needed cajoling, but he eventually joined Van Gogh in Arles in October 1888, and after about a week in the Yellow House the two began working side by side. Both artists had radical ambitions, but they were differently inclined. ‘Gauguin was happy to abstract away from what was in front of him,’ explains Gayford; ‘Vincent was more attached to what he saw.’ There is a bias towards Van Gogh in the narrative (and quite right: he was both the better artist and the more sympathetic personality), and yet Gayford doesn’t gloss over his difficult side. He could be childish, hectoring and volatile; ‘he was unable to leave a point of disagreement alone’. In truth, it is hard to imagine anyone coping too long with the challenge of living with him.
Gauguin was charismatic, impressive, but hideously egotistical. Commercially, he was beginning to enjoy some success, whereas Vincent, at 35, was still languishing, unknown. ‘Few considered Gauguin other than formidable. No one seems to have thought the same of Vincent.’ So there was an undercurrent of rivalry. Gauguin, with his stronger personality, had the upper hand. But why else did things come to a head?
Van Gogh feared abandonment — not only by Gauguin, whose income and comradely support he relied on, but also by his brother Theo. Theo had just got engaged. New research suggests that Vincent probably received the letter bearing this news on the day he cut off his ear. Did Vincent fear Theo’s crucial financial support would dry up? Or, suspecting that he had long ago blown his own chances at happiness, was he simply envious, self-pitying?
Van Gogh had a medical condition, that much is obvious. Over the years, hundreds of theories have been offered, and Van Gogh has been claimed as a patron saint by just about every group in existence representing the mentally thwarted. The most likely diagnosis, in Gayford’s judgment, is bipolar affective disorder. One of the symptoms of this condition, at certain points in its cycle, is ‘vertiginous thoughtassociation’, something to which Van Gogh was undoubtedly prone. One of Gayford’s great achievements is to explain these ‘vertiginous associations’ in a way that helps us make sense of the earsevering.
Years before, Van Gogh had lived with a reformed prostitute and her two children, but the episode had ended in disaster. In Arles he and Gauguin went for regular ‘hygienic’ visits to the local brothels. His feelings about prostitutes, says Gayford, were ‘deep and raw’.
Both artists were fascinated by a number of recent, sensational murders in which prostitutes had been dismembered. An original and convincing speculation of Gayford’s here stems from the recognition that one of these recent cases took place across the Channel. A translation of a letter by none other than Jack the Ripper had appeared in Le Figaro less than three months before Van Gogh cut off his ear. The letter read, ‘The next job I do I shall clip the lady’s ear off and send to the police officers just for jolly wouldn’t you?’ The Jack the Ripper story is one of three tales of severed ears — the others appear in the Gospels and a novel by Zola which Van Gogh may have had jostling in his mind that fateful night. His actions were ‘too carefully structured to be haphazard,’ writes Gayford. ‘It was highly irrational, to be sure, but there was some hidden pattern.’ It is astonishing to learn, or be reminded, that after they parted ways that night Van Gogh and Gauguin, though they corresponded, never saw each other again. It is strange, too, that Theo Van Gogh, in so many ways a hero in Vincent’s life, the kindest of brothers, spent less than 12 hours in Arles before heading back to Paris, even though his brother’s life remained in jeopardy.
‘Poor fighter & poor, poor sufferer,’ he wrote after being at Vincent’s bedside. ‘Nothing can be done to relieve his anguish now, but it is deep and hard for him to bear.’
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