Breaking van Gogh Read online

  10

  Confined and Liberated

  December 23, 1888.

  He had enough of the shouting and slammed the door behind him, heading out into the cold December night. Paul Gauguin needed fresh air and space without Vincent’s caustic words and harsh voice bearing down on him.

  Inside the house on a corner in Arles, in southern France, an enraged Vincent van Gogh picked up a razor and began to rake clumps of bristles off his crimson beard. With bulging eyes, he stared down his reflection in the mirror. Open paint tubes lay about the sink; a wood pipe smoldered with a dying red cinder. Vincent turned to a glass of absinthe, the “green fairy,” and poured it down his throat.

  Stumbling through the dark living room, he burst out of the yellow house with green shutters67 into the cold night that befell the quaint city of Arles. Like a feral dog, he searched the deserted street looking for his weary prey, Gauguin, his houseguest. A fast walker, Vincent strode toward the center of town, the razor hidden in the sleeve of his shirt.

  Spotting the solid, dark blue lines of his quarry’s silhouette in the distance, van Gogh dashed after him. He grabbed Paul by the shoulder, turning him around and brandishing the razor. Gauguin stepped back and took a defensive posture, drilling a hard stare into his friend’s eyes.

  “You’re mad. What’s this about?” Gauguin demanded, unnerved but not scared of the Dutch painter. He saw himself in Vincent’s fixed eyes, along with the spark of animal impulse.68 He smelled the absinthe on van Gogh’s icy breath.

  “You, you … Rachel likes you better than me,” Vincent spat out, off balance.

  “Of course she does. You have trouble getting hard,” Gauguin said, pointing at the razor, as he struck at the heart of the matter—Vincent’s impotence since coming to Arles. With those hurtful words that cut sharper than any razor or rapier—Gauguin was fond of fencing—he pushed van Gogh away, saying, “Go back now. Sleep off your demons.”

  After that exchange, the two friends, two artistic rivals, two passionate men with strong personalities parted in the charcoal shade of night, never to see one another again. Gauguin had had enough of Vincent’s lunacy, the Dutchman’s battles with his mind, his inner demons, and his thirst to embrace the viper of the narcotic liquor. But most of all, he couldn’t deal with the artist’s inferiority complex.

  Paul Gauguin vanished into the night, but Vincent wasn’t done, not by a long shot. He would have bayed at the moon had it been out that night. He spun around and scurried back to the yellow house, to the home where he had wanted to start an artist colony with the likes of Paul Gauguin and Emile Schuffenecker, along with other young French artists. But his dream of an artist commune died that night.

  After eight years as a professional artist, Vincent had moved from being a detailed drawer, influenced by the Dutch masters, to a budding artist with his own unique style. He left Christianity and the church behind, failed in a brief stint as a missionary, and spent time in London working in the art galleries before moving back to The Hague. He was a total failure in relationships with women, from his first cousin to a prostitute. His odd, intense behavior, gravitating toward peasant life and downtrodden women, made him a virtual outcast in his family. It was the ultimate fear of being “cut off from money” that forced his return home to his native Holland.

  Vincent van Gogh the artist didn’t really come alive or flourish until he arrived in Paris, at the behest of his younger brother Theo, an art dealer. In Paris, van Gogh found himself liberated and influenced by the French School of Impressionism. In Arles, in the south, he became more intoxicated by its bright colors, the space and sunlight, less bustle, and a more laid-back atmosphere than the big city to the north. His dream had been to paint and live among his peers as an artist, but no one followed him to the south except Paul Gauguin, who was paid by Theo to live and paint with Vincent. The arrangement didn’t last even a year.

  Now, with Gauguin chased off into the night, the feeling of impotence spread from Vincent’s groin and infected every cell of his body. His blood ran cold; the artist colony dream was dead.

  Van Gogh had been hurt before. He recalled his failures. That December night was different, however. Being cast aside by a man and painter he truly admired, a man with as much lust and passion as himself, but with a greater libido and success with women, hurt Vincent more than his previous litany of failures.

  Rushing back, he barreled through the green door of the yellow house. Standing in the dark living room, he looked around at Gauguin’s possessions, his studies and drawings, and thought about slicing them. He then saw, in the shadows, an unfinished painting of flowers on an easel. He stepped toward it, raising the razor, ready to strike, when suddenly he caught his murky reflection in a glass vase. Whipped into a frenzy by his dark inner twin, he stepped into the bathroom and stared at his maniacal, menacing, hyena-wild reflection, rubbed his stubbled neck, lifted the razor and, grabbing his left ear, sliced it off in a silent scream, locking eyes with his reflection in the mirror.

  Ever the artist, he looked at the fleshy lower piece of ear, studying the blood as it oozed down his fingers, pooling in the palm of his left hand. The blood wasn’t red or brownish or dark maroon; it was black like the night. Vincent put his lopped-off bloody ear in an envelope, wiped his hands clean, and put down the razor, still wet with blood, like a used painter’s knife.

  He then ventured out into the night one more time, heading to the brothel that Paul Gauguin frequented. He knocked on the door. Footsteps approached—a creak of a floorboard. A young prostitute opened the door and looked warily at her sporadic client. He didn’t seem right. His appearance was off, disheveled. There was an odor of absinthe on his breath, and his eyes were dark spades with bags underneath them, vacant, with no spark of life.

  He handed Rachel the envelope and said, “Guard this object carefully.”

  Rachel squeezed it, felt the squishy contents, then peeked inside. She saw the bloody piece of Vincent’s ear; she looked back into his eyes, tried to figure out which side had lost it under the scarf he draped over his head, and almost fainted. She leaned against the doorjamb for support and watched the crazed Vincent dash away.

  What Vincent didn’t know was that one of the married men being serviced by Rachel that night was his dear friend, Postmaster Joseph Roulin. Learning what had happened, Roulin got dressed and went to the yellow house to aid the injured artist.

  One week later on Sunday, December 30, 1888, the column “Chronique locale” in Le Forum Républicain, a local newspaper in Arles, reported on the event:

  Last Sunday, at half past eleven in the evening, one Vincent van Gogh, a painter, a native of Holland, presented himself at brothel no 1, asked for one Rachel, and handed her … his ear, telling her: “Keep this object carefully.” Then he disappeared. Informed of this act, which could only be that of a poor lunatic, the police went on the following day to the home of this individual, whom they found lying in his bed, by then showing hardly any sign of life. The unfortunate was admitted to the hospital as a matter of urgency.69

  Vincent’s psychotic break put him in the hospital. There he befriended a young medical intern, Dr. Felix Rey, who cared for the self-mutilated artist for two weeks. Vincent’s wound healed remarkably well, quicker than the doctor had expected to see in a thirty-five-year-old patient with a variety of physical ailments. The fortnight in Old Hospital gave Vincent peace, a sense of well-being, as well as separation from absinthe and from obsessing over his insecurities.

  The new year brought a renewed passion for painting—it was a way to keep his mind busy, keep it off the darker impulses. Vincent would busy himself writing letters to his brother, inquiring about whether he had “terrified” Paul Gauguin,70 who had gathered his belongings from the yellow house while Vincent was in the hospital and moved away from the “poor lunatic.”

  It was painting, the therapy of painting, that aided Vincent’s rapid recovery. On Monday, January 7, 1889, Vincent returned home and wrote a
n upbeat letter to his brother Theo, who lived in Paris during Vincent’s stay in southern France:

  Mr. Rey came to see the painting with two of his doctor friends, and they at least understand darned quickly what complementaries are. Now I’m planning to do Mr. Rey’s portrait and possibly other portraits as soon as I’ve accustomed myself a little to painting once again.71

  In January, Vincent painted two self-portraits with a bandage wrapped over his head covering his mutilated ear. For the portrait, he tilted his head to show the right side of his face with his unharmed right ear wrapped in cloth, intact underneath it. The second portrait showed the same—but a more relaxed van Gogh. So relaxed was his facial expression that he appeared to be indifferent to the whole episode, as if nothing of note had happened. (Benoit Landais argues that one of the self-portraits was actually painted by Schuffenecker.)

  Then he painted Dr. Felix Rey. It was a portrait that showed the handsome, raven-haired, twenty-three-year-old physician, with a goatee, in a dark blue suit. But in an approach different from the two self-portraits, Vincent painted Dr. Rey from the left side, prominently capturing his intact left ear, flushed with the blood of life matching his rouge lips. It was as if Vincent the patient, and not the artist, had made a symbolic gesture, a connection with the doctor.

  Vincent connected with Felix Rey in other ways, too, as the two tried to find the reason for van Gogh’s ailment. Beyond his childhood intensity and inability to read people’s social cues and tells, Vincent suffered from a broad array of health issues.

  The artist openly discussed his poor diet and held that being “impressionable,” as Dr. Rey saw it, “was enough to have had what I had as regards the crisis, and that currently I was only anemic, but that really I ought to feed myself up,” as Vincent wrote to Theo in a lengthy letter. He ended up telling the doctor that if the “crisis” reoccurred, he would “keep to a rigorous one-week fast, if in similar circumstances [the doctor] had seen many madmen quite calm and capable of working—and if not then would he deign to remember occasionally that for the moment I myself am not yet mad.”72

  What Vincent really needed, however, was not to adjust the diet, but rather to stop using white lead paint to “prime the canvas, or as impasting, in order to give firmness to the foreground.”73 He would also have had to stop being careless with the oil paints that came in fat toothpaste tubes and that were loaded with toxins; stop his unconscious habit of “nibbling” on those paints from time to time; stop eating them when the coldness of depression swept in; and stop drinking turpentine, which also had its toxic ingredient thujone, a pine tree resin from sap bored out of a living tree. All of that, combined with predispositions to mental health issues and to epileptiform seizures that manifested themselves in Vincent (as well as his sister Wilhelmina, whose failed suicide attempt got her committed to an insane asylum at thirty-five, and his brother Cor, who committed suicide in South Africa),74 contributed to van Gogh’s declining health.

  Many physicians, then and now, have looked for a single explanation for van Gogh’s mental state, his psychotic break, and his numerous ailments. But no single disease, hereditary or acquired during his vagabond lifestyle as a starving artist, can sufficiently explain his mania and poor health. The episodes became more frequent and longer in duration after he cut off his ear. After observing the attacks, both Dr. Felix Rey and Dr. Peyron, van Gogh’s physician at the Saint-Rémy asylum later that year, diagnosed van Gogh with epilepsy and considered it to be the chief cause of Vincent’s psychosis.

  Given that this diagnosis was based simply on observation, and that van Gogh did not display any symptoms before he began painting at the age of twenty-seven, it may make more sense to look more closely at environmental causes, especially given that van Gogh’s voluminous letters discuss his pale and gray skin, symptoms associated with lead poisoning; abdominal pains that could have been caused by the combination of lead and thujone from turpentine and absinthe; and severe, premature tooth decay and gingivitis of the gums. The last symptom, too, has been associated with lead poisoning.75

  Adding fuel to the bonfire of Vincent’s charged personality was foxglove, a medicine used in the nineteenth century to deal with mental health patients. It was derived from the digitalis plant, a natural steroid with a toxicity that affects the heart. High consumption of foxglove in concert with lead poisoning from the oil paints, along with his consumption of absinthe—which also contained thujone, which, when combined with absinthe, has mind-bending effects—put van Gogh on an accelerated destructive path that would lead to death.76

  Yet the chemicals that hurt the artist may have also contributed to the immortality of his art. Absinthe, when drunk in large enough quantities, made some people see yellow swatches and yellow halos around certain objects, effects that we see in many of his paintings.

  Whatever the combination of ailments and triggers he was suffering, by late April 1889, Vincent realized it was time to commit himself to the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, Saint-Rémy. He had help from the town of Arles. The ear incident was the latest of a long list of complaints about van Gogh being a boorish drunk, constantly poor and unkempt, more a gypsy nomad than a bohemian artist. Chasing off Gauguin, frightening the prostitute Rachel, and making the local news had made Vincent a marked man in a town that no longer wanted to tolerate him. If he was a danger to himself, the people of Arles felt he could be a danger to others with his erratic behavior. So the folks of Arles sent a petition to the mayor on February 27, 1889, demanding that he remove Vincent van Gogh from the city.

  They wrote:

  Dear Mr. Mayor

  We the undersigned, residents of place Lamartine in the city of Arles, have the honor to inform you that for some time and on several occasions the man named Vood (Vincent), a landscape painter and a Dutch subject, living in the above square, has demonstrated that he is not in full possession of his mental faculties, and that he over-indulges in drink, after which he is in a state of over-excitement such that he no longer knows what he is doing or what he is saying, and very unpredictable towards the public, a cause for fear to all the residents of the neighborhood, and especially to women and children …77

  By mid-spring van Gogh had been in and out of the Old Hospital in Arles a couple of times. Through Reverend Salles, an elderly caretaker of Vincent in Arles, Vincent was introduced to the head physician at the asylum in Saint-Rémy. He began to converse with Dr. Théophile Peyron, a French naval doctor. After making the decision to voluntarily check himself into the asylum at Saint-Rémy, Vincent communicated his decision to Theo. A week later he received a letter from his brother:

  It pains me to know that you’re still in a state of incomplete health. Although nothing in your letter betrays weakness of mind, on the contrary, the fact that you judge it necessary to enter an asylum is quite serious in itself. Let’s hope that this will be merely a preventive measure.78

  Theo was also concerned that convalescing at the asylum for an extended period would likely limit his brother’s ability to paint for at least three months. If that happened, it meant no money coming in to pay for the boarding.

  On May 8, 1889, a reverend from the local Protestant Church accompanied Vincent van Gogh on the 8:51 a.m. train from Arles to Saint-Rémy-de-Provence.79

  Likely keeping the expenses in mind, the artist took third-class accommodation at the asylum—a small room with a single barred window on the second floor of the old monastery. It had a view of a tranquil wheat field, the stone wall marking the boundary of the hospital property, a cluster of pine trees, rolling green hills, and the tops of the limestone ridges of the Alpilles range in the background, where the summer sun rose each morning over those rounded peaks facing southeast.

  Theo’s practical concerns mostly proved unfounded. Although the doctor wouldn’t clear the artist to walk outside the asylum building until a thorough exam of his mental and physical state had been completed, painting was not forbidden; on the contrary, it was encouraged, since it could ve
ry well be a boon to Vincent’s spirits.

  The week before Vincent checked himself into the Saint-Rémy asylum, he wrote to his dear brother Theo:

  I recently sent off two crates of canvases. D58 and 59—by goods train, and it will take a good week more before you receive them. There’s a heap of daubs in there which will have to be destroyed, but I’ve sent them as they are so that you can keep what appears passable to you. I’ve added Gauguin’s fencing masks and studies, and the Lemonnier book.80

  After clearing out his possession from the yellow house in Arles, sending dozens of paintings to his brother in Paris, and storing personal belongings and some furniture with the Postmaster Joseph Roulin—who, in the end, was one of Vincent’s very few friends in Arles—the artist was ready for the next phase of his life.

  Vincent found his accommodations at the asylum quite good, since there were “30 empty rooms” and two additional rooms, besides the one he slept in, that he was allowed to use. He would use one room to paint in, the other to store the paintings so they could dry (his thick impasto paints and zinc whites took longer to dry than their alternatives). Vincent drew inspiration from the asylum courtyard, the cloister area, and the natural landscape that surrounded the property. He continued writing a detailed letter to his brother, describing his accommodations and surroundings:

  I assure you that I’m very well here, and that for the time being I see no reason at all to come and board in Paris or its surroundings.

  I have a little room with grey-green paper with two water-green curtains with designs of very pale roses enlivened with thin lines of blood-red. These curtains, probably the leftovers of a ruined, deceased rich man, are very pretty in design. Probably from the same source comes a very worn armchair covered with a tapestry flecked in the manner of a Diaz or a Monticelli, red-brown, pink, creamy white, black, forget-me-not blue and bottle green.