The mystery of Van Gogh's madness: what does his last painting say? A new version of the death of vincent van gogh Van gogh death version.
For more than 10 years, British art historians have been studying documents and letters related to the artist Vincent van Gogh, unknown to the general public, and have come to the conclusion that the master, contrary to the official version, was not a suicide. Researchers believe that the great Dutch artist was shot dead, according to the British broadcasting company BBC.
Shortly before his death, Vincent van Gogh settled in one of the hotels in the French city of Auvers-sur-Oise. The master went to work in the nearby field, which is depicted in his last painting, Wheat Field with Crows (1890). It is believed that during one of these walks, the great post-impressionist shot himself in the chest, but the bullet did not hit his heart, so the artist was able, holding the wound, to get to the bed in his room and ask to call a doctor. However, it was not possible to save the great artist.
For a long time, this version of Van Gogh's death was considered official, although many researchers of the artist's work and life noted that there are many white spots in this story. This view is shared by British art critics Stephen Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, whose book "Van Gogh. Life" ("Van Gogh: The Life") was published on Monday.
For more than 10 years, Naifeh and Smith have been studying the little-known letters of the artist, as well as various documents related to him. Including, police protocols of 1890 and the testimony of Van Gogh's acquaintances and neighbors. British art historians have processed over 28,000 documents, most of which have never been translated into English or other languages. Nayfeh and Smith were assisted by four professional Dutch philologists.
In the course of working on the book, British researchers concluded that Van Gogh, who until today was believed to have shot himself, was actually killed. The British note that, according to police protocols, the bullet entered the artist's stomach at an acute, and not at a right angle, which could hardly have happened if Van Gogh had really committed suicide.
According to eyewitnesses, Van Gogh liked to chat and drink with two 16-year-old teenagers from Auvers-sur-Oise, who were seen in the company of the artist and on the last day of his life. Van Gogh's neighbors said that one of the young men was dressed in a cowboy costume and carried a faulty pistol. Naifeh and Smith believe that Van Gogh was accidentally shot from it during the game.
A similar version of the death of the master was expressed by the famous art historian John Renwald back in the 1930s. British researchers believe that the artist made the incident a suicide in order to save young people from punishment. According to Gregory Smith, Van Gogh did not strive for death, however, when faced with it face to face, he did not resist. Smith writes that the master was very worried because he was a burden to his brother Theo, who fully supported the artist, whose work was not for sale. Van Gogh decided that his death would save his brother from hardships, according to the British.
Stephen Naifeh and Gregory White Smith also write that Van Gogh was on such bad terms with his pastor father that when he died, many of the artist's relatives began to accuse Vincent of killing the head of the Van Gogh family. Vincent van Gogh died on July 29, 1890 at the age of 37.
When 37-year-old Vincent van Gogh died on July 29, 1890, his work was almost unknown to anyone. Today, his paintings are worth stunning sums and adorn the best museums in the world.
125 years after the death of the great Dutch painter, it is time to learn more about him and dispel some of the myths that, like all art history, his biography is full of.
He changed several jobs before becoming an artist
The son of a minister, Van Gogh started working at the age of 16. His uncle hired him as an intern for an art dealership in The Hague. He happened to travel to London and Paris, where the firm's branches were located. In 1876 he was fired. After that, he worked briefly as a schoolteacher in England, then as a bookstore clerk. From 1878 he served as a preacher in Belgium. Van Gogh was in need, he had to sleep on the floor, but less than a year later he was fired from this post. Only after that he finally became an artist and did not change his occupation anymore. In this field, he became famous, however, posthumously.
Van Gogh's career as an artist was short
In 1881, the self-taught Dutch artist returned to the Netherlands, where he devoted himself to painting. He was supported financially and materially by his younger brother Theodore, a successful art dealer. In 1886, the brothers settled in Paris, and these two years in the French capital turned out to be crucial. Van Gogh took part in exhibitions of the Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists, he began to use a light and bright palette, experimenting with methods of applying strokes. The artist spent the last two years of his life in the south of France, where he created some of his most famous paintings.
In his entire ten-year career, he sold only a few of over 850 paintings. His drawings (there are about 1300 of them left) were then unclaimed.
He probably didn't cut off his own ear.
In February 1888, after living in Paris for two years, Van Gogh moved to the south of France, to the city of Arles, where he hoped to establish a community of artists. He was accompanied by Paul Gauguin, with whom they became friends in Paris. The officially accepted version of events is as follows:
On the night of December 23, 1888, they quarreled, and Gauguin left. Van Gogh, armed with a razor, pursued his friend, but, not catching up, returned home and, in annoyance, partially cut off his left ear, then wrapped it in a newspaper and gave it to some prostitute.
In 2009, two German scientists published a book suggesting that Gauguin, being a good swordsman, cut off part of Van Gogh's ear with a saber during a duel. According to this theory, Van Gogh, in the name of friendship, agreed to hide the truth, otherwise Gauguin would have been threatened with prison.
The most famous paintings were painted by him in a psychiatric clinic
In May 1889, Van Gogh sought help from the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole psychiatric hospital, located in a former convent in the city of Saint-Remy-de-Provence in southern France. Initially, the artist was diagnosed with epilepsy, but the examination also revealed bipolar disorder, alcoholism and metabolic disorders. Treatment consisted mainly of baths. He remained in the hospital for a year and painted a number of landscapes there. Over a hundred paintings from this period include some of his most famous works such as Starry Night (purchased by New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1941) and Irises (purchased by an Australian industrialist in 1987 for a then record-breaking $ 53.9 million)
1. Vincent Willem van Gogh was born in the south of the Netherlands to the Protestant pastor Theodore van Gogh and Anna Cornelia, who was the daughter of a respected bookbinder and bookseller.
2. By the same name, the parents wanted to name their first child, who was born a year earlier than Vincent and died on the first day. In addition to the future artist, the family had five more children.
3. In the family, Vincent was considered a difficult and wayward child, when, outside the family, he showed the opposite traits of his temperament: in the eyes of his neighbors, he was a quiet, friendly and sweet child.
4. Vincent repeatedly dropped out of school - he left school as a child; later, in an effort to become a pastor like his father, he studied for university entrance exams in theology, but eventually became disillusioned with his studies and dropped out. Wanting to enroll in a gospel school, Vincent considered tuition fees to be discriminatory and refused to study. Turning to painting, Van Gogh began attending classes at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, but dropped out after a year.
5. Van Gogh took up painting as a mature person, and in just 10 years he went from a novice artist to a master who turned the idea of fine art upside down.
6. For 10 years, Vincent van Gogh created more than 2 thousand works, of which about 860 are oil paintings.
7. Vincent developed a love for art and painting through his work as an art dealer in the large art firm Goupil & Cie, which belonged to his uncle Vincent.
8. Vincent was in love with his cousin Kay Vos-Stricker, who was a widow. He met her when she was staying with her son at his parents' house. Kee rejected his feelings, but Vincent continued courtship, which set all his relatives against him.
9. The lack of art education affected Van Gogh's inability to paint human figures. Ultimately, devoid of grace and smooth lines in human images became one of the fundamental features of his style.
10. One of Van Gogh's most famous paintings, Starry Night, was painted in 1889 while the artist was in a mental hospital in France.
11. According to the generally accepted version, Van Gogh cut off his earlobe during a quarrel with Paul Gauguin, when he came to the city where Vincent lived to discuss issues of creating a painting workshop. Unable to find a compromise in solving such a trembling topic for Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin decided to leave the city. After a heated argument, Vincent grabbed a razor and pounced on his friend, who fled the house. On the same night, Van Gogh cut off his earlobe, and not his ear completely, as was believed in some legends. According to the most common version, he did it in a fit of remorse.
12. According to estimates from auctions and private sales, Van Gogh's works, along with , are among the first on the list of the most expensive paintings ever sold in the world.
13. A crater on Mercury is named after Vincent van Gogh.
14. The legend that only one of his paintings, Red Vineyards at Arles, was sold during Van Gogh's lifetime is not true. In fact, the painting sold for 400 francs was Vincent's breakthrough into the world of serious prices, but in addition to it, at least 14 more works by the artist were sold. There was simply no accurate evidence of the rest of the works, so in reality there could have been more sales.
15. By the end of his life, Vincent painted very quickly - he could finish his painting from beginning to end in 2 hours. However, at the same time, he always quoted the favorite expression of the American artist Whistler: "I did it at two o'clock, but I worked for years to do something worthwhile in those two hours."
16. The legends that Van Gogh's mental disorder helped the artist to look into such depths that are inaccessible to ordinary people are also untrue. The seizures, which were similar to epilepsy, for which he was treated in a psychiatric clinic, began with him only in the last year and a half of his life. At the same time, it was precisely during the period of exacerbation of the disease that Vincent could not write.
17. Van Gogh's younger brother, Theo (Theodorus), was of great importance to the artist. Throughout his life, his brother provided Vincent with moral and financial support. Theo, being 4 years younger than his brother, fell ill with a nervous breakdown after Van Gogh's death and died just six months later.
18. According to experts, if it were not for the almost simultaneous early death of both brothers, fame for Van Gogh could have come as early as the mid-1890s and the artist could have become a rich man.
19. Vincent van Gogh died in 1890 from a gunshot to the chest. Going for a walk with drawing materials, the artist shot himself in the heart area from a revolver bought to scare away birds while working in the open air, but the bullet went lower. He died 29 hours later from blood loss.
20. The Vincent Van Gogh Museum, which has the world's largest collection of Van Gogh's works, was opened in Amsterdam in 1973. It is the second most popular museum in the Netherlands after the Rijksmuseum. 85% of visitors to the Vincent Van Gogh Museum come from other countries.
According to the main version, the cause of Vincent van Gogh's suicide was his mental illness - schizophrenia. The artist realized how hopelessly ill he was, and once, having made the last stroke of the painting “Crows in a Wheat Field”, he shot himself in the head.
A brief biography of the Dutch painter, set out in a few sentences in some encyclopedic edition, is unlikely to be able to tell about the misfortunes with which his life was so full. Van Gogh was born on March 30, 1853; died July 29, 1890; in the period from 1869 to 1876 he served as a commission agent for an art and trading company in The Hague, Brussels, London and Paris. And in 1876 he worked as a teacher in England. After that, he became interested in theology and from 1878 was a preacher in the mining region of Borinage (in Belgium). True, he stayed in the field of a preacher for only a little over a year and, according to biographers, was forced to retire from the Borinage due to a conflict with church authorities. Van Gogh was unable to carry out his mission as a preacher with due dignity, he was unable to comfort the miners, exhausted by hunger and the hardships of a miserable life, with promises of a brighter future. Simple human grief echoed in his soul as his own. For a whole year, he tried to get at least some effective help from those in power for his flock, but when he realized that all efforts were in vain, he was completely disappointed in his mission, in people dressed in power, but not wanting to help their neighbor, in God...
During this period, Van Gogh made the first clumsy attempts to draw, the characters of his sketches were, of course, the inhabitants of the mining village. In the 1880s, he seriously turned to art, began attending the Academy of Arts. Vincent studied at the Brussels Academy until 1881, then moved to Antwerp, where he remained until 1886. At first, Van Gogh listened closely to the advice of the painter A. Mauve in The Hague. He still enthusiastically painted miners, peasants and artisans, finding their faces the most beautiful and full of true suffering. Researchers of his work have noted that a series of paintings and sketches of the mid-1880s (and these include Peasant Woman, Potato Eaters, etc.) were painted in a dark pictorial range. In general, the artist's works spoke of his painfully acute perception of human suffering, they were downright depressed. However, the artist has always managed to recreate the "oppressive atmosphere of psychological tension."
In 1886, Van Gogh moved to Paris, where he began to actively attend a private art studio. He enthusiastically studied Impressionist painting, Japanese engraving, synthetic works of P. Gauguin and was simply obsessed with painting. Again, according to experts, Van Gogh's palette changed during this period: it became brighter and more cheerful. Dark, earthy colors disappeared, instead the artist began to use pure blue, golden yellow and even red tones. At this time, a dynamic brushstroke, characteristic of his work, appeared, so originally conveying the mood of the picture. The following works by Van Gogh belong to this period: "Bridge over the Seine", "Papa Tanguy", etc.
In 1888, Van Gogh was already in Arles. It was here that the originality of his creative manner was finally determined and took shape. In the paintings painted during this period, one can feel the fiery artistic temperament of the artist, his passionate desire to achieve harmony, beauty and happiness. But at the same time, a certain fear of forces hostile to man was also caught. Art critics refer to the abundance of different shades of yellow on the canvases, in particular in the depiction of landscapes shining with sunny colors of the south, as in the painting “Harvest. Valley of La Crau. Echoes of fear seeped into the artist's depiction of sinister creatures, which are more like characters in a nightmare, as on the canvas "Night Cafe". However, researchers of Van Gogh's work also note that during this period, the artist's extraordinary ability to fill with life not only nature and people (“Red Vineyards in Arles”), but even inanimate objects (“Van Gogh's Bedroom in Arles”) was especially clearly manifested.
Van Gogh always painted furiously and passionately. Going to work early in the morning in some reserved corner of the countryside, he returned home only late in the evening. He wanted to immediately, in one sitting, finish the picture he started in the morning. He forgot about the time, that he was hungry... He didn't seem to feel tired at all. It is not surprising that such intense work soon caused him nervous exhaustion. In recent years, he increasingly experienced bouts of mental illness, which eventually landed him in a hospital in Arles. Then he was transferred to a mental hospital in Saint-Remy, and finally he settled in Auvers-sur-Oise, under the constant supervision of a doctor.
For the last two years of his life, Van Gogh painted as if possessed, in his work this manifested itself in an extremely heightened expression of color combinations. In the paintings of this period, one can note a sharp change in the artist's mood - "from frenzied despair and gloomy visionaryism to a quivering sense of enlightenment and peace." If "Road with cypresses and stars" leads the viewer to despair, then his "Landscape at Auvers after the rain" can inspire only the most pleasant feelings.
It is difficult to establish the real cause of Van Gogh's illness. His life is full of episodes that mark his extreme intemperance and excitability. Once he quarreled with Gauguin, whom he adored and admired. According to one version, the cause of the quarrel was the woman with whom Van Gogh was in love. In a fit of anger, he attacked Gauguin with a razor, wanting to avenge his abused love, but changed his mind at the last moment. After that, he cut off one ear with the same razor and sent it in a letter to his former lover. After this incident, Gauguin left his friend, fearing new outbursts of rage.
The duration of this kind of attacks in Van Gogh fluctuated between several weeks and several hours. The artist himself during his attacks seemed to remain fully conscious and even retained a critical attitude towards himself and the environment. According to the testimony of the head physician of the hospital in Arles, “Vincent van Gogh, aged 35, had been ill for six months with acute mania with general delirium. During this time, he cut off his own ear. And further: “Vincent van Gogh, aged 36, a native of Holland, admitted on May 8, 1889, suffering from acute mania with visual and auditory hallucinations, experienced a significant improvement in his condition ...”
Like crazy, Van Gogh painted and painted his paintings using incredible color combinations, completing each new painting by the evening of one day. His productivity was incredible. “In the intervals between attacks, the patient is completely calm and passionately indulges in painting,” the attending physician stated.
The tragedy happened on May 16, 1890. Van Gogh committed suicide while working on another painting. There were plenty of motives for his suicide: non-recognition, misunderstanding of others, eternal ridicule both among venerable painters and among friends and relatives, mental illness, poverty, finally ... Van Gogh's brother, Theo, was perhaps the only person who understood, loved artist and took care of him. He spent almost all his fortune on the maintenance of Van Gogh, which ultimately led Theo to complete ruin. The realization that he, Van Gogh, had brought his beloved brother to poverty, further increased his despair, because he was an extremely conscientious and infinitely kind person. Confluences of this kind of circumstances are tragic for a genius. Van Gogh shot himself in the stomach - this is what any normal person could do if he found himself in simply monstrous conditions. These conditions seemed all the more unbearable for a person with an acute and even painful susceptibility to the surrounding world.
Psychologists diagnosed the artist's illness as a manic-depressive psychosis. “His seizures were cyclical, repeated every three months. In the hypomanic phases, Van Gogh again began to work from sunrise to sunset, painted with rapture and inspiration, two or three paintings a day, ”wrote the doctor. The bright, literally red-hot colors of his paintings of the last period also speak in favor of this diagnosis.
According to one version, the cause of the artist's death was the destructive effect of absinthe, to which he was not indifferent, like many other people of a creative warehouse. This absinthe, according to experts, contained an extract of wormwood alpha-thujone. This substance, entering the human body, penetrates into the nervous tissue, including the brain, which leads to a disruption in the process of normal inhibition of nerve impulses, in other words, the nervous system “breaks down”. As a result, a person experiences seizures, hallucinations, and other signs of psychopathic behavior. It should be noted that the alkaloid thujone is contained not only in wormwood, but also in thuja, which gave the name to this alkaloid, and in many other plants. Ironically, these ill-fated thujas grow on the grave of Vincent van Gogh, whose dope finally killed the artist.
Among other versions of Van Gogh's illness, another one has recently appeared. It is known that the artist often experienced a condition accompanied by ringing in the ears. So, experts have found that this phenomenon is accompanied by severe depression. Only the professional help of a psychotherapist can get rid of such a state. Presumably, it was the ringing in the ears with Meniere's disease, and even in combination with depression, that drove Van Gogh to insanity and suicide.
Be that as it may, but the work of Van Gogh gave mankind amazing masterpieces. His vision of the world was so unusual and so amazing that hardly any other artist could repeat Van Gogh's masterpieces. However, he managed to capture not only his own original vision, but also to impose it on the viewer. True, he received recognition only after his death. If during his lifetime no one understood him, and for his entire long-suffering period of creativity, Van Gogh hardly managed to sell only one of his works, now his paintings are sold at auctions for fabulous sums (the artist's self-portrait at the Christie's auction was sold for more than 71 million dollars). As one contemporary critic lamented, only now "many have learned to see the world exactly as Van Gogh saw it."
