Van Gogh’s Ear | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/01/04/van-goghs-ear
It is, in its strange way, at once the Nativity fable and the Passion story of modern art. On Christmas Eve, 1888, in the small Provençal town of Arles, the police found a young Dutch émigré painter in his bed, bleeding from the head, self-bandaged and semi-conscious, in a run-down residence called, for its peeling exterior, the Yellow House. A few hours before, the Dutchman had given his severed ear—or just its lower lobe; stories differed—to a whore named Rachel in a maison de tolérance, a semilegal bordello, as a kind of early Christmas gift. (She had passed out upon unwrapping it.) The painter, Vincent van Gogh, was known throughout the town as a crazy drunk who hung around the whorehouses too much for his own good, and who shared the squalid Yellow House with another so-called artist, even scarier than he was, though not usually as drunk and not so obviously crazy. That other artist, Paul Gauguin—after being interviewed by the police, and insisting that his friend must have sliced off his own ear in a fit—then sent a telegram to the Dutchman’s brother, urging him to come at once. Then Gauguin left for Paris, as fast as the trains could carry him, never to return.
The Christmas crisis had a real, if buried, effect on van Gogh’s imagination, turning him from a dream of living and working with a community of brother artists to one of painting for an unknown audience that might someday appear—a fantasy that was, in the end, and against the odds, not a fantasy at all.
Those words shine in his pictures. We tend to see the arc of his work, from the departure from Paris, in early 1888, to his death, in 1890, as more or less continuous, and miss the decisive break marked by the Christmas crisis. Even through the pictures of 1888 he’s still mostly a prose painter, with something of the nineteenth-century illustrator in him—children, postmen, absinthe-soaked café scenes. He still wanted to be Dickens or Daumier. After the Christmas crisis, he accepted that he was only Vincent. His new pictures—“The Starry Night,” “Cypresses,” and the pictures of the gardens at Saint-Remy—are depopulated, emptied of any vision of common life. Where in 1888 the pictures are still filled with people on top of people—six people in the “Night Café,” a dozen in the streets of Arles at night—in 1889, aside from his copies of Millet, van Gogh thinks only in solitary ones and lonely twos, the occasional individual portrait interrupting a world of visionary dailiness. He wrote, simply, “Let’s not forget that small emotions are the great captains of our lives.” Stars wheel, cypresses flame; the whole world comes alive. The common unity is the animism of the ordinary. “Starry Night Over the Rhone,” of 1888, has the night sky gently decanted into the gaslight world of the town, and the theme is the likeness of streetlight and moonlight, the modern urban subject—the amusement park at night. In the 1889 “Starry Night,” it’s all night and stars and rolling nebulae: me and the night and the music of the spheres. He’s a man alone, and for good.
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