Gauguin the one who cut off Van Gogh's ear?

July 24, 2001 9:54 PM

Gauguin the one who cut off Van Gogh's ear? Favorite line: "When Gauguin, then aged 40 - and still the only other colony member - announced one evening his intention to leave, Van Gogh, 35, was livid. They appear to have had a blazing row, fuelled by absinthe and other alcohol." Sounds like an episode of "Cops," only in 1888.
posted by sassone (33 comments total)

<thumping base>
WHO CUT THE EAR OFF? Gau..Gau...Gaugin
</thumping base>

I sincerely apologize for this. I couldn't restrain myself...
posted by fooljay at 10:12 PM on July 24, 2001

History is rewritten by the winners-- again and again. Richard the third is my favorite example, the excellent books Daughter of Time and Royal Blood show that his successor Henry VII hired historians to assure he would be the hero of the story, and Richard the villain.

A number of historians have since contended that Richard not a villain, did not kill the princes in the tower and wasn't even hunchbacked! He was a reforming king, and passed laws prohibiting taxing books in order to promote learning. He was the only king to die in battle, defending his country.

Revisionism is rampant, the truth suspect, and the difference between fiction and history slight. Van Gogh's ear is gone; supposing anything more is conjecture.
posted by christina at 10:56 PM on July 24, 2001

> Van Gogh's ear is gone; supposing anything more
> is conjecture.

And pointless, too. Bumbling iconoclasts waste far too much ink on silly propositions -- that Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare is the worst one -- and often forget to look at the art, listen to the music, and read the literature. It wouldn't matter if Van Gogh had three ears and Gauguin ate them for breakfast; all of their biographers together are nothing compared to the artists, who are themselves nothing compared to their art.
posted by pracowity at 2:13 AM on July 25, 2001

Geez, pracowity, you could pretty much extend those "nothing compared to's" all the way out to the Big Bang and beyond. A little aural fixation is not such a wicked thing...are you always this ornate at this time of my morning?
posted by Opus Dark at 2:41 AM on July 25, 2001

> you could pretty much extend those "nothing compared
> to's" all the way out to the Big Bang and beyond.

But you already have, so let's leave it at that.

> you always this ornate at this time of my morning?

I don't know what time it is where you are, but it's noon here.
posted by pracowity at 2:59 AM on July 25, 2001

A grammar alert and a curt blurt. Nicetomeetcha...
posted by Opus Dark at 3:27 AM on July 25, 2001

See ya, Opie.
posted by pracowity at 4:03 AM on July 25, 2001

Backatcha, pracowitless.
posted by Opus Dark at 4:14 AM on July 25, 2001

are you always this ornate at this time of my morning?

Errr, pracowity was far from "Flashy, showy, or florid in style or manner; flowery" -- perhaps you meant ornery, Opus Dark?
posted by lia at 4:24 AM on July 25, 2001

From my experience, everyone wants a good story to go with the art. Whether it be artspeak blablabla about the work itself, or tales of anguish, madness, love, wrongdoing about the artist.

I listened to a BBC radio interview with Tracy Emin last night. The interviewer started and spent the majority of the interview asking her personal questions - her childhood, her sordid drinking days, etc., and then in the last few minutes accused her of branding herself, "so what you're selling, is "Tracy Emin."

This ongoing questioning - is it our desire to get to some definitive "yes, this is what this piece/this artist is about?" Why is the work itself not enough? Also, pracowity, can an artist's work be better than he/she is?
posted by spandex at 4:39 AM on July 25, 2001

Here's a bit of Foucault on the "author function", and the emergence of "the author" as the guarantor of the work. In summary, biography is unhelpful and inevitable.
posted by holgate at 5:11 AM on July 25, 2001

spandex, you're an artist - and a pretty amazing one from a look at your site. What's your opinion on the "can an artist's work be better than s/he is" question? Do you feel that your life must represent or reflect your work? or vice versa? Or neither?
posted by hazyjane at 5:50 AM on July 25, 2001

> Also, pracowity, can an artist's work be better
> than he/she is?

Yes, if the artist is any good.

Vincent van Gogh may have been interesting company, a sympathetic friend always ready to lend an ear, but we care about him now only because he painted hundreds of paintings, many of them considered among the greatest paintings in history.

There would have been no Van Gogh paintings without Van Gogh, just as there would have been no Van Gogh without his mother and father, but now it is the art that produces Van Gogh. If the art were to vanish, he would vanish.
posted by pracowity at 6:05 AM on July 25, 2001

> can an artist's work be better than he/she is?

Exhibit A, Richard Wagner. Immensely great and influential artist; wretched, nasty human being.
posted by jfuller at 7:28 AM on July 25, 2001

Exhibit B - Charles Dickens. Writings which have stood the test of time (and transformation into Broadway musicals); produced by an individual who was otherwise rather useless. (Bad father, bad husband, bad provider, etc.)
posted by Dreama at 7:34 AM on July 25, 2001

Exhibit C: Ezra Pound, nazi supporting facist. Stunning poet.

"As a bathtub lined with white porcelain,
When the hot water gives out or goes tepid,
So is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion,
O my much praised but-not-altogether-satisfactory lady."

The art does not excuse the human, nor should the art be held responsible for the human. art's weird. who knows where it comes from?
posted by christina at 7:45 AM on July 25, 2001

I think it all (the images, words, sounds, movements...) becomes us. In my case, it's yet to be as becoming as I want it to be. And honestly I don't know why.

Once it is in your hands, it's out of mine. Then either I go mad not accepting this, or enjoy watching who I become in the eyes of others.
posted by spandex at 7:46 AM on July 25, 2001

And you can come up with exhibits ad infinitum. Which kind of misses the point. In spite of what TS Eliot wanted us to believe, there can never really be a severance between "artist" and "human being". You may not know where "it" comes from, but you know how you come to it. You take your work home with you.

And there's the paradox, because works of art are something quite other than their creators.

I think about this a lot, because one of my favourite poets is Ezra Pound: a man whose life and (often deeply abhorrent) political opinions are much harder to separate from his work than, say, Wagner's.
posted by holgate at 7:51 AM on July 25, 2001

In the blink between "preview" and "post"...

The art does not excuse the human, nor should the art be held responsible for the human.

christina: isn't it a little misleading to call Pound a Nazi, given that his attraction to Fascism was very very Italian in character. And that's where it gets tricky, because you have, say, the Italian cantos (74 and 75) on the fall of Italy, and the first line of Canto 76 -- "The enormous tragedy of the dream in the peasant's bent shoulders" -- which begins what's basically an elegy for Mussolini, and it's all astonishing poetry. And reading those pieces neutrally is nigh-on impossible, because while they're not "authoritarian art" as such, they're certainly not excused from the sins of the creator.

Ronald Bush's essay on this is really worth a look.
posted by holgate at 8:05 AM on July 25, 2001

You got me! (though that is how he typically represented, it is more complex than that.) thanks for the link.
posted by christina at 8:09 AM on July 25, 2001

Canto 74. (those damned roman numerals.)

Though if you're looking for artists' spats, it'd be hard to top Verlaine shooting Rimbaud in 1873. I blame the absinthe.
posted by holgate at 8:18 AM on July 25, 2001

Gah. That's twice now.
posted by holgate at 8:19 AM on July 25, 2001

> And you can come up with exhibits ad infinitum. Which
> kind of misses the point.

That depends upon the point. Perhaps you cannot separate the artist from the man, but you can separate the art from the man (I'll leave Yeats' dancer out of this for the moment).

Spandex asked me whether I thought

> an artist's work be better than he/she is?

Yes.

You mention Pound. Pound is valuable to literature as much for his editing as for his writing, and especially if his art includes his editing, then the art is better than the man was. And I don't mean better in any sort of moral sense -- I don't care if he also dated Herr H. himself and egged him on; I'm interested in what Pound produced.

Pound is gone, and even when he was here he was relatively insignificant except for the art he produced. Everything people now admire about Pound is not Pound, but poetry.
posted by pracowity at 8:56 AM on July 25, 2001

pracowity: "work" is both verb and noun. what's significant, as you said, is the point where the one becomes the other.
posted by holgate at 9:12 AM on July 25, 2001

pracowity, you wrote:
Vincent van Gogh may have been interesting company, a sympathetic friend always ready to lend an ear, but we care about him now only because he painted hundreds of paintings,

It is clear that you have not been exposed to the writings of Van gogh, his letters to his brother Theo and his friends. And you probably haven't read Irving Stone's "Lust for Life." If you had, you would better understand why Vincent Van Gogh is so loved and remembered today. It is not just because of his paintings. You do not speak for everyone.

In my opinion, he was a truly great person whose art pales in comparison to his being. That said, when you look at his paintings, you can see that they are infused with the love and passion with which he lived.
posted by daser at 9:23 AM on July 25, 2001

He was a great person (I've consumed the same Vincent-media as you) but his work is far more powerful and touching the remnants of his humanity. At the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam I saw people of all ages and all languages truly looking at art, many frozen in front of one painting or another that resonated with them -- very different compared with the usual 5 second per picture viewing you see in most galleries.
posted by christina at 10:06 AM on July 25, 2001

I have a problem with the technical details. I'm a fencer. I have a foil. I could sure as hell hurt you, break things, etc...by beating you with my foil but i couldn't slice your ear off. Even with a fencing sabre. Smash all the cartilidge, tear it up a bit etc...but to cut it off would be difficult.

Fencing is a sport. It has been for a long time. Foils aren't swords.
posted by th3ph17 at 10:07 AM on July 25, 2001

> It is clear that you have not been exposed to the
> writings of Van gogh...

Then it is clear that it is not clear, because, more than having been exposed to them, I've read them. Not all of them. But enough.

> In my opinion, he was a truly great person whose art
> pales in comparison to his being.

Do you think people would now remember him, out of all the millions of fine but forgotten people of history, if his paintings hadn't existed?
posted by pracowity at 11:12 PM on July 25, 2001

who knows? It is possible that a majority of people know about him and care about him strictly as an artist. However, I assert that many people care much more about him and his art because of their knowledge of the rest of his life.

I was never particularly fond of his work until I learned about his life in an art history course in college. It sparked my interest in him, and since then I have developed a much deeper apprectiation of his life and art.

If "we care about him now only because he painted hundreds of paintings," then how do you explain the existence of Irving Stone's book "Lust of Life," Don McLean's song "Vincent," Robert Altman's movie "Vincent & Theo," or the play that Leonard Nimoy wrote "Vincent" - all inspired by and dealing primarily with Van Gogh's rich life - not just his paintings. There are many more examples - more so than almost any other historical figure I can think of. Many people care passionately about Van Gogh's life, only a few years of which were spent as a painter.

The importance of the posted article is that it potentially debunks the most widely known and defining legend about Van Gogh- that he cut off his ear. I hear references to it all the time in our culture - sometimes it seems like people are making fun of him or writing him off as a madman. If the story is not true, then that is something worth knowing and worth reporting.
posted by daser at 7:59 AM on July 26, 2001

we all perceive things differently...sometimes you can look thru the art to see the artist, sometimes the art is only important to you when you know the life behind it.

i have to agree that his writings wouldn't have survived without his art. There are more great people in the world than you may think, writing their thoughts down, expressing, living, pondering--but how many will you ever catch a glimpse of?
posted by th3ph17 at 10:23 AM on July 26, 2001

Bah. I have to admit my original question was an attempt to be a bit tricky, pracowity, and it was in response to your claim that the artist was nothing compared to his art. Guess as an artist that got my shackles up, for as you say yourself, without the artist there'd be no art.

But this thread has gone down another path and I woke with this: When we consider, for instance Van Gogh, as a "good" person or not, we look at the evidence - whatever manifestations of him that we have - and then cast judgement. His artwork contains at once all of him and just parts of him; plus, and most importantly, who he (and thus we all) have the potential of being.
Hence the works of Pound. And it works both ways - "good" people can have dark imaginings. The brave ones share their insides and humanize us all.
posted by spandex at 12:03 PM on July 26, 2001

i got an email back from the articles author:
[i wrote about the foil/sword issue]

Thank you for your letter; I, sadly, am not much of a fencer (although I did have a few goes during my student days 20 years ago and rather enjoyed it!), which explains why I did not clarify that point.

In my defence, could I point out that most of the source material was in French and I spoke to Ms Wildegans in German, so maybe something got lost in translation along the way.


for those of you just dying to know.
posted by th3ph17 at 12:38 PM on July 26, 2001

um-- so is it feasible or not? could he have chopped off that ear?
posted by christina at 8:19 AM on July 27, 2001