SYMHC Classics: Vincent van Gogh

This 2011 episode from prior hosts Sarah and Deblina covers the artist's life and work. It also examines long-held beliefs about Vincent van Gogh and the debates regarding them. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. We've gotten a few requests recently from listeners
asking for an episode on Vincent van Go, and this
is one of those cases where I really envy previous
hosts of the show because I really love his artwork.
I would love to do an episode on him, but
Sarah and Bablina already did, wondering their tenure as hosts

(00:23):
in That episode came out on November eleven, But that
also means that this episode is more than a decade old,
and awareness of some of the preferred language regarding things
like alcohol, misuse, sex work, and suicide has evolved a
little bit since this was recorded, so keep that in mind.
They're also continues to be discussion around Van Goh's cause

(00:45):
of death, which is brought up at the end of
the episode, for example, whether Van Got did take his
own life or whether he was killed. One of the
more recent developments in that discussion is a paper published
in the American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology. The
paper came out in and that calls for the exhamation
and autopsy of vang Go to settle the question. So

(01:08):
enjoy the episode. Welcome to Stuff you missed in history class.
A production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm debling a chuk reboarding.
And it seems like van Go has been in the

(01:29):
news kind of a lot lately. But when I thought
about it, I realized van Go is always in the news,
isn't he. He is. In fact, you'll see something about
his latest record breaking sale, or show his hidden works,
like paintings that are revealed under paintings through X rays.
Love those because it's like there's seriously a secret hidden
painting underneath another van Go. And then sometimes there's news

(01:52):
about frauds too, and that's always kind of exciting in
its own weird way. But van Go news isn't always
all about art. Sometimes it's about the man. And that's
partly because the man is what we've come to see
is the epitome of the tortured artist almost even though
we've talked about some other I think really strong contenders

(02:13):
on this podcast, like Caravaggio and Michelangelo, but Vankoh just
has this really compelling life, and I think part of
it has to do with the fact that there are
so many opposites involved in in what he did. And
who he was. He was an immensely talented artist, but
almost totally unrecognized in his own lifetime. He was an

(02:34):
incredibly warm person, but also mentally unstable and alcoholic. He
was a devoted letter writer, but also the kind of
guy who cuts off his own ear, wraps it up
like a present, and gives it as a Christmas gift
to a prostitute. We're going to talk about that kind
of kind of like a letter delivering something. It sends

(02:55):
a message. I am sure about that. Um so yeah,
I mean, he's just got so much going on. He's
he makes a really interesting figure. So it's not too
surprising that people are still analyzing Van Gogh's health, his
mental state, and even his cause of death, which was
long believed to be suicide. And they're coming up with
new ideas all the time. So we'll talk about the

(03:16):
man and his art, but we'll also talk about some
of the more recent theories about his life, as well
as the high tech advancements in studying his paintings. And
just a note too, before we go any further. You
can tell by now we're gonna save van go which
is the standard American pronunciation. I think the Brits have
a different way. They say it. Uh, y'all don't want
to hear us try to save and or however it goes.

(03:39):
I don't think our throats could. I mean, you might
find it amusing, but we would just be sad when
you wrote us and made fun of us. So we're
just going to go with what we know. Van go
So Vincent van Gogh was born in zin Duct in
the Netherlands March eighteen fifty three, and his father was
a Dutch reform minister. His mother was a bookseller's dog

(04:00):
her and after Vincent was born, they had five more kids,
and the one to really remember is his younger brother, Theo.
He turns out to be one of the most important
figures in Vincent's life. And young Vincent was a pretty
quiet kid who liked nature. He'd often go out walking
and wandering, but it was clear that he'd eventually go

(04:20):
into one of the family businesses, religion or art. So
at sixteen he was apprentice to his art dealer uncle,
who worked at the Hague branch of a well respected dealership.
And it was a good job and Van go eventually
located in London, learned about the Dutch masters like Rembrandt
and the contemporary French artists that were selling big at
the time, people like Jean Francois Malay. And he also

(04:43):
grew to love British literature and Victorian culture taste that
really stuck with him throughout his life. But after working
in London for two years in Paris for another van
Go was really ready to get out of the business.
He had suffered his first mental breakdown over and unrequited
British love at this point, and the work of art
dealing just really didn't suit him, so he started job hopping,

(05:05):
as as many twentiesome things do. First he was a
teacher in England. By eighteen seventy seven he was a
bookseller back in the Netherlands. Then he decided to study theology,
but quit that in eighteen seventy eight to go train
as an evangelist in Brussels. He eventually left that to
become a missionary in southwest Belgium and was kind of

(05:27):
into it, but he was actually so into it and
so moved by the poor, impoverished people who he worked
with and who surrounded him, that he gave up all
of his worldly possessions and the church thought that was
taking things way, way too far, and dismissed him from
his position. Vincent later told an acquaintance quote, they think

(05:48):
I'm a madman because I wanted to be a true Christian.
They turned me out like a dog, saying that I
was causing a scandal. So what's this guy gonna do.
He's not going to be in the art business. He's
not going to be a preacher or a missionary. What
gives Well, his brother, Theo, who at that point was
also an art dealer, had a few ideas about that.
Van Go was twenty seven, and Theo encouraged him to

(06:11):
become an artist himself. He likes art, he's good at it,
and so maybe it will suit his personality a little
better than being a businessman or a preacher. And as
much as van Go's later work seemed to be entirely natural,
like they were just kind of dashed off in a minute,
he sets off in his art career quite seriously. He
plans at first to master black and white drawing figures

(06:34):
in correct perspective, and then he copies prints. He studies
drawing manuals. He studied drawing at Brussels Academy, though he
left after a short time, and then in one he
decided he needed some formal training, and so he took
lessons from his cousin Anton Mauve, a respected Dutch landscape painter,
and his art dealer uncle even commissioned a couple of

(06:54):
drawings from him. So things seemed to be ramping up
a little bit with his new career. He was learning
a trade, and in eighteen eighty two van Go made
the jump to oil paints, moving in eighteen eighty three
to a quiet Netherlands village where he could paint landscapes.
And he still does like nature, just like he did
when he was a kid. He can paint peasants there,

(07:15):
you know, just these bucolic sort of scenes. And when
he came home to his parents home, which by that
point was in Noonan in the Netherlands, he focused even
more on these portraits of peasants. During the winter he
lived with them, he did more than forty studies of
peasants heads. And I encourage you guys to go and

(07:35):
look up some of these if you're I mean, I'm
sure you are familiar with van Go. Everybody is, but
you might be a little surprised if you're not familiar
with his early works. They're very dark brown and dark
green and just sort of almost muddy colors. And one
of the more famous works from this period, called The
Potato Eaters, is a pretty good place to start, i'd say,

(07:57):
for forgetting a sense of this dark very unlike van
Go van Go style. Yeah, you guys should really go
check out some of these pictures. Sarah printed out some
for me and they were a big help while researching.
So Van Go left again in eighty five to study
at Antwerp Academy, mainly so he could see many of
Peter Paul Ruben's works, but he stayed there only three

(08:18):
months before taking off for Paris, where Theo was living
at the time. And this is where Van Go really
started to become van Go. He saw the work of
the Impressionists in person, he saw Japanese prints, he met
contemporaries like Enrida to Lose the Track and Paul Goga,
and Theo set him up with some art world personalities too.

(08:38):
He got to meet Camille Pizzarro and George Sura, and
Van Go's paintings really started to incorporate a lot of
what he was seeing. So, for instance, The Broken brushwork
of Impressionism. Sometimes the dots of point all is um
and just this really bright, bright color and light, the
kind of things that we associate with him today. One
great example from this pi it is self portrait with

(09:01):
a straw hat. I printed out that one too, and
it just looks completely different from self portraits that he
was doing just a year before in Paris, like you
would just think a completely different person did it if
it was not obviously a portrait of the same man.
And ironically self portrait with a straw hat is done
on the back of one of those peasant head drawings,

(09:23):
and we're gonna talk a little bit more about that later.
To van Go's frugal nature, but this is where he
came into his own. But after two years in Paris,
he was ready to be in the countryside again, so
he left for Arla, which is in southwest France, in February,

(09:51):
and all of that Paris exposure to color and a
lighter palette just turns to magic and bright sunny Provence.
Van Go paints blooming fruit trees, fields, cottages and locals
like the postman Joseph Roulan and his family, and he's
clearly inspired by the Japanese prince. He did fourteen paintings
of orchards in less than one month, and his technique

(10:12):
just got even bolder from there. I mean, just to
illustrate this, there's this great quote in the Encyclopedia Britannical
article about Van Goh. It goes, once hesitant to diverge
from the traditional techniques of painting he worked so hard
to master, he now gave free rein to his individuality
and began squeezing his tubes of oil paint directly on
the canvas. But I love that image too. I mean,

(10:34):
just stop and talk about that for a minute. I'm
imagining Vandergo out of Paris. You know, he's just mastered it.
He's got all the technique down and going for it
when you know, painting and orchard or whatever, and just
squeezing the tube right out onto the onto the canvas.
It sounds fun. It does sound fun. It sounds like

(10:55):
sort of letting go of of conventions almost. But it
wasn't all fun and games. Van Go had the special
hope when he came to Arla. He wanted to start
an artist commune, the studio of the South, where peers
like Gogan and to Lustrek could come and live together
and paint. So he rented a studio called the Yellow House,
and he ultimately wrote to THEO so much about when

(11:17):
Gogan comes that THEO ended up advancing Gogan the money
for future pieces of unsold art, essentially paying him to
go live with his brother. So Paula Gun does not
really seem like the kind of guy you would want
to pay to go live with your sibling. He seems
like a pretty unlikely choice for somebody as upbeat and
enthusiastic and sometimes seriously depressed as Vano was to choose

(11:40):
as a housemaid. Just to give you a little background,
and Goga, he had abandoned his stockbroker career for art
and had a reputation of being a bit of a brute.
This is before the Tahiti phase, but still van Go
was really pumped about the idea of finally getting his
artist commune off the ground. And things went okay for

(12:01):
a little more than a month with the two men
producing works and getting along reasonably okay. Then trouble struck
in a really big way. So it was Christmas, and
just to paint the scene a little bit, van Go
had been spending a lot of time reading the Christmas
Books of Charles Dickens, which, if you have read um,

(12:24):
probably the most famous of Dickens Christmas books. You know
that a lot of times they have to do with
a guy who has a mental breakdown right around the holidays,
and not necessarily the most uplifting. No. I mean maybe
if you go through the end, but you could eventually
go off track, I think if you read too many
of them. He was also spending a lot of time
hanging out with Go Gah. So on Christmas Eve, Arla

(12:48):
police found Van Go bleeding from his self bandaged head
in the Yellow House, and that left some questions about
what on earth happened. So the traditional tale goes the
night before, Van Go had been talking NonStop to Gogan,
who couldn't take it anymore and left the house. So

(13:09):
when Gogan heard his name in the street, he turned
around to find van Go hollereen and waving around a razor.
Van Go didn't attack Go again. Instead, he went home,
cut off his ear and gave it as a gift
to a local prostitute named Rachel, telling her quote guardless
object carefully. She passed out when she opened it. As
many people would, I think so go Go was interviewed

(13:31):
by the police about the whole thing, and he told
them that Van Gogh must have done this to himself.
And after all the formalities were over, Goga sent a
telegram to THEO saying you need to get down here immediately,
and then got out of dodge. He left for Paris
and did not come back. But a couple of years
ago another theory emerged. According to Hans Kaufman and Rita Vildegan's,

(13:55):
who are art historians and who wrote Van Go's Ear,
Paul Goga and the Pact of Silence, Go get cut
off Van goes ear with not a razor but a sword,
and then the two guys decided to keep the whole
thing secret. Pretty wild twist to this story. Yeah, and
Adam Gopnik actually wrote a great piece on the Ear

(14:16):
mystery for The New Yorker in two thousand ten, and
he set the scene in his article by noting two
important facts that we should point out. For one thing,
Van go despite the lovable nature that comes across in
his correspondence, would have been quote exhausting to live with.
And I can kind of understand that too. All of
Van Go's correspondence is online and that's also very neat

(14:36):
to go look at, in addition to looking at pictures
of his paintings. But he sounds really, really nice, but
if you were with him all the time, that could
definitely get old. I mean, he describes how the sky
looks when he's going out on a walk and how
the trees look and it sounds lovely in a letter,
but maybe if you were living in the Yellow House

(14:57):
with him, it would get kind of old, be too much. Maybe. Well.
The other point that got Nick made was that go Gan,
in addition to being pretty mean and scary, was a
fantastic fencer who definitely carried a foil around in Arlow
when he was going out at night. Felt self defense.
So Kaufman and Vildegon's theorized that when van Go came
near Gogan on the street, shouting and waving a razor,

(15:20):
Gogan attacked with the sword, accidentally slicing off part of
Van Go's ear. Van Go then picked the bit up
and the two agreed to an unspoken code of silence.
And there's some potential evidence out there for this, right, yeah,
there seems to be. So one is that the wound
was clean. It was a slice, and let's not imagine
too much what it would take with a razor in

(15:41):
your own ear. But it does not seem like it
would be a clean job. And then another factor to
consider is that people who self mutilate, sometimes now called
van go syndrome ironically enough, usually go for their arms
and their hands, and their legs and their chest, not
their ears, although again got Nick pointed out that van
go would have had a better understanding of his ears

(16:03):
than most people, um since he had painted himself so
many times already. By this point another piece of potential evidence.
The guys, right, these weird hint hint sort of things
to each other. For example, after van Gogh is sufficiently recovered,
he writes to go Agin that he'll shortly be returning
his left behind fencing equipment. He says, quote, I'll pluck

(16:24):
up the courage in a few days. Those terrible engines
of war will wait until then. I now write to
you very calmly, but I haven't yet been able to
pack up all the rest. And the two even have
this code word of sorts ittus, which means fish, if
you know, like theology or something. But it also relates

(16:45):
to fencing meaning a blow or a hit, and go
Gad kind of obsessively writes ittus in relation to Van
Gogh's name, even placing it inside of this little ear
like squiggle doodle drawing. So some sort of strange factors
to consider here, and Van go makes his own subtle

(17:07):
allusions to other people too, not just like these two
have a strange correspondence. Going on to his brother, he writes, happily,
go Ga, I and other painters aren't yet armed with
machine guns and other dangerous war weapons, just swords and razors.
I mean, seems like that might be bad enough, right.
So whatever happened, it majorly shook up Van go He

(17:28):
went back to work quickly after leaving the hospital, but
he had to go back in for nerves just a
few weeks later. To go back to that Gothnic article,
there's a quote that really illustrates the change that took
place inside Van go after that incident, a change that
affected his whole outlook as an artist. The Christmas Crisis
had a real, if buried effect on Van Gogh's imagination,

(17:51):
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. Yeah, So giving up on this idea of
the artist commune and and living for the appreciation of

(18:12):
his fellow artists, you know, all living in harmony together
and making work and um, critiquing each other and that
sort of do it's not worth giving up on that
and just making art for himself, accepting that or hoping that,
you know, eventually somebody will be there to appreciate it, which,
of course I guess that is us now and everybody

(18:33):
in the twentieth century. He got really into Van Gogh,
but by April nine, van Gogh wasn't really recovered mentally
from this attack, and he was fearful that another major
nervous attack could permanently impede his work. He really didn't
like these things setting him back that way, so he
voluntarily entered an asylum at Saremie de Provence and um

(18:58):
just a sad quote for you. Around this time he
wrote his sister, and this sort of gives you an
idea of his state of mind when he is voluntarily
committing himself to an asylum. He said, every day, I
take the remedy that the incomparable Dickens prescribes against suicide.
It consists of a glass of wine, a piece of
bread and cheese, and a pipe of tobacco. It isn't complicated,

(19:20):
you'll tell me. And you don't think that my melancholy
comes close to that place, however, at moments. But so
van Go spent twelve months in the asylum, and he
sometimes had these nervous attacks, and then sometimes he was
really productive. He produced a hundred and fifty canvases, which

(19:41):
I mean that sounds like a lot to me. And
when he was first confined to the grounds, he painted
what he could see. I mean, he'd liked to paint
from life, so he would do pictures of the walled
guard and the irises and the lilacs in it. He
would do copies of dela QoI and Rembrandt, And when
he was finally allowed more freedom, towards the end of

(20:02):
his day, he painted nearby wheat fields and cypress trees
and olive trees. A lot of his most famous paintings
are actually from this period where he is in the institution.
He did portraits of his fellow patients. He did scenes
inside the hospital. He even did The Starring Night at
this time, and thought that it was a failure, not

(20:23):
at all what he was hoping. It would be the
masterpiece that's hanging on so many college freshmans. I mean,
I was thinking the same thing. So, finally, missing family
and home, he left the asylum and moved to over
sUAS outside of Paris. He put himself under the care

(20:45):
of an artist friendly homeopathic doctor, Paul Ferdinand Gauche, and
he got back to work with a Vengeance. So two
of I think your favorites from the period, Sarah Thatch
cottages at Cordeville and the church at Overre those were
painted during that time. Yeah, I really like these ones.

(21:05):
They have a nice I don't know, they're not quite
as yellow and super bright as some of the paintings
he did in the south of France, but they just
have this really nice color. That Thatched cottage as one
has a this pale green tone to almost the entire painting,
which I mean, I know that sounds weird, but it
ends up being quite lovely. So he's again producing a

(21:29):
lot of work. But then in July, perhaps over guilt
relating to his financial dependency on his brother, or just
another attack seizing him. He shot himself in the chest
in a wheat field, and it took van Go two
days to die, so there was a lot of time
to talk to people about what had happened. He spoke

(21:51):
with the police, he met with THEO and when the
police first taught to him, he said, quote, I shot myself.
I only hope I hadn't bought sed it. What I've
done is nobody else's business. I'm free to do what
I like with my own body. And when he was
examined by a doctor who said that the bullet couldn't
be removed, he was asked if he had tried to

(22:12):
commit suicide. Van Go responded, I believe, so don't accuse
anybody else, which sounds a little bit suspicious. It's on
the one hand, definitive and then yeah, also kind of strange.
It leaves it open, I guess, which makes way for
new theories like this one that suggests that van Go
didn't really commit suicide but was murdered. It's part of

(22:34):
a biography by Gregory white Smith and Stephen Nafa. The
authors suggest that two teens visiting for the summer accidentally
shot van Go and that he admitted suicide to protect them.
Their reasons for thinking this or that. For one thing,
the gun was never found, nor were Van Gogh's painting supplies. Also,
the wheat field was a mile outside of town, which

(22:57):
is really far to go if you're shot in the chest. Finitely.
And then finally, one of the boys, Rene Secoton, admitted
in nineteen fifty six that yes, he and his brother
had borrowed the gun from a or borrowed a gun
from a local business owner. And yes, they also often
bullied Van go they'd even send their girlfriends over to

(23:19):
hit on kind of shy, awkward Vincent and um really
embarrass him. But they didn't admit to actually shooting Van Go.
Kind of an important distinction. In fact, um, this guy
said that the artist stole the gun and the boys
hadn't even been in town when the suicide took place.
So there is kind of strange things going on here,

(23:42):
but also not really definitive information. But according to a
recent article in art Info France, the Van Go Museum
isn't changing its story, so they're not going along with
with a new theory quite yet. Leo Johnson, who's the
curator at the museum, says, quote, we do agree with
the there's that there are many unanswered questions regarding Van

(24:02):
God's death. It's just that at this point we feel
there's not enough evidence to prove the new interpretation, and
therefore we find it's too early to abandon suicide as
the cause of death. So who knows, I mean, maybe
we'll get more information on this in the near future.
We've learned that m cold cases that are hundreds of

(24:23):
years old can be solved, sometimes very true. But what
about his legacy? After his sunflower filled funeral and overre
Van Go finally started to become famous. It's a well
known saying that Van Go produced nine hundred paintings and
one thousand one works on paper and only sold one painting.
In his lifetime. Only one article had been written about him.

(24:46):
But that gives the false sense that Van Goh was
just completely unknown, which is not the case right. No,
people who could see his work did often like it.
Guess like Monet and Goga and Bizarro thought that it
was fantastic, thought that he was a really, really great artist,
but his fame hadn't spread yet. Word hadn't spread, or
taste for his work hadn't spread. So THEO, who was

(25:08):
a successful art dealer, had been trying to promote his
brother's work for years. I mean, in addition to supporting
him financially. He was kind of his champion in the
art world. He had absolute faith in him. And really tragically,
he died just a few months after Vincent and passed
on that that faith in Vincent's work to his widow, Joanna,

(25:31):
who had a baby son also named Vincent, to support.
So it's Joanna also known as Joe for short, who
really came to to be the Van Gogh champion. After
his death, she called on her family and her husband's
art contacts and started showing the pieces. She followed Theo's
advice to keep the works together, to not just sell

(25:54):
them off piece by piece to whoever came along looking.
And I think this is a remark couple fact, but
as late as nineteen o six she could still show
a complete set of Van go works, and his work
influenced the German expressionists. His published correspondence gave folks all
sorts of insight into his life and his technique, and

(26:15):
they're really lovely they're filled with sketches, they're poetic, they're
incredibly friendly. As you said before, and as we've made
quite clear, his life is perfect for research by professionals
of all disciplines. Psychologists have tried to diagnose him. Some
say that he had epilepsy, some say schizophrenia, Some say
that Vincent THEO and his sister may have all had

(26:36):
an inherited metabolic disorder. Yeah, but there's also lots of
modern research taking place around his works. They're not just
his life. Two of my favorite examples of this are
really sort of science e high tech like. One is
that there's a Cornell electrical engineering professor named ce Richard
Johnson Jr. Who has used computer algorithms to create We've

(26:59):
dense the maps of van Go's canvases, so the density
of the thread patterns lets historians know if one painting
was made from the same role of canvas as another,
so you could tell that, um, a certain work is
authentic because it was made right next to a known work,
or maybe a certain work is a fraud because it

(27:21):
doesn't match the density patterns at all. And then probably
the most helpful thing here, it helps art historians place
the paintings in the order they were made. Because they
can tell well that canvas was right next to the other,
he probably painted them around the same time, and according
to a work published on van Go and analytical chemistry,
chemists figured out the reason why some of van Go's

(27:42):
brilliant chrome yellows have faded over the years. By using
UV light and simulating the aging process of old paint.
They found that chromium oxidized when it was mixed with
a chemical ingredient often found in the white pigment, lithopone.
So they figured he must have stretched his yellow paint
with white and unknown oninly created a problem for conservators

(28:02):
down the road. And I thought that was such an
interesting piece of news because it helped answer a question
that I had had, which was how did van Go eat,
pay his rent, live and buy what are usually pretty
expensive supplies, I mean oil paints and canvases. That's expensive
stuff with no job. So THEO obviously supported him contributed

(28:25):
um much of the money that van Go used to live,
but Vangilt was clearly penny pinching too, so like painting
over the old canvases, we mentioned that historians have figured
that a huge number of Vango's paintings probably do have
other paintings underneath them, and then even going as far
as to stretch his paint I think it's it's interesting.

(28:47):
It is, but considering all the support that THEO gave Vincent,
it's probably appropriate that in nineteen fourteen, Theo's remains were
relocated to rest near Vincent's, so anyone stopping to pay
respects to the artist can also visit the grave of
his tireless supporter. I think that's so appropriate somebody who
had just total faith in his and his family member

(29:08):
and turned out to be right, even though neither of
them got to see it unfortunately. So UM I had
fun researching this, and for those of you who are
interested in learning more, there's so much. I mean, obviously
go look at um pictures, either in museums of course
or online, but the trove of letters is so fun.
I mean I just looked at random ones, picking different

(29:30):
letters to different correspondence from different time periods, and I
think it really helped give me a better sense of
what kind of person Van Gogh was. Thanks so much
for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is
out of the archive, if you heard an email address

(29:52):
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the course of the show that could be obsolete now.
Our current email address is history po podcast at i
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(30:14):
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production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I
heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.