Who cut off Van Gogh’s ear?Should we give ear to the latest wild theories about Vincent van Gogh?
There is no area of the arts so esoteric, insignificant or apparently straightforward that an academic can’t weave some mind-bogglingly pretentious theory around it. Even popular music isn’t immune. A few years ago, for instance, I found myself reporting on a Bruce Springsteen conference at which hundreds of earnest scholars presented papers with titles such as A Marxist Perspective on “Darkness on the Edge of Town”. Er, pardon?
But there’s nothing esoteric about the theory unveiled by two Hamburg University academics last week. They contend that, contrary to what the world thought for more than 120 years, Vincent van Gogh did not lop off the lower part of his left ear in a manic moment, before presenting it to a prostitute called Rachel with the curious instruction to “keep this object carefully”.
Too simple! The academics contend that Van Gogh’s friend and fellow genius Paul Gauguin sliced the ear — perhaps by accident — after a drunken row over Rachel (for whom they both lusted) and an equally heated discussion over whether art should be drawn from life or the imagination. VG, fearing that PG was deserting his artistic circle, lunged at his friend in the street. PG, a good amateur fencer, drew his blade to fend off VG’s assaults, and . . . whoops!
The next day (according to this theory) Gauguin lied to the police, and left for Tahiti shortly after. He never saw Van Gogh again. For his part, Van Gogh stumbled through an incoherent police statement (perhaps, the Germans argue, to protect his friend) and was sent to a mental asylum. He then threw himself into a frenzy of work — 70 paintings in 70 days — and shot himself dead seven months later.
So how did these new facts come to light? After all, Van Gogh is one of the most researched figures in Western art. You would have thought that every snippet of knowledge had been uncovered decades ago. The answer is that there are no new facts, only new interpretations — and deft conjecture.
In their book (Van Gogh’s Ear: Paul Gauguin and the Pact of Silence), Hans Kaufmann and Rita Wildegans simply put a new gloss on police statements and second-hand accounts of what witnesses said they saw. There’s no way to prove or disprove their theory. From their point of view, that’s the beauty of it. I am just surprised that they didn’t build in a sinister plot involving albino monks and the Holy Grail, and call the book The Van Gogh Code.
Still, at least poor old mutilated Vincent joins a small but illustrious club of Dead White Males — those supreme artistic geniuses whose murky final months provide endless employment for scholars with a penchant for sensational revelations. Think of the rabid speculation in recent years over Tchaikovsky’s demise. Did he drink that glass of unboiled water, in the middle of a cholera epidemic, to commit suicide in the wake of a homosexual affair that went sour? Was he ordered to kill himself by his old classmates, who “tried” him for his sexual deviancy at a secret court? Was he even poisoned by his own doctor, on orders from the Tsar, to cover up a scandal involving a member of the Imperial Family? Incredibly, all of these theories are taken seriously by musicologists, because there is too little evidence either way to ridicule any of them.
And if that applies to Tchaikovsky and Van Gogh, who both died within the lifetime of my grandfather, imagine the scope for “creative” scholarship when dealing with the deaths of giants from much earlier eras. Was Mozart poisoned by Salieri, as was implied in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus? When the film came out, musicologists queued up to denounce the notion as a preposterous Hollywood distortion of a rather ordinary 18th-century death. But that hasn’t stopped other scholars from sifting and resifting the meagre evidence. Which includes, of course, Salieri’s own reported “confession” — admittedly years later, when he was gaga.
Christopher Marlowe’s death in 1593, ostensibly in a Deptford pub brawl over a drink bill (known to theatre historians as “The Reckoning”), is even murkier. As well as being the greatest dramatist of his age, Marlowe moved in shadowy circles: just a fortnight earlier he had been interrogated by the authorities on suspicion of being a heretic. He was certainly a government spy. Was he murdered to stop him revealing too much about some high-placed noblemen? Charles Nicholl’s The Reckoning presents all the evidence brilliantly, if you want to read further.
Does any of this matter? Not really. The biographical details of creative geniuses — particularly where they involve suicide or some other self-harm — may help us to put their art in context. But any truly great piece of work has the power to transcend the circumstances of its composition and speak directly to us. We may regret that Marlowe’s death at 29 robbed us of many masterpieces (unless, of course, you believe that the whole Deptford thing was faked, and he wrote his later plays under the pen-name of W. Shakespeare). But, in the end, what we have is what we have. No amount of scholarship is going to conjure a new masterpiece out of these long-dead geniuses.
I just hope that the revelations about Van Gogh don’t lead to a remake of Lust for Life (with a suitably enhanced part for Gauguin, naturally). I’m not sure that Kirk Douglas, at 92, can go through all that ear-chopping stuff again.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol...icle6248777.ece * * *
ერთი სიტყვით, გოგენს მოუჭრია ყური ვენ გოგისათვის, მთვრალ ჩხუბში, პრასტიტუტკა რაშელის გულიზა, რომლებსაც ორივენი ყვარობდნენ
This post has been edited by Johnnie Walker on 12 May 2009, 06:54
ვან გოგი, გოგენი და ის ცნობილი მოჭრილი ყური :)
