Today, we’re going to talk about art….
Pained expressionist? Embarrassing failure? All of the above? On December 24, 1888, Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh, suffering from severe depression, cut off the lower part of his left hear with a razor while staying in Aries, France. He later documented the event in a painting titled “Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear.”
Vincent van Gogh was born in Groof Zundert, Holland, in 1853. From his early youth he was thought to be a bit strange — some even called him freakish. He was a failure at everything he tried — except painting.
Twice in his life he tried to cultivate romance with women that rejected him outright. The woman he finally had a relationship with was a prostitute — a fact that scandalized his family.
He chose to associate with the poor and downtrodden. He completely rejected all aspects of middle-class respectability. He was prone to volatile mood swings and mental breakdowns. The best description of hime was that he was just a weirdo.
Of course if you ask most people what they know about van Gogh, you’ll more than likely get some vague reference to an ear-chopping incident. But why did he do that?
To this day, scholars continue to put forth various theories that attempt to expose the true story of Vincent van Gogh and the severed ear. The truth is probably some combination of actual events and all the theories and speculation about what happened.
From what I can tell, the most widely accepted story goes something like this….
By 1888, van Gogh, who was then 35 years old, had become sadly disillusioned with life in Paris. Besides being a misfit, he was a failure. He couldn’t sell any of his paintings, so he moved to Aries, in the south of France, where he planned to establish an artist’s colony. He invited fellow painter Paul Gauguin to live with him. From the outset, the relationship between the two was volatile to say the least — van Gogh was a foreigner to all of the normal social graces of decent living — a thing that annoyed the heck out of Gauguin. On Christmas Eve, 1888, the two men got into an argument — the argument became a brawl and Vincent attacked Gauguin with a razor, but Gauguin managed to ward off the blow…. and van Gogh fled to his room
Vincent proceeded to get hopelessly drunk. He soon came to regret his intense display towards Gauguin. In his drunken stupor he concocted a way that he could make amends — he would cut off his ear (????) as a show of remorse. Holding a razor in his right hand, he stood in front of a mirror and sliced through his left ear from the top of the lobe, working down at an angle.
Then van Gogh gift-wrapped the severed portion of his ear in a handkerchief and took it down to his local bordello where he, covered in blood, sought out Rachel — a prostitute he had a crush on — and handed her the package. The legend has it that the poor girl fainted. The brothel was thrown into turmoil, and Vincent beat feet. The police found him asleep in his bed the following morning.
He spent the next 12 months in an asylum, but apparently they weren’t big on rehab back in those days. Two years later, he ended his life with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest.
His work — and the romantic(?) story of the tortured, antihero artist have become the stuff legends are made of.
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