A Big Dose of Van Gogh to Cope with Election Anxiety

How am I coping with election anxiety in this final week? By turning off cable news and losing myself in art books, in particular a new one about Van Gogh. I’m not a religious person, but when I look at the later works of Vincent Van Gogh, I feel closer to “god,” to a higher energy, to something essential and essentially good that connects all of us with nature, from the sub-atomic to the galactic, as channeled through this cosmic lightening rod of an artist: socially-inept, impoverished, half mad, pure. Van Gogh takes me to a better place.

Politics, not so much.

It was in this spirit that I impulsively ordered Martin Bailey’s new book Studio of the South: Van Gogh in Provence. Like most new books about Van Gogh Studio of the South puts forth a new theory about Van Gogh’s self-mutilation and increasing madness. Bailey theorizes that Van Gogh may have received a letter from his brother Theo announcing his engagement to Johanna Bonger a few hours before he cut off his ear, not afterwards as generally accepted. Theo, an art dealer living in Paris, was Van Gogh’s sole source of financial support. Fear of losing this support from his beloved brother as he set out to build a new family would have weighed heavily on the artist’s already fragile state of mind.

Vincent Van Gogh. Bedroom in Arles, 1888. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

The book covers the 444 days the artist spent in Arles, from the time he left Paris until he checked himself into the asylum at Saint-Rémy in May 1889. Drawing from Van Gogh’s own letters and meticulous research, Bailey vividly details Van Gogh’s life and work in the yellow house on the Place Lamartine in the village of Montmajour. Van Gogh dreamed of an artists’ house, where like-minded colleagues would live and work together. He rented rooms in the yellow house and set about convincing Gauguin to join him there, a collaboration that would only last about a month and would, of course, end in tragedy.

During his time in Arles Van Gogh completed around 200 paintings, including some of his most brilliant work: sunflowers, wheat fields, orchards in bloom, the postman Roulin and his family, his bedroom in the yellow house, self portraits, some with bandaged ear and pipe, the Night Café and a starry sky over the Rhône. About a third of them are beautifully reproduced in Studio of the South along with works done by Gauguin during his brief stay, maps and historic photographs.

Gauguin fled Arles after the night of madness that resulted in Van Gogh cutting off his own ear. Three more attacks of madness ensued in the following months, each resulting in Van Gogh’s hospitalization. By now his neighbors were afraid of him and began an organized effort to get him out. Van Gogh found a new place to live but backed out at the last moment, deciding it would be too difficult to go on living independently. Instead, he decided to check himself into the asylum at Saint-Rémy.

Vincent Van Gogh. The Red Vineyard, November 1888. Pushkin Museum, Moscow. 

Despite the attacks and hospital confinements, Van Gogh was at the height of his powers as an artist and never stopped working. As he prepared to leave Montmajour for the asylum, defeated, he removed the last batch of paintings from the stretcher bars, rolled them up and shipped them by freight train to Theo in Paris. Included were over thirty pictures which today would be worth billions of dollars. Neither Vincent nor Theo was able to sell any of them in their short lives. Vincent committed suicide a year later at the age of 37. Six months after that, Theo succumbed to complications from syphilis at age 33.

Click here to buy Studio of the South from Amazon.com