• HOME
  • ABOUT
  • ARTIST BIRTHDAY CALENDAR
  • SUBMISSIONS
  • CONTACT
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • Pinterest
  • YouTube

Daily Art Fixx

visual arts blog, painting, drawing, sculpture, illustration and more!

  • Art History
  • Drawing
  • Illustration
  • Mixed Media
  • Painting
  • Photography
  • Sculpture
  • Video
  • ART QUOTES
  • MORE CATEGORIES
    • 5 Women Artists Series
    • Architecture
    • Art & Technology
    • Art-e-Facts
    • Body Art
    • Collage
    • Cover Art
    • Crafts
    • Design
    • Digital
    • E-Learning
    • Eco-Art
    • Group Feature
    • Mixed Media
    • Nature
    • Street Art
    • Weird Art
    • Women in Visual Arts

Van Gogh’s Ear – What Really Happened?

January 7, 2012 By Wendy Campbell

Self-Portrait-Vincent-van-Gogh-1889Most art fans have heard the story of Vincent van Gogh cutting off his own ear and giving it to his favourite prostitute. But does anyone know what really happened?

The story goes that the combination of van Gogh’s heavy drinking of absinthe,  smoking, and possible poisoning from lead based oil paints,  led the artist to a madness which caused him to slash off his ear on December 23, 1888, and then commit suicide in 1890.

In their book “Van Gogh’s Ear: Paul Gauguin and the Pact of Silence”, Hamburg, Germany based art historians Hans Kaufman and Rita Wildegans present a different theory. The pair spent ten years reviewing French police investigations, witness accounts, and the artist’s personal letters. They believe that fellow artist and friend Paul Gauguin, who was known to have had a collection of weapons including fencing swords,  cut off van Gogh’s ear in self-defense.

Gauguin stayed with van Gogh in Arles, France and the two worked together for about two months.  The tension between the artists grew and they quarreled often. Van Gogh was vulnerable and hyper-sensitive, and a bullying and egocentric Gauguin often threatened to leave. This was too much for the unstable van Gogh who, in his state of despair, came after Gauguin with a cut-throat razor.

Until recently,  it was thought that van Gogh turned his anxiety over Gauguin on himself and severed his own ear and Gauguin, upset by his friend’s state of mind,  left Arles. However, Kaufman and Wildegans believe that Gauguin, fed up with van Gogh’s mental instability, decided to leave the house after van Gogh threw a glass at him during an argument. A crazed van Gogh followed him and things became violent.  Gauguin, either in anger or self-defense, lopped off part of van Gogh’s left ear.

They believe that van Gogh was so devoted to his friend that he did not report the attack and the two continued to write letters to each other.  This theory is based on a phrases that van Gogh wrote to Gauguin and his brother including: “You are quiet, I will be too”  and “pact of silence”.  As well, van Gogh’s letter to his brother Theo describes Gauguin’s aggressive character. He wrote it was lucky Gauguin didn’t have a machine gun or other firearms.

Whether the wound was self-inflicted or not, there is no doubt that Van Gogh, bleeding from his wound,  staggered into a bordello and gave a prostitute friend named Rachel his severed ear, telling her to ‘keep this object carefully’. He returned to his house where he nearly died from loss of blood and for weeks he spent his time between the hospital and home, continually crying out for Gauguin.

In July 1890, van Gogh moved to Auvers sur Oise, under the care of doctor Paul Guichet but a few days later, he shot himself in the chest and died two days later.

Source: Mail Online

Update (from ART INFO)

Letter Suggests van Gogh Lopped Off His Own Ear
“NEW YORK—Van Gogh scholar Martin Bailey claims the distressed Dutch artist slashed his own left ear lobe after learning that his more affluent art dealer brother, Theo, was getting married, contesting theories that fellow painter Paul Gauguin was to blame.” (for the full story, visit ART INFO).

Filed Under: ART, Art History Tagged With: art history, van Gogh, van Gogh's ear

Art-e-Facts: 5 Random Art Facts X

February 26, 2010 By Wendy Campbell

1. Reverse Graffiti (aka clean tagging, dust tagging, grime writing), is a method of creating art in public spaces by removing the dirt from its surface. Early forms of reverse graffiti include writing and pictures drawn on the dirty windows of cars and shops.  In the last several years, a more advanced method has emerged where art is created by cleaning dirty surfaces with stencils, detergent, and a high powered pressure washer. The interesting thing about reverse graffiti is it can be applied to so many different mediums with ink. Old t-shirts with peeling logos, vintage promotional mugs, maps…he possibilities are endless.

Jeffrey Pine - Sentinel Dome-Ansel Adams2. At the age of twelve Ansel Adams taught himself to play the piano and read music. Soon after, he began lessons and for the next twelve years he studied piano, intending to make his living as a concert pianist. Adams ultimately gave up piano for photography but these early studies ” brought substance, discipline, and structure to his frustrating and erratic youth. Moreover, the careful training and exacting craft required of a musician profoundly informed his visual artistry, as well as his influential writings and teachings on photography.”

American Gothic-Grant Wood-19303. “American Gothic” by Grant Wood depicts a farmer and his spinster daughter posing before their house, whose gabled window and tracery, in the American gothic style, inspired the painting’s title. The models were actually Grant’s sister Nan and their dentist. Wood was accused of creating this work as a satire on the intolerance and rigidity that the insular nature of rural life can produce; he denied the accusation. American Gothic is an image that epitomizes the Puritan ethic and virtues that he believed dignified the Midwestern character.”

Untitled-(baby)- Sam Jinks4. Hyperrealism is a genre of painting and sculpture resembling a high resolution photograph. It is a fully-recognized school of art and is considered to be an advancement of Photorealism by the methods used to create the resulting photorealistic paintings or sculptures. The term is primarily applied to an independent art movement and art style in the United States and Europe that has developed since the early 2000s.

Le_Dejeuner_sur_lherbe-Edouard_Manet-1862-635. The Salon des Refusés, French for “exhibition of rejects”  was officially sponsored by the French Government in 1863 and was an exhibition of works rejected by the jury of the Paris Salon. Any artist who wanted to be recognized, at that time, was required to have exhibited in a Salon, or to have gone to school in France. Being accepted into these Salons was a matter of survival for some artists and reputations and careers could be started or broken based upon acceptance into the Salon. Today, the term refers to any exhibition of works rejected from a juried art show.

Related Books:
GRAFF: The Art & Technique of Graffiti
Ansel Adams: 400 Photographs
Grant Wood’s Studio: Birthplace Of American Gothic

Ron Mueck (Hyperrealism)
Early Impressionism and the French State (1866-1874)

Sources: Wikipedia (hyperrealism), DAF (items 1-4)

Filed Under: ART, Art-e-Facts Tagged With: Ansel Adams, Art Facts, art history, Grant Wood, Hyperrealism, Reverse Graffiti, Salon des Refuses

GET DAF'S MONTHLY E-NEWS!

Categories

Archives by Date

Privacy Policy ✪ Copyright © 2023 Daily Art Fixx