Posted on 05/05/2009 5:16:51 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Vincent van Gogh's fame may owe as much to a legendary act of self-harm, as it does to his self-portraits. But, 119 years after his death, the tortured post-Impressionist's bloody ear is at the centre of a new controversy, after two historians suggested that the painter did not hack off his own lobe but was attacked by his friend, the French artist Paul Gauguin.
According to official versions, the disturbed Dutch painter cut off his ear with a razor after a row with Gauguin in 1888. Bleeding heavily, Van Gogh then walked to a brothel and presented the severed ear to an astonished prostitute called Rachel before going home to sleep in a blood-drenched bed.
But two German art historians, who have spent 10 years reviewing the police investigations, witness accounts and the artists' letters, argue that Gauguin, a fencing ace, most likely sliced off the ear with his sword during a fight, and the two artists agreed to hush up the truth.
In Van Gogh's Ear: Paul Gauguin and the Pact of Silence, published in Germany, Hamburg-based academics Hans Kaufmann and Rita Wildegans argue that the official version of events, based largely on Gauguin's accounts, contain inconsistencies and that both artists hinted that the truth was more complex.
Van Gogh and Gauguin's troubled friendship was legendary. In 1888, Van Gogh persuaded him to come to Arles in the south of France to live with him in the Yellow House he had set up as a "studio of the south". They spent the autumn painting together before things soured. Just before Christmas, they fell out. Van Gogh, seized by an attack of a metabolic disease became aggressive and was apparently crushed when Gauguin said he was leaving for good.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
Forced myself to read this just to see how little evidence they had. Seems practically zero. Pure speculation.
Next they’ll come up that those two were homosexuals.
I’ve always suspected it was Gauguin. That bastard.
Van Gogh probably cut off his own ear and imagined it was Gauguin, which is why he was so proud of what he’d done that he handed the trophy ear to his favorite hooker. :’) Fon gock was at least half a bubble off of level.
Didn’t Van Gogh have a bad case of tinnitus? I always assumed that’s why he cut off his ear, and why he killed himself. Not that I know anything about it!
He painted that cornfield, then went out into it and killed himself, probably the same reason — the ears were bothering him.
/rimshot although the joke doesn’t make perfect sense
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