Vincent van Gogh, with his obsessive love of art and a constant need to improve his mind, knew how to inject colour into the lives of coal miners and peasants, into sterile rooms and onto uneventful nights.

By Vipasha Aloukik Pai

More than 120 years ago, on a cold December evening in a city in the south of France, a struggling artist named Vincent van Gogh cut off his ear. The pain would have been unbearable, the blood would have gushed and the sensory imbalance would have been nightmarish. In spite of this, he bandaged himself up, walked to a brothel, asked for a girl and handed her his ear.

Over the last century, this incident has become the first thing that leaps into the pop-culture mind whenever van Gogh is mentioned. One of the greatest artists of the 19th century, the kind whose work has been sold at record-smashing prices, van Gogh actually died a poor man having sold only a few paintings in his lifetime. Add to this the mystique of the quintessential tortured artist, the mad genius, the violent outlier, and you have the ultimate recipe for unprecedented popularity. However, for the bona fide admirer of van Gogh the artist, this reputation of van Gogh the man is somewhat of a grouse.

No Cherubs, Please
The insinuation that he was a frenzied loony, whose madness gave his art a new dimension, is not entirely true. He was difficult and eccentric, yes, but he was no madman when it came to his work. His paintings don’t affirm blind fury or frenetic madness. They are, in fact, deeply conscientious, disciplined and technical, rarely straying from his purpose of creating on the canvas what he saw in life. No cherubic angels or mythological scenes for him. Only what was real – miners, peasants, flowers, nature. Only the quotidian, elevated by his hand, to be not pleasing but provocative, not alluring but authentic.

Van Gogh didn’t always want to be an artist. Upon his family’s insistence, he took up clerical jobs – once at an art dealership, once at a bookshop. But he really wanted to study theology, which he couldn’t because the prospect was expensive, and he wanted to preach the gospel, which he eventually did to a community of coal miners in Belgium. The poverty of the coal miners moved him deeply. To fit in, he sullied his face, gave away his possessions and slept on straw. His ways were immersive, to say the least, and unacceptably so. The miners thought him mad and the Church Council found his “almost scandalous excess of zeal” condemnable.

I’m Vincent And I Paint
With this rejection, he decided to focus on himself, money be damned. He wrote in a letter to his brother, Theo, “I have a more or less irresistible passion for books and the constant need to improve my mind, to study, if you like, just as I have a need to eat bread.” An obsessive love of art accompanied this love of literature and he devoured Shakespeare, Victor Hugo and George Eliot with the same passion with which he studied the works of artists such as Eugène Delacroix, Rembrandt and Jean-François Millet. Finally in his late twenties, he started drawing with serious devotion. He lived poorly on money sent by Theo, who had become a moderately successful art dealer by now. Van Gogh spent his days studying perspective and depth, drawing figures and taking long arduous journeys, usually on foot, to draw the world in all its raw glory.

His earliest works were dark and stark, gloomy to the layman’s eye. But even then there was an honesty on his canvas that conveyed empathy and intelligence. His 1882 drawing of a nude woman, ‘Sorrow’, depicted his companion Sien, a pregnant prostitute who van Gogh described as “an ordinary woman who has something of the sublime for me”. The pinnacle of his early work was, even in own books, the depiction of a meal among a family of poor peasants. ‘The Potato Eaters’ was simple in its premise, but almost religious in its execution. To his brother, he wrote, “It is a painting that will do well in gold – of that I am certain.”

Of Sunflowers And Starry Nights
By 1886, at 33 years of age, van Gogh moved to Paris and like so many other artists, he finally found himself. He visited museums, studied artworks and painted relentlessly, experimenting with the bright colours that would mark his most famous paintings. Though unable to make a profit from his work, he was optimistic about the future. “I realise that these big, long canvasses are hard to sell, but later on people will see that there’s fresh air and good humour in them,” he wrote to Theo.

By 1888, craving some fresh air himself, van Gogh arrived in Arles where he painted, among other things, ‘The Starry Night over the Rhône’, ‘Vincent’s Bedroom in Arles’ and several versions of the now famous sunflowers. Eventually and infamously in December that year, he cut off his ear. Some believe it was because of his issues with fellow artist and then roommate Paul Gauguin. Others believe it was the fact that his brother had decided to get married, thus potentially jeopardising his only source of financial sustenance. Still others say it was Gauguin who cut off his ear with a sword, though this seems unlikely. Immediately after this incident, he committed himself to a mental institution in Saint Rémy de Provence, displaying an unquestionable desire to fight whatever was plaguing his mind.

At Saint Rémy, he created his most famous works – hundreds of paintings and drawings in the 444 days he was holed up in the asylum, including ‘The Starry Night’, his most famous work till date. By then, he had simmered down to the perfect palette and developed his own peerless technique. His work was colourful and bright, original and complex, essentially and unmistakably van Gogh-esque. Eventually he moved to Auvers-sur-Oise to live under the care of Dr. Paul Gachet, a great friend of the Impressionists. In the few months he spent here, he once again worked feverishly to produce some brilliant paintings, including ‘Wheatfield with Crows’.

The Resurrection
Imagine being the eternal black sheep, professionally and personally. Imagine being financially dependent on your younger brother for most of your life. Imagine your love unrequited, and your art, the very quintessence of your life’s work, dismissed by the world. When so much has gone wrong, something otherwise slight can very easily become the last straw that leads you astray. In July 1890, when he was only 37, van Gogh shot himself.

Posthumously, van Gogh achieved immense fame. There is, obviously, his splendid art, and then there are hundreds of diary-like letters he sent to Theo that provide a rare insight into the mind of an artistic genius. But even though more is known about him than any other artist of his time, a part of him will always remain a mystery. Did his lingering melancholy help him create his art? Or, was he able to create it, not because of, but in spite of his mind falling apart? A new documentary on his life and work, to be staged at the NCPA this month, will unravel these answers.

This article was originally published in the December 2016 issue of ON Stage.