The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles by Martin Gayford. This is one of those books I found by accident while looking for something else (a Haruki Murakami novel), which I couldn't find, at the Brooklyn Public Library. My husband was waiting for me in the car, parked illegally at the curb in front of a fire hydrant because this neighborhood (Bay Ridge) is always hell to find a parking place and I didn't want to keep him waiting, even though he told me to take my time. So I curtailed my usual habit of wandering among the books in what appears to be a pole-axed daze for what might be literally an hour or two and yanked this one off the shelf. It wasn't a totally random impulse—the subject did sound interesting.
In the fall of 1888 Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin shared a house in Arles. Not until Felix Unger and Oscar Madison a century later gave it a go have an odder couple tried to live together under one roof. What could they have been thinking? How could this possibly have ended well? Even Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger outlasted them by half a week.
It was all Van Gogh's bright idea. He had some sort of pie-in-the-sky notion of establishing a community of like-minded artists in southern France. Arles was hardly the perfect choice, but it was the most practical and affordable. He invited Gauguin. He would have been better off choosing a less temperamental, if less talented, housemate. But Gauguin was represented in the art-world by Van Gogh's brother, Theo, and Vincent felt, somewhat mistakenly, that as artists he and Gauguin had a natural affinity. So Gauguin was talked into it.
At first things started out okay. But two months later it ended with Gauguin fleeing the house in a panic and Vincent one ear short and stark raving mad.
I learned a lot of stuff in this book. For instance, that the "myth" of Van Gogh's dire poverty is somewhat exaggerated. No, he wasn't rolling in the clover, but Theo assured him that he needn't ever starve, that Theo considered it his responsibility to make the money and Vincent's sole concern was to make the art (what a guy!). I learned that Vincent himself was an employee in the family art-dealing business, that there actually was a family art-dealing business, but that he was fired for incompetence. I learned that the whole cutting-off-the-ear thing may well have had a connection not only to the scene in the New Testament where Peter cuts off a soldier's ear when they come to arrest Jesus, but also to an event in an Emile Zola novel where a priest gets an ear cut off. Van Gogh was apparently strongly effected by the symbolism of both these scenes. Then there was Jack-the-Ripper, who was roaming around London at the same time that Van Gogh and Gauguin were co-habiting the Yellow House. During one of his murderous frenzies, the Ripper cut off the ear of one of his prostitute-victims. It seems that the Ripper crimes were much in the news that fall and Gauguin and Van Gogh would most likely have followed accounts of the serial killings in the newspapers they read. Jack-the-Ripper hated prostitutes and cut off one of the dead woman's ears; Van Gogh, conversely, thought prostitutes were "sisters of mercy" to lonely, saintly men dedicated to the arts such as Gauguin and himself and cut off his own ear and offered it to a prostitute. A weird form of magical compensation, perhaps? Author Martin Gayford doesn't seem to think it altogether improbable.
Besides all the gossipy dish on the family dynamics, the sexual, religious, artistic and philosophical proclivities of Gauguin and Van Gogh, I also learned a lot more stuff, not only specifically about Van Gogh and Gauguin, but about the art and artists of the period. I learned that Van Gogh wasn't the complete outsider that he's been made to seem in myth and legend. He was known to plenty of well-known artists of his day, either through his brother Theo or through his own work, and that some of them even recognized his wild and never-before-encountered talent; they largely just didn't quite know what to make of it. Gauguin, who wasn't yet the Gauguin of legend, who himself was still a struggling semi-unknown, was among those who sensed that Vincent had something special. But living in such close quarters with the man, he was also one of the first to realize just how perilously close Van Gogh teetered to the edge of sanity. There was no logical reason for Vincent Van Gogh to feel quite so outcast, so lonely, so persecuted, so misunderstood and unappreciated as he felt. But reason had little to do with Van Gogh's motives. He wasn't where he wanted to be, but he was getting there, slowly, if not surely, one step at a time. He was, in the end, simply his own worst enemy.
Although Gayford makes no bones about what a self-serving, self-mythologizing tool Gauguin could be, hardly the most reliable chronicler of what really happened under even the best of circumstances, one must concede that as events turned out, there was likely more truth in what Gauguin said about those nine weeks he spent with Van Gogh than self-aggrandizement or self-justification. Van Gogh was pretty bonkers. I wouldn't have wanted to live with him and after reading this book I doubt you—or any reasonably sane, non-masochistic person without a stun-gun--would either.
Within two years of Gauguin saying "Adios amigos I'm outta here for the tropics or anywhere you ain't," Van Gogh, having regained sanity only in intervals between regular periods of madness, shot himself and died just as he was beginning to receive the positive recognition for his revolutionary work that he would retain to this day. Theo died very shortly afterwards, an even younger man, succumbing to syphilis-induced insanity.
The book is illustrated throughout with reproductions of some of the more important paintings discussed in the text (both Gauguin's and Van Gogh's as well as others), albeit in black and white, which is a real shortcoming, especially in Van Gogh's case, where color is elevated to the level of science, psychology and religion all in one. Still, when all is said and read, for a book that I came upon merely by chance and that I didn't pay a dime to read and that I grabbed off the shelf in part to beat the meter maid and so as not to take advantage of my husband's patient nature, this was quite a nice find.
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