Ear ear!!

From The TimesMay 9, 2009 Who cut off Van Gogh’s ear? Should we give ear to the latest wild theories about Vincent van Gogh? There is no area of the arts so esoteric, insignificant or apparently straightforward that an academic can’t weave some mind-bogglingly pretentious theory around it. Even popular music isn’t immune. A few years ago, for instance, I found myself reporting on a Bruce Springsteen conference at which hundreds of earnest scholars presented papers with titles such as A Marxist Perspective on “Darkness on the Edge of Town”. Er, pardon? But there’s nothing esoteric about the theory unveiled by two Hamburg University academics last week. They contend that, contrary to what the world thought for more than 120 years, Vincent van Gogh did not lop off the lower part of his left ear in a manic moment, before presenting it to a prostitute called Rachel with the curious instruction to “keep this object carefully”. Too simple! The academics contend that Van Gogh’s friend and fellow genius Paul Gauguin sliced the ear — perhaps by accident — after a drunken row over Rachel (for whom they both lusted) and an equally heated discussion over whether art should be drawn from life or the imagination. VG, fearing that PG was deserting his artistic circle, lunged at his friend in the street. PG, a good amateur fencer, drew his blade to fend off VG’s assaults, and . . . whoops! The next day (according to this theory) Gauguin lied to the police, and left for Tahiti shortly after. He never saw Van Gogh again. For his part, Van Gogh stumbled through an incoherent police statement (perhaps, the Germans argue, to protect his friend) and was sent to a mental asylum. He then threw himself into a frenzy of work — 70 paintings in 70 days — and shot himself dead seven months later. So how did these new facts come to light? After all, Van Gogh is one of the most researched figures in Western art. You would have thought that every snippet of knowledge had been uncovered decades ago. The answer is that there are no new facts, only new interpretations — and deft conjecture. In their book (Van Gogh’s Ear: Paul Gauguin and the Pact of Silence), Hans Kaufmann and Rita Wildegans simply put a new gloss on police statements and second-hand accounts of what witnesses said they saw. There’s no way to prove or disprove their theory. From their point of view, that’s the beauty of it. I am just surprised that they didn’t build in a sinister plot involving albino monks and the Holy Grail, and call the book The Van Gogh Code.