Art historians are divided into two camps. Specialists from the Amsterdam Museum refute the recent statement that the artist was killed by a 16-year-old schoolboy.
Who killed Vincent van Gogh?
Before two years ago Stephen Knife And Gregory White-Smith published an exhaustive biography of the artist, it was indisputably believed that during his stay in France he committed suicide. But American authors put forward a sensational theory: Van Gogh was shot dead by a 16-year-old schoolboy René Secretan, although it is not clear if he did this on purpose. The artist lived for two more days and, according to the authors, "accepted death with satisfaction." He defended Secretan, claiming it was suicide.
In the July issue Burlington Magazine the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam joined the controversy. In a detailed biographical article, two of the museum's leading researchers, Louis van Tilborg And Teyo Medendrop, insist on the version of suicide. There is no doubt only that he died two days after he received a gunshot wound on July 27, 1890, somewhere in Auvers-sur-Oise. They undertook an investigation based largely on an obscure interview given by Secretan shortly before his death in 1957. The secretary recalled that he had a pistol with which he shot at squirrels. He and his older brother Gaston knew Van Gogh. René Secretan claims that the artist stole the weapon from him, but says nothing about the shot. Nyfe and White-Smith considered the interview a dying confession and referred to the late art historian John Rewald, who mentioned the rumors that circulated in Auvers that the guys had accidentally shot the artist. The authors believe that Van Gogh decided to defend René and Gaston from the accusations.
The conclusions of criminologists
Nyfe and White-Smith drew attention to the nature of the wound and concluded that the shot was fired "from some distance from the body, and not point-blank." This is what the doctors who treated Van Gogh testified: his friend Dr. Paul Gachet and local practitioner Jean Mazeri. After reviewing the facts, van Tilborg and Medendrop were convinced that Van Gogh had committed suicide. Their article says that Secretan's interview "in no way" supports the case of a murder committed intentionally or by negligence. From the interview it follows only that Van Gogh somehow got the weapons of the brothers. The authors emphasize that although Rewald retold the rumors about the Secretans, he did not really believe in them. Van Tilborg and Medendrop cite new data published last year in a book Alena Roana Vincent van Gogh: Has the suicide weapon been found? Dr. Gachet recalled that the wound was brown with a purple rim. The purple bruise is the result of a bullet hit, and the brown mark is a gunpowder burn: it means that the weapon was close to the chest, under the shirt, and therefore Van Gogh shot himself. In addition, Roan discovered new information about weapons. In the 1950s, a rusty revolver was found buried in a field just behind the Château d'Auver, where Van Gogh is said to have shot himself. Analysis showed that the revolver spent 60 to 80 years in the ground. The weapon was found next to the road, which in 1904 the son of Dr. Gachet depicted in a painting called Auvers: the place where Vincent committed suicide. The revolver was found just behind the low farmhouses shown in the center of the painting.
Article in Burlington Magazine also concerns the last weeks of Van Gogh's life. The authors argue with the generally accepted theory that the artist was depressed due to the fact that he lost the financial support of his brother Theo. Van Tilborg and Medendrop argue that Van Gogh was more concerned that Theo did not allow him to participate in decision making. Theo was in serious trouble with his employer, the Busso et Valadon Gallery, and was about to start his own business: it was supposed to be a gallery, but Theo did not even consult his brother, which made him feel even more alone. Van Tilborg and Medendrop conclude that the suicide was not an impulsive act, but a carefully considered decision. Although Theo's behavior played a role, the key factor was the painful thought of the artist that the obsession with art plunged him into the abyss of mental turmoil. The authors look for traces of this confusion in the last works of Van Gogh and point out that when he shot himself, he had a farewell note to his brother in his pocket. Traditionally, Van Gogh's last work is considered to be the painting Crows over wheat field, but it was completed around July 10, more than two weeks before the artist's death. He himself wrote about this canvas: “A huge space under a stormy sky, dotted with wheat. I was trying to express sadness, extreme loneliness.” Van Tilborg already assumed that Van Gogh's last works were two unfinished paintings - Tree Roots and Farms near Auvers. The article hypothesizes that the first of them is a program farewell work showing how elms fight for survival.
Van Gogh claimed that he shot himself. The same version was supported by his relatives. Nayfe and White-Smith argue that the artist was lying, while van Tilborg and Medendrop believe that he was telling the truth. In all likelihood, we need to carefully study the evidence of contemporaries about suicide.
Dr. Gachet immediately sent Theo a note with the message that Vincent had "injured himself". Adeline Ravu, whose father kept the hotel where the artist lived, later recalled that Van Gogh told the policeman: "I wanted to kill myself."
Terrible injury
Vincent was very close to his brother. It's hard to believe that he lied to his brother about his horrific injury just to save two teenagers who were poking fun at him from the police. In the end, it was much more difficult for Theo to endure suicide, since he felt part of his guilt in it. The last words of Vincent van Gogh sound heartbreaking: "That's how I wanted to leave." In his letter to his wife, Theo says: "A few minutes passed, and it was all over: he found peace, which he could not find on earth."
The main cause of Vincent van Gogh's death was considered suicide. However, Pulitzer Prize winners Stephen Nyfeh and Gregory White Smith conducted a study and offered the public an alternative version of the death of the Dutch artist - murder.
Naifeh and White Smith spent 10 years writing a biography of the outstanding artist, beginning with a 2001 visit to the Van Gogh Foundation archives in Amsterdam. The more information about the death of the artist was able to study, the less believed in his suicide.
The main creator of the version of Van Gogh's suicide is recognized as a friend of the artist - Emile Bernard, who considered the artist crazy.
A few facts that cast doubt on this version:
- A local policeman, who was interviewing a wounded van Gogh, asked the artist a question: “Did you commit suicide?” To which the confused artist replied: “I think so ...”;
- Residents of the town of Auvers, where the artist spent the last days of his life, did not hear the shot on the fateful day of Van Gogh's death. No one saw the artist on his deathbed, did not know where the artist got a gun, and the weapons were never found after the incident;
- Presumably in 1953, the testimony of Paul Gachet's son, a doctor who was depicted in the famous impressionist portrait, appeared. It was Paul Jr. who put forward the idea that the shooting took place in the wheat fields outside of Auvers. This theory was later dismissed as "unlikely";
- In 1890, René Secretan, the 16-year-old son of a Parisian pharmacist, found an easy target for ridicule in the strange Dutchman, by then surrounded by all sorts of rumors. The son of a pharmacist sat down with the artist in a cafe, mocked him to amuse his friends. Later, René Secretan broke his silence by giving some unknown details of the artist's death. However, the banker denied any involvement in the shooting, claiming that "only provided a gun that fired every other time". The secretary was sure that Van Gogh's death was the will of chance. Nobody expected the weapon to fire.
During the investigation, Naifeh and Smith were assisted by Dr. Vincent Di Maio, an eminent forensic scientist with worldwide practice. Di Maio studied archival documents on the testimony of the doctor Paul Gachet, who described in detail the appearance ran by Vincent Wang Goga. The doctor noted that the purple halo of the wound had nothing to do with the proximity of the gun barrel to the artist's body. “In fact, this is subcutaneous bleeding from the vessels, and the“ brownish ring ”occurs around almost all entry wounds. It would also be possible to detect powder burns on the artist's palm, since smokeless powder was only recently developed and used in only a few military rifles. And the black powder used everywhere would have left obvious traces on the wounds.
Di Maio's conclusion is: “In all medical probability, Vincent van Gogh could not inflict wounds like himself on his own. In other words, he didn't shoot himself."
During the research conducted by Nayfeh and Smith, the curator of the Van Gogh Museum expressed his opinion on the tragic events from the artist's biography. “I think that Vincent van Gogh did it to protect the boys, he accepted the “accident” as a way out of a life burdened with difficulties. But I think the biggest problem you will feel after the publication of your theory. Suicide became kind of self-evident truth is final stories of a martyr for art. This is Vincent van Gogh's crown of thorns."
Biography and episodes of life Vincent van Gogh. When born and died Vincent van Gogh, memorable places and dates of important events in his life. artist quotes, Photo and video.
Life of Vincent van Gogh:
born March 30, 1853, died July 29, 1890
Epitaph
“I stand to myself, and hung over me
Twisted like a flame, cypress.
Lemon crown and dark blue, -
Without them I would not be myself;
I would humiliate my own speech,
When someone else's burden dropped from his shoulders.
And this rudeness of an angel, with which
He makes his stroke related to my line,
Leads you through his pupil
Where Van Gogh breathes stars.
From a poem by Arseny Tarkovsky dedicated to Van Gogh
Biography
Without a doubt the greatest artist of the XIX century. with a recognizable manner, the author of world-renowned masterpieces, Vincent van Gogh was and remains one of the most controversial figures in world painting. Mental illness, a passionate and uneven character, deep compassion and at the same time unsociableness, combined with an amazing sense of nature and beauty, found expression in the artist's vast creative heritage. Throughout his life, Van Gogh painted hundreds of paintings and at the same time remained an unrecognized genius until his death. Only one of his works, "Red Vineyards in Arles", was sold during the life of the artist. What an irony: after all, a hundred years after Van Gogh's death, his tiniest sketches were already worth a fortune.
Vincent van Gogh was born in the countryside into a large family of a Dutch pastor, where he was one of six children. While studying at school, the boy began to draw with a pencil, and even in these, the earliest drawings of a teenager, an extraordinary talent is already visible. After school, the sixteen-year-old Van Gogh was assigned to work in the Hague branch of the Parisian firm Goupil and Company, which sold paintings. This made it possible for the young man and his brother Theo, with whom Vincent had a not simple but very close relationship all his life, to get acquainted with real art. And this acquaintance, in turn, cooled the creative zeal of Van Gogh: he strove for something sublime, spiritual, and in the end he gave up the “low” occupation, in his opinion, deciding to become a pastor.
This was followed by years of poverty, living from hand to mouth and the spectacle of much human suffering. Van Gogh was passionately eager to help the poor people, at the same time experiencing an ever-increasing thirst for creativity. Seeing in art a lot in common with religious faith, at the age of 27, Vincent finally decides to become an artist. He works hard, enters the school of fine arts in Antwerp, then moves to Paris, where at that time a whole galaxy of impressionists and post-impressionists lives and works. With the help of his brother Theo, who is still engaged in the sale of paintings, and with his financial support, Van Gogh leaves to work in the south of France and invites Paul Gauguin there, with whom he became close friends. This time is the heyday of Van Gogh's creative genius and at the same time the beginning of his end. The artists work together, but the relationship between them becomes increasingly tense and eventually explodes in a famous quarrel, after which Vincent cuts off his earlobe and ends up in a mental hospital. Doctors find he has epilepsy and schizophrenia.
The last years of Van Gogh's life are throwing between hospitals and attempts to return to normal life. Vincent continues to create while in the hospital, but he is haunted by obsessions, fears and hallucinations. Twice Van Gogh tries to poison himself with paints and, finally, one day he returns from a walk with a gunshot wound in his chest, having shot himself with a revolver. The last words of Van Gogh, addressed to his brother Theo, were: "Sadness will be endless." The hearse for the funeral of the suicide had to be borrowed from a nearby town. Van Gogh was buried in Auvers, and his coffin was strewn with sunflowers, the artist's favorite flowers.
Van Gogh self-portrait, 1887
life line
March 30, 1853 Vincent van Gogh's date of birth.
1869 Start of work in the Goupil Gallery.
1877 Work as an educator and life in England, then work as an assistant pastor, life with miners in the Borinage.
1881 Life in The Hague, the first commissioned paintings (cityscapes of The Hague).
1882 Meeting with Klozinna Maria Hornik (Sin), the "vicious muse" of the artist.
1883-1885 Living with parents in North Brabant. Creation of a series of works on domestic rural scenes, including the famous painting "Potato Eaters".
1885 Studying at the Antwerp Academy.
1886 Acquaintance in Paris with Toulouse-Lautrec, Seurat, Pissarro. The beginning of friendship with Paul Gauguin and a creative upsurge, the creation of 200 paintings in 2 years.
1888 Life and work in Arles. Three paintings by Van Gogh are exhibited at the Independent Salon. Arrival of Gauguin, joint work and quarrel.
1889 Periodic exits from the hospital and attempts to return to work. Final transfer to the orphanage in Saint-Remy.
1890 Several paintings by Van Gogh are accepted for exhibitions of the Society of the Twenty in Brussels and the Independent Salon. Moving to Paris.
July 27, 1890 Van Gogh wounds himself in Daubigny's garden.
July 29, 1890 Date of Van Gogh's death.
July 30, 1890 Van Gogh's funeral at Auvers-sur-Oise.
Memorable places
1. The village of Zundert (Netherlands), where Van Gogh was born.
2. The house where Van Gogh rented a room while working in the London branch of the Goupil company in 1873
3. The village of Kuem (Netherlands), where Van Gogh's house is still preserved, in which he lived in 1880, studying the life of miners.
4. Rue Lepic in Montmartre, where Van Gogh lived with his brother Theo after moving to Paris in 1886.
5. Place du Forum with a cafe-terrace in Arles (France), which in 1888 Van Gogh depicted on one of his most famous paintings, “Night Cafe Terrace”.
6. The hospital at the monastery of Saint-Paul-de-Musol in the town of Saint-Remy-de-Provence, where Van Gogh was placed in 1889.
7. Auvers-sur-Oise, where Van Gogh spent the last months of his life and where he is buried in the village cemetery.
Episodes of life
Van Gogh was in love with his cousin, but she rejected him, and the persistence of Van Gogh's courtship quarreled him with almost the entire family. The depressed artist left his parental home, where, as if in defiance of his family and himself, he settled with a corrupt woman, an alcoholic with two children. After a year of a nightmarish, dirty and miserable "family" life, Van Gogh broke up with Sin and forgot about the idea of starting a family forever.
No one knows exactly what caused Van Gogh's famous quarrel with Paul Gauguin, whom he greatly respected as an artist. Gauguin did not like the chaotic life and disorganization of Van Gogh in his work; Vincent, in turn, could not get a friend to sympathize with his ideas of creating a commune of artists and the general direction of painting of the future. As a result, Gauguin decided to leave, and, apparently, this provoked a quarrel, during which Van Gogh first attacked a friend, though without harming him, and then mutilated himself. Gauguin did not forgive: subsequently, he repeatedly emphasized how much Van Gogh owed him as an artist; and they never saw each other again.
Van Gogh's fame grew gradually but steadily. Since the very first exhibition in 1880, the artist has never been forgotten. Before the First World War, his exhibitions were held in Paris, Amsterdam, Cologne, Berlin, New York. And already in the middle of the XX century. Van Gogh's name has become one of the loudest in the history of world painting. And today the artist's works occupy first places in the list of the most expensive paintings in the world.
The grave of Vincent van Gogh and his brother Theodore in the cemetery in Auvers (France).
Testaments
“I am more and more convinced that God cannot be judged by the world he created: this is just an unsuccessful study.”
“Whenever the question arose whether to starve or work less, I chose the former whenever possible.”
"Real artists don't paint things as they are... They paint them because they feel they are."
"The one who lives honestly, who knows real difficulties and disappointments, but does not bend, is worth more than the one who is lucky and who knows only relatively easy success."
“Yes, sometimes it is so cold in winter that people say: the frost is too severe, so it doesn’t matter to me whether summer comes back or not; evil is stronger than good. But, with or without our permission, the frosts stop sooner or later, one fine morning the wind changes and a thaw sets in.”
BBC documentary Van Gogh. Portrait written in words "(2010)
condolences
“He was an honest man and a great artist, for him there were only two true values: love for one's neighbor and art. Painting meant more to him than anything else, and he will always live in it.
Paul Gachet, Van Gogh's last attending physician and friend
When 37-year-old Vincent van Gogh died on July 29, 1890, his work was almost unknown to anyone. Today, his paintings are worth stunning sums and adorn the best museums in the world.
125 years after the death of the great Dutch painter, it is time to learn more about him and dispel some of the myths that, like all art history, his biography is full of.
He changed several jobs before becoming an artist
The son of a minister, Van Gogh started working at the age of 16. His uncle hired him as an intern for an art dealership in The Hague. He happened to travel to London and Paris, where the firm's branches were located. In 1876 he was fired. After that, he worked briefly as a schoolteacher in England, then as a bookstore clerk. From 1878 he served as a preacher in Belgium. Van Gogh was in need, he had to sleep on the floor, but less than a year later he was fired from this post. Only after that he finally became an artist and did not change his occupation anymore. In this field, he became famous, however, posthumously.
Van Gogh's career as an artist was short
In 1881, the self-taught Dutch artist returned to the Netherlands, where he devoted himself to painting. He was supported financially and materially by his younger brother Theodore, a successful art dealer. In 1886, the brothers settled in Paris, and these two years in the French capital turned out to be crucial. Van Gogh took part in exhibitions of the Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists, he began to use a light and bright palette, experimenting with methods of applying strokes. The artist spent the last two years of his life in the south of France, where he created some of his most famous paintings.
In his entire ten-year career, he sold only a few of over 850 paintings. His drawings (there are about 1300 of them left) were then unclaimed.
He probably didn't cut off his own ear.
In February 1888, after living in Paris for two years, Van Gogh moved to the south of France, to the city of Arles, where he hoped to found a community of artists. He was accompanied by Paul Gauguin, with whom they became friends in Paris. The officially accepted version of events is as follows:
On the night of December 23, 1888, they quarreled, and Gauguin left. Van Gogh, armed with a razor, pursued his friend, but, not catching up, returned home and, in annoyance, partially cut off his left ear, then wrapped it in a newspaper and gave it to some prostitute.
In 2009, two German scientists published a book suggesting that Gauguin, being a good swordsman, cut off part of Van Gogh's ear with a saber during a duel. According to this theory, Van Gogh, in the name of friendship, agreed to hide the truth, otherwise Gauguin would have been threatened with prison.
The most famous paintings were painted by him in a psychiatric clinic
In May 1889, Van Gogh sought help from the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole psychiatric hospital, located in a former convent in the city of Saint-Remy-de-Provence in southern France. Initially, the artist was diagnosed with epilepsy, but the examination also revealed bipolar disorder, alcoholism and metabolic disorders. Treatment consisted mainly of baths. He remained in the hospital for a year and painted a number of landscapes there. Over a hundred paintings from this period include some of his most famous works such as Starry Night (purchased by New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1941) and Irises (purchased by an Australian industrialist in 1987 for a then record-breaking $ 53.9 million)
As it turned out, Vincent van Gogh did not die from his own bullet. They shot him. This is told by the correspondent of The Moscow Post.
The great artist Van Gogh did not die from his own bullet. He died from a gunshot fired by two drunken young men. So say Stephen Naifeh and Gregory White Smith - biographers.
Vincent Willem van Gogh (Dutch. Vincent Willem van Gogh, March 30, 1853, Grotto-Zundert, near Breda, the Netherlands - July 29, 1890, Auvers-sur-Oise, France) is a world-famous Dutch post-impressionist artist.
In 1888, Van Gogh moved to Arles, where the originality of his creative manner was finally determined. A fiery artistic temperament, a tormenting impulse towards harmony, beauty and happiness, and, at the same time, fear of forces hostile to man, are embodied in the landscapes shining with sunny colors of the south (Yellow House, 1888, Gauguin's Armchair, 1888, "Harvest. La Crot Valley" , 1888, Vincent Van Gogh State Museum, Amsterdam), then in ominous, nightmare-like images (“Night Cafe”, 1888, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo); the dynamics of color and stroke fills with spiritualized life and movement not only nature and the people inhabiting it (“Red Vineyards in Arles”, 1888, Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow), but also inanimate objects (“Van Gogh’s Bedroom in Arles, 1888, Vincent van Gogh State Museum, Amsterdam). In the last week of his life, Van Gogh paints his last and famous painting: Cereal Field with Crows. She was evidence of the tragic death of the artist.
Van Gogh's hard work and riotous lifestyle (he abused absinthe) in recent years led to bouts of mental illness. His health deteriorated and he ended up in a mental hospital in Arles (the doctors diagnosed him with temporal lobe epilepsy), then in Saint-Remy (1889-1890) and in Auvers-sur-Oise, where he attempted to commit suicide. by suicide on July 27, 1890. Going out for a walk with drawing materials, he shot himself with a pistol in the heart area (I bought it to scare away bird flocks while working in the open air), and then independently got to the hospital, where, 29 hours after being wounded, he died from blood loss ( at 1:30 am on July 29, 1890). In October 2011, an alternative version of the artist's death appeared. American art historians Stephen Naifeh and Gregory White Smith have suggested that Van Gogh was shot by one of the teenagers who regularly accompanied him in drinking establishments.
According to his brother Theo (Theo), who was with Vincent in his death minutes, the last words of the artist were: La tristesse durera toujours ("Sorrow will last forever").
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