Dali House

Blood brothers: Vincent and Paul get all yellow.

Harrumph of the day: My newspaper can’t afford to keep the air-conditioners on all the time anymore, but The Guardian and The Observer don’t think twice about paying two different writers to review the same book when they could easily share one fella’s opinion.
Anyway,the book in question is Martin Gayford’s “The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles”, and the reviewers agree it’s a goodie (though apparently the illustrations are awful, unlike mine).

Peter Conrad
The Observer
Sunday April 9, 2006
If you want domestic calm, yellow is not the colour to use when decorating. The painter Kandinsky thought that yellow was unbearably shrill, like “a trumpet being played louder and louder” … For Vincent Van Gogh, its acid brightness suited his episodes of feverish mania, which always had a “high yellow note” … It’s not surprising that his yellow-wallpapered house in Arles, which he shared with Gauguin for two frazzled months in the autumn of 1888, turned out to be a cage for two incompatible neurotics.
“Van Gogh Painting Sunflowers” by Paul Gauguin

Van Gogh invited Gauguin to live and work with him in this cramped space because, as a secular preacher who thought that art could redeem beleaguered mankind, he wanted to construct his own small model of social harmony. His meagre furniture possessed a stern, rustic, monastic rectitude, meant to denounce the stuffed, padded interiors of the bourgeoisie. Hence his iconic rush-bottomed chair and the doughty earthenware pots in his kitchen. Although Van Gogh’s four rooms were, as Gayford says, poky and skewed, too easily spied on from a busy street and rattled by the noise of passing trains, Van Gogh thought of them as “an artist’s house”, a sanctum of creativity.
Gauguin accepted Van Gogh’s invitation for climatic reasons. He sympathised with Van Gogh’s belief in “an immense renaissance of art”, but expected its character to be sensually flagrant, not evangelically earnest. “Whoever believes in this new art,” Gauguin declared, “will have the tropics for a home.” For him Provence was merely a stop-over on the way to Tahiti …
Van Van Gogh was pinched, weedy, beset by demons. Gauguin, who paraded through Provence in the costume of a Breton sailor, had the self-possession of a boulevardier. A sceptical colleague described him as an unscrupulous actor, who combined the roles of buffoon and pirate.

Vinnie’s “Fifteen Sunflowers in a Vase” from 1888

For a few weeks, the two painters busied themselves in setting up a Crusoesque cottage industry. Rather than buying pre-primed canvases, they cut out their own sections of sackcloth and sloshed barium sulphate onto them to bring out the rugged, woven texture of the jute; unable to afford carved and gilded frames, they nailed together plain strips of wood. Van Gogh slapped on paint with a trowel, and Gauguin devised a way of smoothing the craggy surface by rinsing the pictures in water and leaving them out to dry like laundry.
Once or twice, they worked in tandem and sat together to make portraits of the same subject. Gayford shrewdly notices that the invited subjects looked straight at Gauguin but avoided Van Gogh’s gaze …
Soon enough, Gauguin eased himself out of the awkward situation. Van Gogh’s response to his desertion was rabid. He followed Gauguin into the street and menaced him with an open razor. Faced down, he returned to the house and used the razor to slice off his own ear, which he wrapped in newspaper and presented to a whore in the local brothel. Gayford’s book ends with the house repainted red by blood gushing from the auricular artery that Van Gogh severed in symbolically gelding himself.

Richard Cork
The Guardian
Saturday April 8, 2006
How can Gayford’s book add anything new to our knowledge of the anguished Vincent? The answer lies in Gayford’s adroit decision to focus on the nine momentous weeks leading up to Van Gogh’s crisis. He recreates the everyday details of life at the Yellow House in Arles …
Five years older than Van Gogh, and a formidable leader of rebellious young artists, Gauguin was impoverished. So he finally accepted the invitation to stay at the Yellow House, and Gayford describes how the exhausted Gauguin arrived at five in the morning after a two-day train journey from Brittany …

“Still Life with Sunflowers on an Armchair” by Vinnie’s roommate, 1901

At first, Gauguin reacted positively to his new surroundings. He became the cook, and the two lonely men enjoyed regular visits to the Arles brothels. Before long, though, Gauguin grew uneasily aware that Van Gogh was, in Gayford’s words, “teetering on the edge of derangement”. The exact cause of the artist’s inner turmoil has been much debated, with diagnoses ranging from glaucoma, severe sunstroke and absinthe-induced hallucinations to syphilis and schizophrenia. Gayford favours manic depression, or bipolar disorder …
Van Gogh’s affliction was soon exacerbated by the news, from his art-dealer brother Theo, that Gauguin had just earned 500 francs from the sale of a big painting. It made Van Gogh even more bitter about his inability to sell any of his work. Dependent on subsidies from the loyal Theo, he admitted feeling “morally crushed and physically drained by it” …
Although they worked side by side, Van Gogh thrived on painting from the life, with spontaneous vigour. Working from memory quickly made him unhinged, whereas the slow and meditative Gauguin insisted that “Art is an abstraction; extract it from nature, while dreaming in front of it.” Their arguments became vehement, and Gauguin soon realised that “between two such beings as he and I, the one a perfect volcano, the other boiling inwardly, some sort of struggle was preparing” …
During December, Van Gogh developed an unnerving nocturnal habit of getting up and wandering over to Gauguin’s bed. Luckily, Gauguin woke up each time and asked: “What’s the matter with you, Vincent?” The intruder returned silently to his own bed. But the crisis came to a head in a local café. After consuming a “light absinthe”, Van Gogh hurled the glass at Gauguin’s face. “I avoided the blow,” he recalled, “and taking him bodily in my arms went out of the café.”
Two days before Christmas, though, the violence grew unstoppable. After rushing menacingly up to Gauguin in Arles after dark, Van Gogh returned home. While Gauguin escaped to a hotel for the night, Van Gogh seized his razor and, spraying blood everywhere, sliced off his ear. At the brothel, he gave the packaged offering to a prostitute called Rachel, asking her to “guard this object very carefully”. Then he vanished, yet made no attempt to resist the police when they raided the house and took him off to hospital.
In his delirium, he asked for Gauguin, “over and over”. But Gauguin, claiming that a visit would upset Van Gogh, left for Paris on Christmas Day. They never saw each other again, but it would be a mistake to regard their sojourn merely as an unmitigated catastrophe. Gayford makes clear that they were also stimulated by this ill-fated experiment, and Van Gogh summed it up well when he declared: “Old Gauguin and I understand each other basically, and if we are a bit mad, what of it?”

A bit more on this subject from, would you believe, VanGoghGauguin.com? Who’d have thought those two would get around to building their own website!
Gauguin’s arrival in Arles ushered in a period of artistic interaction. The bale of jute bought by Gauguin shortly after he arrived is almost metaphorical for the relationship between the two artists. Gauguin and Van Gogh both cut their canvasses from this bale in the weeks that followed. As neither of them had ever worked with jute before, the coarsely woven fabric presented a fresh challenge.
The new medium compelled Gauguin to apply the paint more thickly than usual, the coarse structure introducing a “primitive” feel to paintings normally executed with such rhythmic consistency. Gauguin developed an affinity with jute and it continued to be his favourite surface, also after leaving Arles.
Van Gogh also had to adapt his style. His brushstrokes became broader and sank more into the canvas. This is partly connected with the way the jute was prepared. The two painters experimented with various combinations of pigment and binding medium to create grounds of varying absorbency. More absorbent grounds result in a matter paint surface. Gauguin liked this effect; Van Gogh did not.
But the connection between Van Gogh and Gauguin is not only attributable to a bale of jute; the paintings from the Arles period are also remarkable for their common subject matter. The two artists observed the landscape around Arles, the Roman graveyard, the inhabitants of the village, and each other. A comparison of their treatment of these subjects indicates that their styles were coming closer together. After Van Gogh was persuaded by Gauguin to paint more from memory, his paintings became flatter and more decorative and his compositions, like Gauguin’s, had unexpected angles and were cut short. Gauguin also explored new possibilities and started using a palette knife to apply the paint in thick layers on the canvas.