Misery And Memory In Two Van Goghs
Beneath soaring ceilings, in a small darkly painted gallery off the main hall of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, two immense sunflower paintings hang side by side. The paintings are bigger than I expected them to be, big enough that when I watch people pose between them, their faces are the size of only one of the flowers. These paintings are sisters, not twins. Exhibited for the first time together, both show a vase of sunflowers painted by Vincent van Gogh. But they are subtly, uncomfortably different.
On the left hangs one in all yellow. Fifteen sunflowers sit inside an earthenware pot, the kind you might have at home. They are painted with Van Gogh’s signature thick globs of paint. Even the flat lemon-yellow background is textured with a basketweave pattern—for every vertical stroke there is one horizontal. The flowers themselves are a muddy yellow, their centers tinged with orange or brown. Seven of them stand erect and forceful; the other seven droop, dying. One of the drooping sunflowers, on the bottom right, splays its petals outward. The green underleaves of the flower streak skyward, outlined with a darker green, like flames, threatening the others. There is a single shot of blue, a crude line slightly higher on the left of the vase than on the right, that demarcates the yellow of the table from the yellow of the wall behind it.
The right painting is of twelve sunflowers, inside the same type of pot. Its background is a shining, vibrant blue—still textured, but with less organization. The petals themselves are outlined in a slightly darker color, giving them a sharper, almost harsh appearance. The exuberance of the blue with the sharpness of the flowers makes the painting feel harried. The bottom of the pot is purple, and a bright, almost fire-hydrant red shines out from the center of one of the sunflowers. Van Gogh used the same red to outline the vase and sign his name. It’s bright but not quite optimistic. There’s something in there that feels a little unsettled. But maybe I just think that because I know too much.
Van Gogh painted four sunflower paintings, including the yellow one on the left, in a single week in August 1888. That wasn’t terribly uncommon for Van Gogh at the time. He was incredibly prolific in Arles, painting 200 paintings during his time there for an average of three per week. “I’m painting with the gusto of a Marseillais eating bouillabaisse, which won’t surprise you when it’s a question of painting large sunflowers,” he wrote to his brother. The flowers he painted that week ascend in quantity, as if building to something. The first, which is now in an unknown private American collection, has three sunflowers. The next, which burned when America dropped bombs on Japan in World War II, had five flowers. The third, with 12 flowers, lives in the Neue Pinakothek in Munich. This final sunflower painting of that frenzied inspiration-driven sprint is on loan in Philadelphia from the London National Gallery.
The painting on the right is from after. There were seven sunflower paintings made in the yellow house where he lived in Arles, France. The first four were painted with the sunflowers in front of him in the pot, in August 1888. The next three were painted in January of 1889, after Van Gogh’s entire life went to shit.
We know from Van Gogh’s letters that he intended the sunflower series to be decoration for the yellow house where he lived. “I’m thinking of decorating my studio with half a dozen paintings of Sunflowers. A decoration in which harsh or broken yellows will burst against various BLUE backgrounds, from the palest Veronese to royal blue,” reads a quote from Van Gogh on the wall of the exhibition. The exhibition also tells us that fellow painter Paul Gauguin would stay in the room with the sunflower paintings for two months. “Acclaim for the pictures, and their dispersal following his death, mean we rarely have an opportunity to see them together as he envisioned,” a quote from the curators reads on the wall of the exhibition.
But what is so compelling about the ability to see these two paintings together at last in person is missing from the walls of the museum: the fact that Van Gogh chopped off his ear in between painting them.
According to Van Gogh scholar Martin Bailey, Van Gogh and Gauguin did not get along well in the yellow house. Gauguin came in late October, and on Dec. 23, they fought, and Gauguin left. What exactly happened that night, what they fought about, and how the whole situation played out, is left to hearsay and Gauguin’s retelling years later.
What we know for sure is that Van Gogh followed Gauguin into town, they fought, and then at some point in the evening, Van Gogh used a razor to slash off the majority of his own left ear. He wrapped it in paper, or newspaper, or an envelope, or a soft cloth, depending on whose version of the story you choose to believe, and carried it to a brothel in town. He said something there, but no one agreed on what. A Dec. 26, 1888 news report has him telling the Madame, “Take it. It will be useful.” A Dec. 30 news article says he said, “Keep this object carefully.” Gauguin’s account at the time, which he told to fellow artist Emile Bernard, who then told it to the press, has Van Gogh saying, “You will remember me, truly I tell you this.” Fifteen years later, the phrase had changed in Gauguin’s memory to “Here. In remembrance of me” .
And then Van Gogh was found by police and later Gauguin the next morning in his bed, passed out and surrounded by blood. He was taken to the hospital, where his ear could not be saved but his life could. He left the hospital on Jan. 7, 1889 and checked into a mental hospital on Feb. 7. In between, he made the painting that hangs on the right in the exhibition.
There are two Van Goghs in this exhibition: the blue and the yellow, yes, but also the man who existed before and the man who survived himself.
Unlike its yellow sister, the blue painting of sunflowers feels a little less connected to the earth. Van Gogh could not have worked from real-life sunflowers as he did for the originals, because it was January and sunflowers do not bloom then. Instead, these are sunflowers of the imagination: lurid, bright, and tainted. The greens here are muddier, the table top putrid, the background a bright, alluring, beautiful teal blue. Unlike the yellow painting, the blue one is a study in contrasts. The flowers are clustered tightly in the center, their arrangement exactly the same as one of the earlier paintings (though not the one it is hung next to). When you compare those two, you can see the muddiness of January creeping in. The colors are mucky and the highlights not as bright, as if a cloud had passed between the painter and the sun during the time between.
The painting is a memory of a moment in time when the sunflowers were alive, when his ear was attached, when Gauguin was still to come and his brother was not yet engaged to be married. “The two brothers were also very close to each other, and Vincent worried that he would lose his brother’s affection. Fear of abandonment was the probable trigger for the mutilation,” Bailey wrote in Apollo magazine in 2016. But we don’t really know what made Van Gogh chop off his own ear and bring it to a brothel. We also don’t know what he suffered from that led to him shooting himself with a revolver in the chest in July 1890. Posthumous diagnoses of Van Gogh’s mental illness have led many scholars to believe he may have had borderline personality disorder, which can include a deep-seeded fear of abandonment.
Can you see all of that in two paintings of sunflowers? I’m not sure. “I’d like to paint in a way that … everyone with eyes could understand it,” Vincent once wrote to his brother. And I do think, if you look with attention and interest, even without the contrast, you can understand it. On the surface you have beautiful paintings of sunflowers sitting in earthenware pots, captured in a moment between full life and death.
As I sat for a half hour in front of the two paintings, I noticed that people were drawn to one or the other. They wanted photos of themselves between the paintings, but when they snapped shots from close up, usually it was of just one. I could not give a reason for this, and maybe it was just a coincidence. But maybe it was something innate, too.
I am drawn to the blue painting. I tried several times to focus my full attention on the yellow one, but soon my eyes began to drift back to the other. The flowers in the blue one have a mythic quality—more the idea of a sunflower than a sunflower itself. I see in that painting the struggle of trying to return to a version of yourself that no longer exists. There is something desperate in it that speaks to me: the longing for a different time, the dream of rewinding to the past, and the desire to maybe have done things differently.
