Antonin artaud van gogh

In late , Pierre Loeb , founder of the Galerie Pierre in Paris, suggested to Artaud that he should write about Van Gogh, believing that after a nine-year stay in a psychiatric hospital he was eminently well qualified as an artist to write about a painter deemed to be mad. Artaud was in the process of preparing his works for publication and was not enthusiastic about the project.

Artaud was incensed by Beer's clinical portrayal of the painter's madness and challenged this analysis, accusing society as a whole of driving Van Gogh to suicide by its indifference or in order to "prevent him from uttering unspeakable truths". Drawing on Artaud's analysis and words, this exhibition adopts an entirely new approach to works by Van Gogh familiar to the poet, grouped according to his own descriptions.

Institutions disintegrate on the social level; and medical science, by asserting Van Gogh's madness, shows itself to be an unserviceable, irresponsible corpse.

Let anyone who once knew how to look at a human face take a look at the self-portrait of Van Gogh [ Painted by an extra-lucid Van Gogh, that face of a red-headed butcher, inspecting and watching us, scrutinising us with a glowering eye. I do not know of a single psychiatrist who would know how to scrutinise a man's face with such overpowering strength, dissecting its irrefutable psychology as if with a knife".

The tragedy explained. Who is going to come in? Will it be Gauguin or another ghost? Around mid-November , Van Gogh produced two paintings which form a pair: a plain yellow wooden chair with a straw seat and Gauguin's Chair painted in red and green - colours evoking night-time passions. He explained to his brother that they represented day and night, Vincent and Paul.

There is clear evidence of the tragedy which was brewing in this potent, metaphorical portrait of the friend who came to stay with him in Arles. According to Gauguin, Van Gogh threatened him with a razor a month later in a fit of nocturnal madness and then cut off the lobe of his own left ear and gave it to a prostitute. According to Artaud, the violet shadow suffusing the chair represented the dividing line between two antagonistic personalities.