Ear-ie

“'But I don’t want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.

'Oh, you can’t help that,' said the Cat. 'We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.'
'How do you know I’m mad?' said Alice.
'You must be,” said the Cat. 'or you wouldn’t have come here.'” - Lewis Carroll from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

December 23, 1888 - a chilly night in Arles in the south of France, two friends argue. One wants to return to Paris to paint. The other pleads with  his friend to remain and pursue their muse together. Being passionate men, the argument grows violent and continues out on the street. What happened next is a matter of conjecture.

The artists were Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh. The commonly held story is Gauguin departed. In a distraught rage, Van Gogh sliced off part of his ear, wrapped it and delivered it to a brothel. Returning to his house, he fell asleep. Hours later Van Gogh, close to death from loss of blood, was roused by the police . 

Two German historians now surmise that a fight ensued in which Gauguin struck with his epee severing Van Gogh's ear. Gauguin, a known fencer, cut a bella figura wearing the sword by his side. In letters to his brother, Theo, and to Gauguin, Vincent mentions a "pact of silence." Gauguin wrote to a friend that he could never speak ill of Van Gogh, "a man with sealed lips." The secrecy was to protect Gauguin from prosecution. The historians also cite the word "ictus" written on an early sketch of Van Gogh's bandaged ear self-portrait. Ictus is a Latin fencing term which means cut or stab.

We may never know the actual story. Gauguin and Van Gogh never saw each other after that fateful night. In 1890, Van Gogh shot himself while painting in a field. In 1903, Gauguin died in Tahiti of syphilis, alcoholism and a dissipated life. - as ever BB

"Art will remain the most astonishing activity of mankind born out of struggle between wisdom and madness, between dream and reality in our mind." - Magdalena Abakanowicz