Van Gogh's Illness

Hideo Kobayashi

Van Gogh's illness

Hideo Kobayashi

The next time you see a Van Gogh, you will be treated to a very fine exhibition of his work. The works in the National Museum of Art in Grehler-Mueller, Holland, are a large collection of 270 works, from the very earliest drawings to those made in the year of his death, and one third of Van Gogh's entire oeuvre is represented here. This is a completely exceptional occurrence for the final works of a major artist. The fact that it has come about so conveniently for us, the viewers of Van Gogh's paintings, also tells us what a lonely man the artist was. His paintings did not move. Even if they did, there were no takers. Van Gogh's brother was an art dealer and did his best to promote his brother's paintings, but he was never able to sell any of them. However, according to some researchers, only one painting was ever sold. A friend of Van Gogh's, the sister of a Belgian painter called de Boeck, bought one for 400 francs. The insurance money on his work at the upcoming exhibition is said to be 1.44 billion yen. Indeed, if we look at history from the sidelines, we do not think that the irony of history is something that is unique to Van Gogh. That is not the case. That is not what I mean when I use the phrase "irony of history" here. Van Gogh experienced the irony of history from within. His paintings are inseparable from the artist's earnest experience of the bizarre cruelty of history. This acute awareness is deeply rooted in the motivation for Van Gogh's work. That is what I want to say.

Van Gogh was confined to the psychiatric hospital in Saint-Rémy, and painted many pictures of the island of wheat, which was separated by the hospital's stone wall and could be seen from the window of his hospital room. Two of these paintings will be on display at the upcoming exhibition, but in a letter to his brother at the time, he wrote that he saw the shadow of death walking through the wheat field. It was not a sad shadow at all, but death walked its own path in broad daylight, accompanied by the sun that moistened its pure gold light. Humanity, he writes, "may be a mutation that will be reaped in time." I do not mean to imply that his paintings speak the same words. The paintings reveal something more indescribable. However, when I return to the words of the letter from the impression I received from the painting, I cannot help but think that there is something in it that clearly corresponds to the paintings. This is not limited to the painting of the island of wheat. The work of Van Gogh, once he had achieved his full personality, is a clear reflection of a red, compulsive motivation, or an awareness of the pressing conditions of his work. His paintings are not beautiful in the ordinary sense of the word. Therefore, people like Renoir, who believed that the great art of painting was to paint beautiful pictures in the ordinary sense and to become a great painter, did not recognise Van Gogh's work. A painting should give the viewer the impression that the artist is in a good mood with his painting, which is not the case with Van Gogh's paintings. That is what Renoir told people. There is nothing like that in Van Gogh's paintings, on the contrary, there is something that makes the viewer feel uneasy. It was certainly this quality that made it difficult for people to accept Van Gogh's paintings, but it is this same quality that, over time, has made them irresistibly appealing. As Renoir says, there is no sense of self-sufficiency in the world of his paintings. But this is not the same as a feeling of inadequacy, of something missing. Within this feeling of anxiety, there is some assertive force at work that tells us things must be this way. Over time, people seem to have been persuaded in this way. What is it? Actually, this was the question that came to mind when I started writing about Van Gogh. Of course, it is not a question that can be answered in general terms. Rather, it might be better to say that it was the power of these questions that, over time, Van Gogh's paintings have unwittingly persuaded people. Questions were constantly being posed in the form of impressions. People responded with answers that, due to the nature of the emotion, could not be put into words.

There is no doubt that Van Gogh's greatest misfortune as a man was his mental illness. He produced the work for which he is said to have demonstrated his seriousness for less than three years, from February 1888, when he left Paris to settle in the south of France, until his suicide in Auvers-sur-Oise in July 1890, during which time he was free from the asylum for a total of only about a year. There is a belief that art is a product of the environment, but was mental illness a kind of environment in which Van Gogh's works were born? This is a very complicated question. In any case, it cannot be denied that there is a deep relationship between his art and his mental illness, and many scholars have conducted research on Van Gogh's mental illness. I am not well versed in this area of knowledge, but some scholars have judged Van Gogh's illness as schizophrenia, others as a kind of incurable disorder, and still others have denied both. In short, it seems that everyone has their own theory, but if such research does not lead to a deeper understanding of Van Gogh's art, it is meaningless work. There is no doubt that Van Gogh was an extraordinary man, and his works are not only the result of his genius, but also the result of his passion for art. Since the mark on his painting determines the essence of the value of his paintings, the task of analysing his mind and reducing him to an ordinary mental patient found anywhere would be a meaningless task if it were only for that purpose. This is not limited to artists like Van Gogh. With the development of analytical psychology, the tendency to make art the object of psychology in general has become very strong. Moreover, this psychology has developed based on the observation of abnormal psychology of neuroses and mental illnesses, and fortunately, many excellent artists have so-called madness, so it is not difficult at all to discover that psychological conditions very similar to neuroses are involved in the creation of artworks. The artwork is not a disease, but a phenomenon. This has led to an extreme tendency to confuse works of art with pathological phenomena. Such insanity notwithstanding, it is important to remember that however novel the methods and hypotheses that naturally emerge when artists and works of art are interpreted by psychoanalysis, the underlying idea is an extension of the same traditional idea of explaining the formation of art by historical or social conditions. The external conditions of society that are visible to everyone's eyes were gradually narrowed down and replaced by conditions of the unconscious world that are invisible to one's own eyes. Unsatisfied with the social environment of the individual, they substituted the ocean of the unconscious that surrounds consciousness. Of course, psychologists were not content with just an ocean of the unconscious. We are compelled to consider some rational structure, such as the surface or depths of the unconscious world, just as sociologists consider the class structure of society. The reason why Van Gogh's illness is uncontested, even if it is academically ambiguous, is that he was a man who knew exactly what he was ill with, a sick man who, like an astute psychiatrist, was constantly observing the signs of his illness. This is evidenced by his collection of letters, which are a series of relentless self-criticisms and are unparalleled as confessional literature. He also left behind more than forty self-portraits. No other artist has painted so many self-portraits in such a short space of time. If one wants to use the word pathological, one could say that he was a pathologically sharp self-critic. This seems to me to be the most important thing.

There is a famous self-portrait that Van Gogh painted after he was released from the hospital, which unfortunately you will not be able to see at the forthcoming exhibition. When he suffered his first serious attack in Arles, he cut off his own ear and gave it to a prostitute. He regained consciousness in hospital, but when he was discharged and returned to his studio, the citizens of Arles protested why he was discharged and locked him up again. This self-portrait was painted at the time of his discharge. Of course, he would have been told at this time what he had done during his seizure. In his letters to his brother, we can see his concern for his brother's safety, and in his response to the police's order of confinement, he wrote to his brother that he would not be released from the hospital. He acted calmly even in the face of the police's order to confine him. The fact that the public had united against a weak, sick man was like a slap between the eyes, but he would persevere. If he got angry, he would soon be seen as a madman, and every self-excuses would be tantamount to self-accusation. On the contrary, if he let his emotions get the better of him, it would be detrimental to his illness, so he had no choice but to endure. You, too, must stay out of the case, he told his brother. Van Gogh had regained his reason. But such a thing as regaining one's reason is a gentle thing. It came without any effort on his part. It is a gentle thing to go insane. It is as easy for him to go mad as it is for me. Because for him, painting a self-portrait with a bandage over his ear was something else. Here is a man who is a freak of nature. He is called Van Gogh by himself and by the world, but on reflection, what should we call him? Is it what we should call the ego? Van Gogh would gaze upon this mysterious entity, of which reason and consciousness in the ordinary sense are merely a part, forgetting everything else. He looks, looks, and sees through it. The lines and colours of what he sees become lines and colours, and the lines and colours are seen through again. I may just be playing with words when I say this, but in such a case, Van Gogh's consciousness - if I may use the word consciousness - is a pure consciousness. This is perhaps the essential meaning of a self-portrait.

In a letter to his brother from that time, he wrote that when he was finally informed that he was mentally ill, an idea flashed forth like a bolt of lightning. I say "flashed forth like a bolt of lightning" only because that is what I felt from the way he wrote the letter, but I can sense from the phrases in the letter that there was probably something he could intuit that could not be clearly expressed in words. There is this phrase. "When the townspeople (of course, this refers to the people of Arles who demanded Van Gogh's imprisonment) ask me how my health is, I always answer, I will die by your hands once, and then I will come back. Then my illness will die. I'm not saying that it won't take any effort to die, but if you get seriously ill once, you will definitely understand that you will never get sick again. You are either healthy or ill. It's the same as being young or old. I will do as you do, and do as much as the doctor tells me to do. I will think of it as a duty that I must fulfill." Judging from the wording of the letter, it seems that his brother was also ill at the time, but Van Gogh's words can be considered a monologue. He did not mean to say that we should approach illness from a calm and objective standpoint in the ordinary sense of the word. That is something that can be left to the doctor. What he cannot leave to the doctor is his own attitude to life. Health or sickness, in his case, of course, means sanity or madness, and he is not speaking metaphorically at all, but how one should resolve to endure the alternation of two different personalities. If the only way to live is to endure the bizarre experience that the ego in madness and the ego in sanity are one and the same, then, as he says, this is the way to die and come back to life. There is no room in him for bystanders, and self-reflection in the ordinary sense of the word is of no use to him. It would be better if the disease were cured. But that is extremely doubtful and only a matter for the doctor. From his own sense of urgency, he says, the problem is rather to be seriously ill. From the hospital in Saint-Rémy, he writes to his brother, "Good-natured Monsieur Peyron (he is a doctor at the hospital) will have much to report to you: probability, possibility, unconscious actions. All right. But if he becomes any more accurate than that, I will not believe him to be so accurate. For if he does become so, I know exactly what he will be accurate about." Van Gogh was not being sarcastic. How could he have afforded such a thing? Accurate psychological analysis is good, but what I need is rather the opposite, he was saying. What is the cause of illness?

It would be to take consciousness as a clue and rationally reconstruct the undercurrent of the unconscious. And that is where we get the phrase, "cause of disease." The more precise the words, the better. I will even believe the words, if necessary. But that is the limit. What is the point of a painter who has to live with the burden of madness? If he does not willingly accept such a fate, he should commit suicide. No report of this painful consciousness could possibly have been written by Peyron. "I am willing to accept the role of the madman has been cast upon me, just as if I were playing the role of a notary public. But the bad thing is that I don't feel the strength to play such a role at all," Van Gogh wrote. When he was in the hospital in Arles, it was very difficult to escape the fear of the onset of madness, but when he moved to the hospital in Saint-Remy and had to live with many madmen, he realised that he could no longer fear madness. In the days to come, he had to look after the violent and screaming men, day and night. It was his turn next. To borrow Van Gogh's own words, "While painting apricot blossoms, I suddenly collapsed like an animal," and when he came to, his throat was swollen and he could not even eat. He found himself in the same condition as the man, wildly screaming. To onlookers it may seem like a hellish world, but the inhabitants of hell must live by helping each other. He must humbly accept the role of the shaken madman. When he comes to his senses, he must also play the role of a sane person honestly. This is what he means when he says, "You are either healthy or sick, just like you are either young or old." How can this be called merely dispassionate judgement or objective thinking? He sought a spirit that could transcend all the all-too-human dramas. Rather, the needs of his real life compelled him to make a decision. What good would conventional religions and philosophies do at this point? The problem, as he says, was in "spirit," in will. And he laments the lack of "spirit." He writes, "Learning to suffer without complaining, learning to face illness without shying away from it, is exactly the same as taking dizzying risks." He could not have been exaggerating. The intense self-consciousness of this cornered man is the motivation behind his work. It is the very perspective of his self-portrait with the bandage over his ear. Reading his letters and following his struggle with madness, one can clearly see the efforts he made to maintain this perspective, the way he gained and lost it, lost and regained it through mental concentration and tension. Only his painting work was his salvation. He called his work his teacher. He believed that only the act of concentrating the mind to paint could guarantee him this perspective. His work was, in this sense, entirely self-portrait.

The Dutch psychiatrist G. Kraus, who studied Van Gogh's psychosis, deduced from a critical study of the extensive literature that it was impossible to determine his exact illness with current psychiatric research. I once read in a Van Gogh biography that he concluded that "Van Gogh was as unique in his art as he was in his illness." The biographer wrote that this was probably the wisest decision he could have made. Perhaps it was. But it is more important to ask, what would Van Gogh say if he read this conclusion? He would answer, "You will find me to be a unique individual, but what is the most unique thing about my personality? Is it not my psychosis, the very thing I fought against? I fought, but in the end I ran out of strength and committed suicide. Even when I was sane, I was a truly eccentric person. Because of the intensity of my personality, I had to clash with both my gentle younger brother and my beloved Gauguin. I could not get on with anyone. I am a person who has too much of my personality. How I would have preferred to have nothing unique at all. You are telling me what I was forced to show, what I failed to do." If Van Gogh had responded in this way, who could disagree? In fact, a careful perusal of his collected letters reveals him to be just such a man. The words "originality" and "individuality," made popular by Romanticism, have been abused. In the process of overuse, the meaning of the individuality of a work of art is unknowingly diminished. It is confused with the meaning of mere individual differences. No one would boast about their nose, which is naturally different from others. However, when this nose is displayed at an exhibition, some people seriously admire it as an original work of art. If we want to talk about the individuality of a work of art, we must refer to the result of the conquest of the constraints that one had to bear because of one's birth as an individual. A good self-portrait tells how the artist has dealt with and responded to the face he was born with. If so, what is this being dealt with and what is being responded to? We can only say that it is the author's spirit to create beyond the personal and accidental. If this spirit is forgotten, the meaning of the word "realism" will also decline. What I have just described is the work of a great artist, without exception. In the case of Van Gogh, I think we should see the same thing as an extreme case, manifesting itself in the form of a fierce battle.

During his most severe attacks, Van Gogh lost consciousness, but during his convalescence he suffered from a variety of delusions. The first is a helpless melancholy, and the second is a dreadful kind of ecstasy. In the end, he lost consciousness. But he has not spoken a word about such things. He says he does not want to talk about them. He says it is very painful to believe that imagination is reality. He says that the pain when melancholy attacks him is so intense that he wishes the doctor would never wake him up again. He speaks of his resolve not to be a false prophet when confused religious notions assail him. There is no way to escape the onslaught of delusions. It was, in his own words, "a kind of emotion, mysterious, powerful, all-purpose, that confuses me." In the face of this, there is no choice but to face it directly, as he says, without flinching. He calls his painting a lightning rod against madness, and the lightning rod must mean the tip of his consciousness, which is closest and most sensitive to madness. The same mind that was awakened inwardly looks outwards. At the time he first began working in his studio in Arles, Van Gogh spoke of the "terrible clairvoyance" he experienced while sketching, but it seems likely that he was referring to his mind's eye rather than his physical eye. It is meaningless to discuss the realism of Van Gogh's paintings without considering his spirit. In a letter written in a hospital in Saint-Remy, he said, "You know what a Dutch poet and wanderer once said: 'I am tied to this earth by more than earthly bonds.' This is what I have experienced and understood in my suffering, especially while suffering from so-called psychosis." This is the very motif of the painting of the island of wheat that you will see next. The stone wall you see in the distance represents his earthly bond. But even the healthy members of society who have confined him within the stone walls have not escaped from their own earthly bonds. But the island of wheat is different. He holds himself to a different set of bonds. Damp snow falls, and he rises from his bed in the middle of the night to look out at the island of wheat. He writes, "Never, never had nature seemed to me so full of such a searing emotion." Perhaps he was listening to what the fields of wheat had to say. "You are either healthy or you are sick. It is exactly the same thing as saying you are young or old." He expressed the voice as he heard it. This is the realism of his paintings.

Van Gogh was ill, but his awareness that he was ill was not ill. "Who is sane?" he asks in his letters, but it is his paintings that are really asking the question so vehemently. Who can say that a sane person's sense of self is clearer than that of Van Gogh's sick mind? It does not take a psychologist to explain how dubious our ordinary consciousness is. Everyone knows that a drunk who says he is drunk is still fine, but a drunk who insists he is not drunk is dangerous. It is not only alcohol that makes people drunk. The same is true of the structure of the human mind, which is intoxicated with principle. People like Van Gogh, who had to contend with the assault of violent delusions, have therefore developed a sharply honed consciousness, but we, in the stores of sanity, may be resting on a dull sense of self. This is certainly worth considering. Indeed, what analytical psychology teaches has become common knowledge for people today. Words such as "libido" and "complex" are on everyone's lips. In other words, the scope of the modern mind has expanded tremendously, and everyone has become a self-indulgent talker about the ego. One only has to look at the contemporary literature, which is on the verge of being torn apart by psychological mesmerism, to realise this. Psychoanalysis may be able to treat neurosis, but it cannot cure the neurosis of the ego play of the educated man who is familiar with psychoanalysis. How can we actually enrich our inner experience, refine our self-consciousness, with the knowledge that consciousness and mind are two separate entities, that each human being has a dark and dangerous unconscious? No, knowledge has the opposite effect. It is already happening. It is only natural that those who listen to rational explanations of unconscious processes would abandon such archaic methods of warfare with their own minds. The fewer people there are fighting against themselves, the more people there will be fighting against others. It seems like obvious arithmetic. The modern age is said to be the age of psychology. It is an age in which even the deepest recesses of the mind, which are invisible to the eye, must be transformed into visible phenomena to be understood. It seems that even the world of one's own mind has been transformed into a kind of external world. Is it better to say that there is a confusion between the spiritual and the psychological? Or should we say that there is a tendency to compete to believe in the increasingly detailed proof of the absence of spirit, which is called psychology? In any case, the word "spirit" has fallen into the sense of the subjective, the imaginary. I am not a spiritualist. However, I do not want to forget that the ideas of the times, no matter how old they are, never emanate from in-depth research and speculation, that they expand without regard to such things, and that once they have expanded, they always put on a rational mask.

I have no intention of criticising civilisation in the slightest, but when I was thinking about Van Gogh as a person, the conversation naturally turned out that way. There is a generally accepted opinion that Van Gogh's paintings are the forerunners of expressionist painting, but this view does not interest me very much. The concept of expressionism is ambiguous, and if it can be argued that Van Gogh would not have been a pioneer if later generations had not imitated his paintings, it would be a troublesome issue. I first came to Van Gogh as a person through his collected letters. I am sure such people have their own biases, but to me Van Gogh's paintings are very spiritual. There is nothing reminiscent of the pioneers of our time. The relentless record of self-analysis he left behind, which continued uninterrupted from the age of nineteen until his death at the age of thirty-seven, is the very opposite of the modern psychological climate. The ego that can be analysed is discarded at every turn. He is willing to abandon the path of the spirit in order to reach the spirit that cannot be externalised. And what he dares to call "something more than earthly ties" is directly intuited within his heart. I cannot imagine that such experiences, which he speaks frankly of in his letters, can be dismissed with the word "subjective." From my own experience, Van Gogh's paintings feel more like spirit than painting. I have the feeling that I am not looking at his paintings, but rather that there is an eye on the other side, and I am being looked at.