Van Gogh: Artistic brillance vs. insanity

You don’t have to be an artist, an art dealer, or an art history teacher to be more than a little familiar with the name Vincent Van Gogh. He’s a man who is as well known for his recurrent battles with poverty and mental illness as he is for his dynamic use of movement and color in so many of his masterpieces. We are just as familiar with the story of Van Gogh cutting off his ear with a razor after a falling out with his good friend and fellow artist Paul Gaugin as we are with the swirling, hypnotic vision of “Starry Night”. We’ve heard the tragic story of his suicide just as often as we’ve seen the ubiquitous reproductions of his vibrant still lives of sunflowers from his biggest project, “The Decoration of the Yellow House”. As a result, the question of whether his undeniable greatness was more the result of artistic brilliance or the visions of a raving madman is one that is still being asked today.

Over the years, many have attempted to answer the question of what exactly was wrong with Vincent Van Gogh. More than 150 professionals in the field of medicine have analyzed Van Gogh’s symptoms and the particulars of his life and have come up with more than 30 possible diagnoses, including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and acute porphyria. While there is no question in anyone’s mind that Van Gogh battled mental illness for most of his life, this was especially so in the final years following what was very likely a nervous breakdown on or near December 24, 1888. (This is the date of the notorious incident where he severed his left earlobe with a razor, afterwards wrapping the flesh in newspaper and placing it in the safekeeping of a prostitute with directions to “keep this object carefully”.) After this seeming breakdown, Van Gogh had many periods of artistic inactivity, during some of which he was actually not allowed to paint. Many of his masterpieces were painted before these later years when the effects of mental maladies and other health issues were most crushing.

It has often been suggested by experts that many elements present in Van Gogh’s work, especially some of the work created after his breakdown and subsequent committal, were not simple products of artistic creativity but real health issues, for example the swirls and spirals to be found in the paintings of of his Saint-Remy period. These light patterns and swirling brushstrokes have since been studied and shown to conform to the mathematical model of turbulence put forth by famed Russian