March 9, 2020 • 40 mins
Vincent Van Gogh is one of the most influential of all post impressionist artists. Known for his emotive and intensely expressive style, he is also known for excessive suffering in his short 37 year life. But what caused Vincent's extreme moods and did his mental issues contribute to the beauty and originality in his artwork?
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Personology is a production of I Heart Radio. Vincent van
Gogh is one of the greatest and most influential of
all post Impressionist artists, whose profound impact on twentieth century
art continues to alter the history of Western art today.
(00:23):
Known for his emotive and intensely expressive style, he's also
known for his successive suffering yet high productivity, having made
over artworks in ten years of his short thirty seven
year life. Though he died a hundred and thirty years ago,
his work still affects the way we view beauty, art,
and individuality. Several of his paintings have sold for over
(00:43):
one hundred million dollars. I'm Dr Gayl Saltz and this
is Personalogy. Joining me today is Stephen Knife, working artist, lawyer,
Pulitzer Prize winner, and with his partner Gregory white Smith,
(01:04):
is the author of the meticulously researched definitive biography Van Gogh,
The Life, a New York Times bestseller well after his death,
viewed as a genius. Vincent was born March fifty three
in groot Sundered in the Netherlands, the oldest son of Theodorus,
a Dutch Protestant minister. And Anna, the daughter of a
(01:26):
wealthy family. Vincent was the first of five children. He
was really not the first pregnancy. There was a first
Vincent who basically died in childbirth essentially, and something that
was really devastating for his mother. They had named him Vincent,
and so our Vincent essentially comes into the world already
(01:51):
inheriting this sense of loss and distress from his mother,
and born a year to the day after the first Vincent.
That first anniversary is usually very distressing to any mother
who's lost to pregnancy. The literature sort of implies that
the damage was too vincent in imagining that he was
(02:15):
the lesser of the two Vincents, and we wondered if
really the damage was in his mother and his head.
There was her constellation of regrets and frustrations and angers
that he perceived and suffered from. That's what we could
call the replacement child, And unfortunately it can become a
(02:37):
self fulfilling prophecy. When a mother abused her replacement child
as being the bad one essentially or not measuring up
in some way, it can become a self fulfilling prophecy
for that child who lives day to day with the
expectation and the transference from the parent that they're not good,
(02:59):
where there disappointing or they certainly don't measure up in
some way. Poor guy, our Vincent suffered from so many problems,
all of them layered on top of each other, and
if he had an assortment of mental afflictions and partly
as a result, would have disappointed him his parents. Anyway,
(03:20):
the fact that there was this previous Vincent and there
was this replacement child syndrome would simply have magnified the
parents disappointment and who he was anyway. Many of Vincent's
self portraits show evidence of a head shape and facial deformity,
(03:42):
a topic he referenced in letters he wrote specifically about
the way other people viewed and reacted to him. It's
likely that this was the result of a trauma during
the process of birth, which at the time was much
more prone to accidental injury for the infant and or
the mother. Some of this Kaistius, who have tried to
imagine what the diagnosis should have been have said it
(04:05):
was it could easily have been congenital. And one of
my questions to you is the shape of his skull
genetic or wouldn't have been a trauma in the birth process,
do you think, well, given certainly had other siblings who
didn't seem to have this issue going on, and given
that the shape of the head and not other sort
(04:27):
of medical problems that go along with some sort of
genetic syndrome, it seems likely that it was something that
happened in the birth canal. That is not unusual that, frankly,
ahead gets misshapen when birth occurs, and in normal circumstances,
it is something that sort of over the following days
(04:50):
goes back to essentially normal skull shape. But sometimes if
there's been some sort of trauma or you know, child
is set too long in the birth canal, something didn't work.
Terms of taking an out of the birth canal, there
can be essentially what ends up being a malformation, and
that can affect brain tissue, which could be fine. Again,
the brain is very plastic, it could recover, but if
(05:13):
there was some sort of damage and there was some
sort of scarring, scarring in the brain can set up
someone for particular kinds of problems. And we'll talk later
about what those problems may have been for Vincent, But
it wouldn't be surprising if that was a nitis what
we call a nitis, or like an area of the
(05:34):
brain where there was some scarring or something not quite right,
and that would set him up to develop certain symptoms. Later,
you and Greg documented a lot of information about the
kind of kid he was growing up. They weren't a
poor family, but they were very much middle class family,
and until Vincent came along, it was not a terribly
(05:58):
distinguished family. Were very fortunate that he became quite famous
soon after his early death, and therefore people began to
record his life. That they began, historians went out and
interviewed people, and in fact, interestingly a a photograph of
his nanny came to light for the first time in
(06:19):
the last couple of months. These nineteenth century photographs were
stilted and not terribly psychologically revealing, but she certainly doesn't
look like a terribly loving and gentile woman, so I
think that might have added to the difficulties of his childhood.
But we do have the recollections not only of her,
but of the other people who worked in the van
(06:40):
Go household, and of course the recollections of his parents
in their letters, and also some of his classmates. We
know quite a bit about his his childhood and how irascible, irritable, difficult,
and unhappy he was as a child. Several Evan's relationships
(07:04):
defined his early life. Primary is his mother, Anna, who
was described as an angry and unhappy woman, disappointed with
her lot in life. Her marriage was arranged at the
late age of thirty by her younger sister, Cornelia. Cornelia
had married a successful man and saved her sister from
spinsterhood by setting Anna up with her husband's younger brother, Theodore.
(07:25):
Given Theo's position as a minister of a small town,
this meant the family had little means and status. It
is easy to assume that this was a difficult transition
for Anna. She came from the Hague, which was a
very harsh city at the time, and from a relatively
well to do family, and social status in the Netherlands
(07:47):
in the nineteenth century was everything. So she married down
basically both in the sense that her pastor husband didn't
make much money, married down in the sense that she
married at such an advanced age when her younger sister
and all of her other sisters had had been married.
The younger sister marries is extremely wealthy art dealer who
(08:07):
lived in a mansion in nearby Breda. On top of that,
or maybe because of it, the implications of the accounts
of her life are that from Vincent himself or that
she was a terribly depressed person. And she herself said
described herself as what we would call depressed. The way
(08:28):
she medicated that depression was to stay busy at all times.
Uh and and gave that lesson to her son. So
I think we we can We can fairly say that Vincent,
a depressed individual, grew up with a depressed mother, which
is not unusual. Sadly that children who have a mother
who is depressed often developed depression really out of both
(08:53):
the biological and genetical loading of depression which runs in
families genetically speaking, but also that essentially they are emotionally neglected,
not on purpose, but because the mother is depressed, she's
emotionally unavailable. Perhaps the most important relationship in Vincent's life
(09:17):
was his younger brother, Theo, the second son. Gregarious, capable,
and affable, he quickly became the preferred son by his parents,
but he was also adoring of Vincent. Parents are drawn
to attractive, charming, happy, cooperative children in my experience, and
(09:39):
THEO was all those things. He was terribly good looking,
he was a happy child, he was an engaged child.
He loved helping his mother around the kitchen. So for
in all the ways that our Vincent was wanting this four,
your younger sibling was proving himself the parents favorite child.
(10:00):
So Vincent terribly acutely aware that instead of being what
the eldest child should have been, the successful one he had,
he sat back and watched his considerably younger brother basically
take his place as the first child in the family,
even though THEO was replacing him as the you know,
(10:24):
number one son. In a way, he loved THEO, and
THEO loved him, and there was sort of this mutual
closeness and worship that, somehow, despite the competitive failings, was
not undone. No as a wonderful, touching anecdote from his
childhood where he and THEO shared a bed growing up
(10:47):
and uh, and we're in the sort of uh attic
bedroom in the parsonage in Zinder and uh the mother
had one of her fond memories was of the two
of them sharing a pillow, especially when THEO was very young. Uh.
He looked up to his older brother when he was too.
(11:09):
Vincent was six, and given that age difference, UH, and
given Vincent's uh intense interest in life. He loved collecting bugs,
he loved collecting bird's nest, he loved understanding how nature worked,
and he would was constantly regaling his younger brother with
(11:29):
his uh somewhat more advanced knowledge of the world, and
THEO sort of hero worshiped him. So, despite all of
the things we know that happened later in their lives,
there was this early template for a much more positive
relationship which never was never completely lost, even as THEO
(11:50):
became the more successful child, to the point that THEO
became Vincent's financial sponsor and basically paid for Vincent's entire
adult life. We we end up with this terribly complicated
sibling relationship in which there which is full of of resentment,
(12:10):
mixed in with all that resentment was an enormous amount
of love. I mean, if if you were his name,
the key relationship in Vincent's life, it was clearly his
brother THEO. Vincent's father, Doris short for Theodorus, was a
(12:30):
mediocre minister and therefore placed in small towns with small congregations,
but his relationship with Vincent was conflicted. He was often
distant and disappointed in his first born, of who much
was expected. It made it even more complicated for Vincent
uh that he wasn't getting much paternal feeling from his father.
(12:53):
That his father was the was essentially the father figure
for the entire Protestant community, in that he was the
pasture for in this largely Catholic village they were living in.
So I I assume it would have been bad enough
that he did not have a good relationship with his father,
but making it worse was the fact that everybody else
(13:15):
looked up to this man as the paternal figure in
that community. And you know, this is like the beginning
of the way pretty much all of his relationships go.
So whether you could call this sort of a template
for the sad unrequited, always unrequited relationships he he has,
(13:37):
which are few and far between, but when they are
he wants to be close to whoever he wants to
be with, and they push him away, they don't want
him there. This seems like a good spot to take
a break. When we get back, we'll dive into some
(13:57):
of the medical conditions that ran in the family. But
that were poorly understood in his time. Despite the family's
seeming lack of understanding of Vincent's struggling and suffering, there
(14:17):
were numerous relatives with psychiatric illness and epilepsy on both sides.
Vincent's grandmother and uncle and a cousin all had epilepsy.
Vincent's sister developed schizophrenia so severe that she remained mute
and catatonic for the entire second half of her life.
I was, as you can imagine, terribly interested that you
(14:41):
seem to think partly because his own doctors diagnosed him
as as having epilepsy, partly because of his personality issues
and I assume his medical issues, but also because of
the family history of epilepsy. I was eager to hear
your thoughts on for lobe epilepsy as one of the
(15:02):
key illnesses that he suffered from. Some people say, oh,
you know, it was clearly bipolar disorder, he had schizophrenia,
he had depression. But if you look at all of
the symptoms together and the family history, and as you
mentioned that, the doctor did diagnose him with epilepsy. When
people say, well, it can't be epilepsy, I mean he
(15:24):
didn't he isn't recorded as having these seizures where you
know there would be motor movement of your body or
you would fall down and have seizure activity. But temporal
lobe epilepsy, unlike other forms of epilepsy, occurs just as
it sounds, in the temporal lobe, which is the area
of the brain that houses emotion and affects mood, affects
(15:47):
the way we therefore relate to others, and also can
be an area where there can be hallucinatory experience, particularly
sort of emotionally based hallucinatory experience, both visual and or auditory.
But if you see any seize your activity at all,
(16:07):
it's usually maybe just a momentary what looks like an
absent seizure. Basically you appear to be absent, you're just
sort of not relating to the outside world. You look
like there's nobody home. But it usually would last a
very short time, and you wouldn't have any motor movement
because the temporal lobe doesn't house anything to do with
(16:28):
motor movement, and so people who have temporal lobe epileps
you're often missed, they're not diagnosed at all. All of
these what I would now say are symptoms of being
highly irascible and irritable, periods of depression at times hyper religious,
which we see in that we think of it in
(16:50):
the form of he's learning to be a preacher, but
he goes way beyond I'm learning to be a preacher, right, Well, yeah,
the fact that when he was in the boy Knowledge
trying to be a missionary and there's a terror bole
gas explosion in one of the minds, he literally strips
his clothes off to make bandages for the UH to
the victims of this UH. He engages in forms of
(17:11):
self mortification as part of his religion. He wouldn't sleep
in a bed. He made himself sleep on a wooden board.
He he literally cudgeled himself as a form of more
self mortification. I don't think we're this is it is
a stretch to say that his religion was excessive and
his own father, who was a minister, was horrified. One
(17:34):
reason he was fired as a missionary was that the
gentleman who sort of ran the mission were so horrified
by his excessive displays of religiosity. And I think that
that is it was was clearly a symptom of his
relationships with people the combination of of of irritability and
(17:55):
stickiness is a formula for terrible relationships with people. To
a bond UH in an excessive way to force yourself
on people to an extent that is uncomfortable to them,
and then to start fighting with them constantly makes it
virtually impossible to maintain a relationship with him. And that's
(18:16):
really classic for temporal lobe epilepsy. So stickiness can apply
to people and a relationship, but the same can be
true of stickiness to topics. So he would become obsessive,
like completely obsessed with you know. Now I'm going to
be a preacher and as you said, go to the
nth degree UM and not give up or not step
back for a moment, and yet struggle with it. One
(18:40):
thing I wanted to ask you, Dr Saltz is temporal epilepsy.
The term for it in at the time Vincent was
suffering from from it. Perhaps UH was known in psychiatric
circles in France. The the term for in French was
epilepsy the larvall meaning um emerging from the larva. And
(19:05):
we we know that his doctor in are All Dr Ray,
his roommate at the Mountpilier medical school had done his
sort of doctoral dissertation on this subject. You could say
that Vincent really got lucky in the sense that he
happened to come into contact with this doctor who had
some ideas about such things, because certainly many doctors did
(19:29):
not and really advised him, you know, you need to
stay away from the absinthe. That obviously would be a
help in and of itself. But he also treated him
with potassium bromide, which actually did help him to get better.
Whether they really understood that this occurred in the temporal lobe,
I don't know that we could say that, because I'm
(19:49):
not sure that the understanding of brain neuro anatomy was
you know, what it is today or even close to it.
But certainly they did understand that there was the l
lihood of some seizure activity causing maybe not so much
the interpersonal difficulties that Vincent was having, but the at
that point the extreme impulsivity and distress in mood, you know,
(20:16):
his his deep dark, you know, terrible feelings, but also
his impulsive you know, he at that point was doing
things like cutting off his ear or or you know,
or or drinking turpentine. You know, he made attempts that
look like serious self injury and or suicide attempts. Although
(20:38):
he writes to THEO, we know he doesn't really want
to kill himself. He doesn't really want to die. The
drinking of the turpentine and the cutting off the year,
we know from the descriptions of his behavior at the
times of both of those incidents that he was in
a moment of certainly of impulsivity and what looks to
me as as as a layment, like a psycho episode.
(21:01):
Whereas at the time that he died, he was in
a very good space. For for Vincent, the day he
was shot, he went out painting. He was in a
good mood that morning. He was being productive. He did
not exhibit the kinds of of behaviors that he exhibited
at the times of his most abstractive acts. Vincent was
(21:23):
not unintelligent. He spoke four languages fluently. He certainly was.
He was a smart person. My sense is that not
only because because he was fluent in four languages, but if, if,
if you take the corpus of letters and the quality
of noted, not only of the writing, which was extraordinary
(21:44):
and might have made him a somewhat significant literary figure,
even if he had never been a painter. And beyond that,
the quality of thinking is so high. At this sort
of philosophical thinking about the meaning of life and of
existence are of a very order. And that doesn't even
begin to address the overwhelming sophistication of the paintings. I
(22:06):
would think he was had had an extremely high i Q.
You can say that it clearly he was not only
a deep and thoughtful and intelligent thinker, um, he was
a creative thinker. As you said, a lot of this
is sort of philosophical and um and even existential, and
(22:27):
so we you can already see. I guess I would
say some of the seeds of his creativity early on.
And yet curiously right this didn't help him at all
in working for an art dealer, or working in a shop,
or working maybe it should say, more importantly with other people,
(22:48):
which is where he had so much difficulty. Much like
Vince since early relationships, his relationships with women were even
more unrequited and tragic. He fell in love with a
cousin who rejected him, and courted a neighbor's daughter, who
(23:09):
attempted suicide when both families rejected the match. He mostly
paid women for any companionship. One woman, Seeing Hornick, lived
with him for almost two years. According to letters and
drawings Vincent made of her, she was a very depressed
and unhappy person. One of Vincent's most famous chalk drawings
is of Seen sitting naked with her head in her arms.
(23:32):
It is titled Sorrow. Even she couldn't handle it, even
though he was paying her. Essentially by the day, there
was much love in this human being. I mean, even
though he couldn't make it work. He desperately wanted relationships
with family, with friends, especially with women, both because of
(23:53):
his romantic feelings and because of his libido. He had
a very high libido hyper sexualism. Another sent him of
temporal epilepsy. Absolutely. There was also a peasant woman in
Noonan who with whom he may have had a child.
But she too was was he was paid by him. Uh.
She wasn't a you know, she wasn't a professional prostitute.
(24:14):
But she modeled for him, and she had sex with him,
and he paid her for all of that. She's had
many children. She was quite ill. Uh, she was older
than he was. She was pock marked, she was not attractive,
She was not a courtisan. And yet one of the reasons,
aside from his productivity, that makes him so appealing and
(24:34):
so ultimately lovable, is that he there was a generosity
lurking constantly in him. And he treated this woman seen
as if she as if she were his wife. And
he took care of her when she went to the hospital. Uh,
he took care of her every day. He tried to
make the apartment attractive for her. And when she had
a child who wasn't his child, he treated this child
(24:58):
as if it was his own child. He made a
crib for him, He decorated the apartment for this baby
when it came home from the hospital. He wanted to
be a family. It was a family, and he drew
these darling drawings of this baby in its crib. Even sadder,
she left ultimately, and she and she ultimately left, even
though she predicted that she would. She was so miserable
(25:22):
that she would drown herself one day, and she did.
In I believe it was she drowned herself as as
as she herself predicted. Let's take a quick break here.
When we get back, we'll discuss how Vincent's mental illness
may have contributed to the incredible output of art. In
his final years, after Vincent's failed attempt at the ministry
(25:52):
and a stint in the family business, he decides he
truly wants to be an artist. One symptom of his
temporal lobe epilepsy, his tennasy, he channels towards painting. Despite
there being no outside interest nor ability to sell his paintings.
He becomes obsessed with and driven to develop his painting.
You're wonderful book, you talk about the spark, his spark,
(26:15):
and he came to it partly because it was art
was the family business. So and he worked in a
gallery even though he failed at it. He were in
the Hague office, the London office, and the Paris office
of what was eventually called the Peel when his uncle
sold his Dutch business to the big French emporium. So
he was constantly in contact with art, and independently of that,
(26:40):
he was constantly going to exhibitions, and he had something
like a photographic memory. At a time when people didn't
have art books with color plates, and they certainly didn't
have the internet what we can call up all these images.
Van God could look at a painting and remember subtle
color combinations and passages of brushwork. Years later, and he
(27:03):
didn't choose to choose really to become an artist. In
something that's very touching, THEO, looking for an activity that
could keep his brother busy and help him deal with
his loneliness and his misery, recommended that he start drawing.
So this not only did feel fund his life as
an artist, he is the one who who suggested he
(27:25):
become an artist. That is the one thing he stayed
with for the last ten years of his life. One
of the things I found fascinating is the question of,
you know, what would medication have done for Vincent? Would
it have changed him so completely that it would have
impaired at least the form of art, that the kind
of art he would have made, or his the the
hypomania that allowed him to work as obsessively as he worked.
(27:50):
What you say, if I don't want to characterize it,
is that there perhaps is some some midway point between
sort of average sensibilities and extreme psychological conditions where there's
sort of a sweet spot where the sort of the
benefits of some of the things that we think of
(28:11):
as negative, like depression, can still be harnessed to an
artistic career without being constrained by excessive psychiatric problems. Was
he in that sweet spot just naturally? What are your
thoughts as to what those medications would have done for
(28:32):
both his level of productivity and for the life experiences
that might have led to to the kind of art
that he made. Such an interesting question to ponder. First,
let me say when we think of I mean, certainly
temporal epilepsy should be treated. Leaving unchecked epileptic symptoms alone
(28:54):
causes them to worsen over time, something called the kinetic effect.
And you know, the more more seizure activity you have,
the more seizure activity you have. And certainly it caused
him terrible suffering. However, when you look at what made
Vincent vincent, you know, in terms of his painting and
something we all just marvel at to this day, this
(29:18):
obsessiveness certainly was a feature. I mean, he most of
his painting was done in the last two years of
his life, the last four to two years of his life,
but particularly in the last two years of his life
he painted almost every day. We need to fight this
notion that he was this madman who poured himself out
on his canvases in a kind of delirium. There is
(29:39):
this sort of cliche that I think needs to be
dealt with because because he was too brilliant, he was
too intentional. The paintings were extremely thought right. He spent
hours and hours every single lie. Yes, and I think
you you mentioned two things that are absolutely crucial. Is
(30:00):
this year productivity. You know, the fact that he could
lay down on a campus thousands and thousands of complex
lines and in complex color combinations. Uh. That level of
energy that mania or hypomania I think um uh is
is not unrelated to the fact that he could paint
(30:20):
a complex painting in an entire painting in a single day.
And as you brilliantly say, uh, you know, we think
of him as this revolutionary painter because at a time
when Serat had a whole group of planelists who were
working around him and learning from him, and Monet and
red Noir were painting paintings of the same scene and
very similar styles. Later, we look towards Picasso and Brock
(30:45):
developing analytical Cubism together, so much so that it's a
little bit hard for outsiders to sometimes distinguish a Brock
from a Picasso from that period. Van go is out
there creating his own thing. And I actually thought long
and hard about what you said, and it does seem
(31:05):
to me quite possible. The late landscapes from the last
seventy days of his life become increasingly abstract. One wonders
if he hadn't died at age thirty seven as a
young Youngish man. Um, you know, if he'd only had
two more years of this very short career, or let
alone ten more years or twenty, what what would the
(31:27):
art of become? It was becoming abstracts so quickly. And
I intrigued by the notion not not that he painted painted,
what that that when he was looking at this landscape,
he saw it as he put it on the canvas.
I think there was a thoughtful form of of abstraction
that was going on, a calculated abstraction that was going
(31:50):
on in the transposition from the nature that he saw
at that moment to the canvas. Maybe that process of
seeing in a distorted fashion during the near psychotic episodes
might have liberated him to be more audacious, to be
looser and freer with the imagery he was creating when
(32:12):
he was completely lucid. Absolutely entirely possible that he could
be looking and seeing you know, reality what he is seeing,
but that he would be impacted by the memory of
of visual hallucinations. It is important to know that during
his most ill periods, when he was you know, in
the beginning of hospitalizations or certain you know times, what
(32:33):
he clearly was not doing well, he did not paint.
So he was not able to be productive at his
his most ill moments. But other than that, he was
incredibly productive. And we do know that patients do have
memories for you know, it's recorded as as a memory,
that is, one may have access to that during ill periods. Hallucinations,
(32:57):
auditory or visual psychotic thoughts, delusions can be remembered and
and can be let's say used, you know, whether that's
in the painting format or written format. So it does
seem plausible. Obviously we were conjecturing we can't know, we
can't ask him, so we we don't know. But these
(33:20):
things collectively, I think about, as you know, the hardwired
let's say strength that can be a part and parcel
of a psychiatric illness like temporal ob epilepsy, where it's
possible that these things are part of what made vincent,
(33:40):
you know, the the incredible, original, yeah, creative, productive, you
know artists that you know, we revere. Towards the premature
end of Vincent's life, his continued mood and relationship struggles,
(34:02):
he produced many paintings and there was just the hint
of some recognition of their promise. He sold one painting
while still alive. But these later paintings, amongst them Starry Night,
are his most incredible work. While there is some debate
about the specifics, we do know that on July, at
the age of only thirty seven, Vincent van Gogh died
(34:24):
of a gunshot wound. Of course, the tragic thing, right
for for Vincent is that he was not recognized that
way in his life and the lords. It was really
not until his death that others began to note. You know,
(34:45):
sometimes genius isn't recognized in the moment, right well, especially
if it's if it's as original as it was. That
was the problem is even his own brother Theo, not
until after Vincent died. There it was just beginning to
be seen. Even Claude Monet and Tayo van Reislberg saw
some paintings by Vincent at an exhibition in Brussels months
(35:07):
before he died and and thought and said to others, boy,
this is very interesting. There's something very interesting going on there.
So they were beginning to see it. But because it
didn't look like the art that we knew, people couldn't
and and including his brother THEO, until the very end,
uh didn't see it there. Now the revolution has happened,
(35:27):
and we all, you know, we can look at these
things and see them for what they are. What's astonishing
to me is that when you look at the at
the great late paintings, it is one massively brilliant color
combination after another, and one perfect brilliant, epic brushstroke after another.
(35:48):
And and this comes from somewhere, of course, you know,
the brain at the center of it all. It's part
of why I do wonder if some of what was
happening in his brain I either visual hallucinations. You know,
you know, we know that creativity UM has everything to
do with imagination. And we know that imagination occurs in
(36:12):
an area of the brain called the default network what
we were calling it now UM. And we know that
it's the free flowing of thoughts, unencumbered, disinhibited, frequent thoughts,
many many, many thoughts means some of them. Some of
those divergent thoughts will turn out to be amazing ones.
Let's say you're genious ones if you are disinhibited enough
(36:37):
but still organized enough to function. What informed his the
thoughts and his default network where their visual hallucinations and
other portions of the brain that he could harness and
utilize to come up with these out of the box
ideas that, as you say, are these putting together of
colors and brushstrokes and ways that no one was doing
(36:59):
had not been seen before. It's it's fascinating to ponder.
That's the other thing that we we we haven't really
discussed fully, and that is the fact that he triumphed
over his own misery. And these paintings are so joyful.
There's some of the most joyful paintings ever done. And
I think there's something truly magical about the fact that
(37:20):
he pulled out of this life of misery, not a brooding, difficult, somber,
gloomy even art form um as other artists did, but
instead these joyful images of flowers and rolling hills and
bright colors and this charming drawing and painting style, so
(37:44):
much charm, so much beauty, so much joy out of
so much misery. What we see in that right, which
I think is part of what resonates so much for
all of us viewing, is this demonstration of incredible resilience
which all of us would like some of right to
be able to manage no matter what is going on,
(38:07):
and as you said, triumph and overcome, and he sort
of displays that through his paintings and his ability also
to paint in such a way to make us so
emotionally touched. Right, They're so evocative, whether it be joy
or sadness sometimes or just sort of existential wonder at
(38:30):
nature in the world, and his ability to do that
to us, to you know, he in his life he
couldn't connect and stay connected to others, but he connects
to us. And he talked about wanting to console people
through his art, and he did it. It's truly one
(38:50):
of the great triumphs I think of the human spirit.
And I think it's one reason why so many people
love his art so much. It isn't just the beauty
and the brilliant colors and the charming drawing. It's it
is this sense of triumph over adversity, the sense of resilience,
and this sense of connection with us all. And the
(39:11):
fact that these connections have been created by a man
who couldn't connect with people in his own lifetime is
something that we take in even unconsciously, is something that
we can hope for in our own lives, that we
can make connections with people even when those connections seem difficult,
That we two can triumph over adversity and be productive
(39:34):
even in our difficult moments. I think you know it
sends a subliminal message to us all that adds to
the incredible artistic experience that we have in front of
one of his paintings. Well, that wraps things up for
(39:56):
this episode. Thanks for joining me today and a special
thanks just even knife. You can get his book Ben
Go The Life wherever books are sold. If you're interested
in more information about the people we discussed today, you
can check out my book The Power of Different The
Link between Disorder and Genius. Also make sure to follow
me on Twitter at doctor Gayl Saltz or at Personalogy
(40:17):
m D until next time. Personology is a production of
I Heart Radio. The executive producers are doctor Gayl Saltz
and Tyler Klang. The supervising producer is Dylan Fagan. The
associate producer is Lowell Berlanti, Editing music and mixing by
(40:39):
Lowell Berlante. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit
the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts.
Personology is a production of I Heart Radio. Vincent van
Gogh is one of the greatest and most influential of
all post Impressionist artists, whose profound impact on twentieth century
art continues to alter the history of Western art today.
(00:23):
Known for his emotive and intensely expressive style, he's also
known for his successive suffering yet high productivity, having made
over artworks in ten years of his short thirty seven
year life. Though he died a hundred and thirty years ago,
his work still affects the way we view beauty, art,
and individuality. Several of his paintings have sold for over
(00:43):
one hundred million dollars. I'm Dr Gayl Saltz and this
is Personalogy. Joining me today is Stephen Knife, working artist, lawyer,
Pulitzer Prize winner, and with his partner Gregory white Smith,
(01:04):
is the author of the meticulously researched definitive biography Van Gogh,
The Life, a New York Times bestseller well after his death,
viewed as a genius. Vincent was born March fifty three
in groot Sundered in the Netherlands, the oldest son of Theodorus,
a Dutch Protestant minister. And Anna, the daughter of a
(01:26):
wealthy family. Vincent was the first of five children. He
was really not the first pregnancy. There was a first
Vincent who basically died in childbirth essentially, and something that
was really devastating for his mother. They had named him Vincent,
and so our Vincent essentially comes into the world already
(01:51):
inheriting this sense of loss and distress from his mother,
and born a year to the day after the first Vincent.
That first anniversary is usually very distressing to any mother
who's lost to pregnancy. The literature sort of implies that
the damage was too vincent in imagining that he was
(02:15):
the lesser of the two Vincents, and we wondered if
really the damage was in his mother and his head.
There was her constellation of regrets and frustrations and angers
that he perceived and suffered from. That's what we could
call the replacement child, And unfortunately it can become a
(02:37):
self fulfilling prophecy. When a mother abused her replacement child
as being the bad one essentially or not measuring up
in some way, it can become a self fulfilling prophecy
for that child who lives day to day with the
expectation and the transference from the parent that they're not good,
(02:59):
where there disappointing or they certainly don't measure up in
some way. Poor guy, our Vincent suffered from so many problems,
all of them layered on top of each other, and
if he had an assortment of mental afflictions and partly
as a result, would have disappointed him his parents. Anyway,
(03:20):
the fact that there was this previous Vincent and there
was this replacement child syndrome would simply have magnified the
parents disappointment and who he was anyway. Many of Vincent's
self portraits show evidence of a head shape and facial deformity,
(03:42):
a topic he referenced in letters he wrote specifically about
the way other people viewed and reacted to him. It's
likely that this was the result of a trauma during
the process of birth, which at the time was much
more prone to accidental injury for the infant and or
the mother. Some of this Kaistius, who have tried to
imagine what the diagnosis should have been have said it
(04:05):
was it could easily have been congenital. And one of
my questions to you is the shape of his skull
genetic or wouldn't have been a trauma in the birth process,
do you think, well, given certainly had other siblings who
didn't seem to have this issue going on, and given
that the shape of the head and not other sort
(04:27):
of medical problems that go along with some sort of
genetic syndrome, it seems likely that it was something that
happened in the birth canal. That is not unusual that, frankly,
ahead gets misshapen when birth occurs, and in normal circumstances,
it is something that sort of over the following days
(04:50):
goes back to essentially normal skull shape. But sometimes if
there's been some sort of trauma or you know, child
is set too long in the birth canal, something didn't work.
Terms of taking an out of the birth canal, there
can be essentially what ends up being a malformation, and
that can affect brain tissue, which could be fine. Again,
the brain is very plastic, it could recover, but if
(05:13):
there was some sort of damage and there was some
sort of scarring, scarring in the brain can set up
someone for particular kinds of problems. And we'll talk later
about what those problems may have been for Vincent, But
it wouldn't be surprising if that was a nitis what
we call a nitis, or like an area of the
(05:34):
brain where there was some scarring or something not quite right,
and that would set him up to develop certain symptoms. Later,
you and Greg documented a lot of information about the
kind of kid he was growing up. They weren't a
poor family, but they were very much middle class family,
and until Vincent came along, it was not a terribly
(05:58):
distinguished family. Were very fortunate that he became quite famous
soon after his early death, and therefore people began to
record his life. That they began, historians went out and
interviewed people, and in fact, interestingly a a photograph of
his nanny came to light for the first time in
(06:19):
the last couple of months. These nineteenth century photographs were
stilted and not terribly psychologically revealing, but she certainly doesn't
look like a terribly loving and gentile woman, so I
think that might have added to the difficulties of his childhood.
But we do have the recollections not only of her,
but of the other people who worked in the van
(06:40):
Go household, and of course the recollections of his parents
in their letters, and also some of his classmates. We
know quite a bit about his his childhood and how irascible, irritable, difficult,
and unhappy he was as a child. Several Evan's relationships
(07:04):
defined his early life. Primary is his mother, Anna, who
was described as an angry and unhappy woman, disappointed with
her lot in life. Her marriage was arranged at the
late age of thirty by her younger sister, Cornelia. Cornelia
had married a successful man and saved her sister from
spinsterhood by setting Anna up with her husband's younger brother, Theodore.
(07:25):
Given Theo's position as a minister of a small town,
this meant the family had little means and status. It
is easy to assume that this was a difficult transition
for Anna. She came from the Hague, which was a
very harsh city at the time, and from a relatively
well to do family, and social status in the Netherlands
(07:47):
in the nineteenth century was everything. So she married down
basically both in the sense that her pastor husband didn't
make much money, married down in the sense that she
married at such an advanced age when her younger sister
and all of her other sisters had had been married.
The younger sister marries is extremely wealthy art dealer who
(08:07):
lived in a mansion in nearby Breda. On top of that,
or maybe because of it, the implications of the accounts
of her life are that from Vincent himself or that
she was a terribly depressed person. And she herself said
described herself as what we would call depressed. The way
(08:28):
she medicated that depression was to stay busy at all times.
Uh and and gave that lesson to her son. So
I think we we can We can fairly say that Vincent,
a depressed individual, grew up with a depressed mother, which
is not unusual. Sadly that children who have a mother
who is depressed often developed depression really out of both
(08:53):
the biological and genetical loading of depression which runs in
families genetically speaking, but also that essentially they are emotionally neglected,
not on purpose, but because the mother is depressed, she's
emotionally unavailable. Perhaps the most important relationship in Vincent's life
(09:17):
was his younger brother, Theo, the second son. Gregarious, capable,
and affable, he quickly became the preferred son by his parents,
but he was also adoring of Vincent. Parents are drawn
to attractive, charming, happy, cooperative children in my experience, and
(09:39):
THEO was all those things. He was terribly good looking,
he was a happy child, he was an engaged child.
He loved helping his mother around the kitchen. So for
in all the ways that our Vincent was wanting this four,
your younger sibling was proving himself the parents favorite child.
(10:00):
So Vincent terribly acutely aware that instead of being what
the eldest child should have been, the successful one he had,
he sat back and watched his considerably younger brother basically
take his place as the first child in the family,
even though THEO was replacing him as the you know,
(10:24):
number one son. In a way, he loved THEO, and
THEO loved him, and there was sort of this mutual
closeness and worship that, somehow, despite the competitive failings, was
not undone. No as a wonderful, touching anecdote from his
childhood where he and THEO shared a bed growing up
(10:47):
and uh, and we're in the sort of uh attic
bedroom in the parsonage in Zinder and uh the mother
had one of her fond memories was of the two
of them sharing a pillow, especially when THEO was very young. Uh.
He looked up to his older brother when he was too.
(11:09):
Vincent was six, and given that age difference, UH, and
given Vincent's uh intense interest in life. He loved collecting bugs,
he loved collecting bird's nest, he loved understanding how nature worked,
and he would was constantly regaling his younger brother with
(11:29):
his uh somewhat more advanced knowledge of the world, and
THEO sort of hero worshiped him. So, despite all of
the things we know that happened later in their lives,
there was this early template for a much more positive
relationship which never was never completely lost, even as THEO
(11:50):
became the more successful child, to the point that THEO
became Vincent's financial sponsor and basically paid for Vincent's entire
adult life. We we end up with this terribly complicated
sibling relationship in which there which is full of of resentment,
(12:10):
mixed in with all that resentment was an enormous amount
of love. I mean, if if you were his name,
the key relationship in Vincent's life, it was clearly his
brother THEO. Vincent's father, Doris short for Theodorus, was a
(12:30):
mediocre minister and therefore placed in small towns with small congregations,
but his relationship with Vincent was conflicted. He was often
distant and disappointed in his first born, of who much
was expected. It made it even more complicated for Vincent
uh that he wasn't getting much paternal feeling from his father.
(12:53):
That his father was the was essentially the father figure
for the entire Protestant community, in that he was the
pasture for in this largely Catholic village they were living in.
So I I assume it would have been bad enough
that he did not have a good relationship with his father,
but making it worse was the fact that everybody else
(13:15):
looked up to this man as the paternal figure in
that community. And you know, this is like the beginning
of the way pretty much all of his relationships go.
So whether you could call this sort of a template
for the sad unrequited, always unrequited relationships he he has,
(13:37):
which are few and far between, but when they are
he wants to be close to whoever he wants to
be with, and they push him away, they don't want
him there. This seems like a good spot to take
a break. When we get back, we'll dive into some
(13:57):
of the medical conditions that ran in the family. But
that were poorly understood in his time. Despite the family's
seeming lack of understanding of Vincent's struggling and suffering, there
(14:17):
were numerous relatives with psychiatric illness and epilepsy on both sides.
Vincent's grandmother and uncle and a cousin all had epilepsy.
Vincent's sister developed schizophrenia so severe that she remained mute
and catatonic for the entire second half of her life.
I was, as you can imagine, terribly interested that you
(14:41):
seem to think partly because his own doctors diagnosed him
as as having epilepsy, partly because of his personality issues
and I assume his medical issues, but also because of
the family history of epilepsy. I was eager to hear
your thoughts on for lobe epilepsy as one of the
(15:02):
key illnesses that he suffered from. Some people say, oh,
you know, it was clearly bipolar disorder, he had schizophrenia,
he had depression. But if you look at all of
the symptoms together and the family history, and as you
mentioned that, the doctor did diagnose him with epilepsy. When
people say, well, it can't be epilepsy, I mean he
(15:24):
didn't he isn't recorded as having these seizures where you
know there would be motor movement of your body or
you would fall down and have seizure activity. But temporal
lobe epilepsy, unlike other forms of epilepsy, occurs just as
it sounds, in the temporal lobe, which is the area
of the brain that houses emotion and affects mood, affects
(15:47):
the way we therefore relate to others, and also can
be an area where there can be hallucinatory experience, particularly
sort of emotionally based hallucinatory experience, both visual and or auditory.
But if you see any seize your activity at all,
(16:07):
it's usually maybe just a momentary what looks like an
absent seizure. Basically you appear to be absent, you're just
sort of not relating to the outside world. You look
like there's nobody home. But it usually would last a
very short time, and you wouldn't have any motor movement
because the temporal lobe doesn't house anything to do with
(16:28):
motor movement, and so people who have temporal lobe epileps
you're often missed, they're not diagnosed at all. All of
these what I would now say are symptoms of being
highly irascible and irritable, periods of depression at times hyper religious,
which we see in that we think of it in
(16:50):
the form of he's learning to be a preacher, but
he goes way beyond I'm learning to be a preacher, right, Well, yeah,
the fact that when he was in the boy Knowledge
trying to be a missionary and there's a terror bole
gas explosion in one of the minds, he literally strips
his clothes off to make bandages for the UH to
the victims of this UH. He engages in forms of
(17:11):
self mortification as part of his religion. He wouldn't sleep
in a bed. He made himself sleep on a wooden board.
He he literally cudgeled himself as a form of more
self mortification. I don't think we're this is it is
a stretch to say that his religion was excessive and
his own father, who was a minister, was horrified. One
(17:34):
reason he was fired as a missionary was that the
gentleman who sort of ran the mission were so horrified
by his excessive displays of religiosity. And I think that
that is it was was clearly a symptom of his
relationships with people the combination of of of irritability and
(17:55):
stickiness is a formula for terrible relationships with people. To
a bond UH in an excessive way to force yourself
on people to an extent that is uncomfortable to them,
and then to start fighting with them constantly makes it
virtually impossible to maintain a relationship with him. And that's
(18:16):
really classic for temporal lobe epilepsy. So stickiness can apply
to people and a relationship, but the same can be
true of stickiness to topics. So he would become obsessive,
like completely obsessed with you know. Now I'm going to
be a preacher and as you said, go to the
nth degree UM and not give up or not step
back for a moment, and yet struggle with it. One
(18:40):
thing I wanted to ask you, Dr Saltz is temporal epilepsy.
The term for it in at the time Vincent was
suffering from from it. Perhaps UH was known in psychiatric
circles in France. The the term for in French was
epilepsy the larvall meaning um emerging from the larva. And
(19:05):
we we know that his doctor in are All Dr Ray,
his roommate at the Mountpilier medical school had done his
sort of doctoral dissertation on this subject. You could say
that Vincent really got lucky in the sense that he
happened to come into contact with this doctor who had
some ideas about such things, because certainly many doctors did
(19:29):
not and really advised him, you know, you need to
stay away from the absinthe. That obviously would be a
help in and of itself. But he also treated him
with potassium bromide, which actually did help him to get better.
Whether they really understood that this occurred in the temporal lobe,
I don't know that we could say that, because I'm
(19:49):
not sure that the understanding of brain neuro anatomy was
you know, what it is today or even close to it.
But certainly they did understand that there was the l
lihood of some seizure activity causing maybe not so much
the interpersonal difficulties that Vincent was having, but the at
that point the extreme impulsivity and distress in mood, you know,
(20:16):
his his deep dark, you know, terrible feelings, but also
his impulsive you know, he at that point was doing
things like cutting off his ear or or you know,
or or drinking turpentine. You know, he made attempts that
look like serious self injury and or suicide attempts. Although
(20:38):
he writes to THEO, we know he doesn't really want
to kill himself. He doesn't really want to die. The
drinking of the turpentine and the cutting off the year,
we know from the descriptions of his behavior at the
times of both of those incidents that he was in
a moment of certainly of impulsivity and what looks to
me as as as a layment, like a psycho episode.
(21:01):
Whereas at the time that he died, he was in
a very good space. For for Vincent, the day he
was shot, he went out painting. He was in a
good mood that morning. He was being productive. He did
not exhibit the kinds of of behaviors that he exhibited
at the times of his most abstractive acts. Vincent was
(21:23):
not unintelligent. He spoke four languages fluently. He certainly was.
He was a smart person. My sense is that not
only because because he was fluent in four languages, but if, if,
if you take the corpus of letters and the quality
of noted, not only of the writing, which was extraordinary
(21:44):
and might have made him a somewhat significant literary figure,
even if he had never been a painter. And beyond that,
the quality of thinking is so high. At this sort
of philosophical thinking about the meaning of life and of
existence are of a very order. And that doesn't even
begin to address the overwhelming sophistication of the paintings. I
(22:06):
would think he was had had an extremely high i Q.
You can say that it clearly he was not only
a deep and thoughtful and intelligent thinker, um, he was
a creative thinker. As you said, a lot of this
is sort of philosophical and um and even existential, and
(22:27):
so we you can already see. I guess I would
say some of the seeds of his creativity early on.
And yet curiously right this didn't help him at all
in working for an art dealer, or working in a shop,
or working maybe it should say, more importantly with other people,
(22:48):
which is where he had so much difficulty. Much like
Vince since early relationships, his relationships with women were even
more unrequited and tragic. He fell in love with a
cousin who rejected him, and courted a neighbor's daughter, who
(23:09):
attempted suicide when both families rejected the match. He mostly
paid women for any companionship. One woman, Seeing Hornick, lived
with him for almost two years. According to letters and
drawings Vincent made of her, she was a very depressed
and unhappy person. One of Vincent's most famous chalk drawings
is of Seen sitting naked with her head in her arms.
(23:32):
It is titled Sorrow. Even she couldn't handle it, even
though he was paying her. Essentially by the day, there
was much love in this human being. I mean, even
though he couldn't make it work. He desperately wanted relationships
with family, with friends, especially with women, both because of
(23:53):
his romantic feelings and because of his libido. He had
a very high libido hyper sexualism. Another sent him of
temporal epilepsy. Absolutely. There was also a peasant woman in
Noonan who with whom he may have had a child.
But she too was was he was paid by him. Uh.
She wasn't a you know, she wasn't a professional prostitute.
(24:14):
But she modeled for him, and she had sex with him,
and he paid her for all of that. She's had
many children. She was quite ill. Uh, she was older
than he was. She was pock marked, she was not attractive,
She was not a courtisan. And yet one of the reasons,
aside from his productivity, that makes him so appealing and
(24:34):
so ultimately lovable, is that he there was a generosity
lurking constantly in him. And he treated this woman seen
as if she as if she were his wife. And
he took care of her when she went to the hospital. Uh,
he took care of her every day. He tried to
make the apartment attractive for her. And when she had
a child who wasn't his child, he treated this child
(24:58):
as if it was his own child. He made a
crib for him, He decorated the apartment for this baby
when it came home from the hospital. He wanted to
be a family. It was a family, and he drew
these darling drawings of this baby in its crib. Even sadder,
she left ultimately, and she and she ultimately left, even
though she predicted that she would. She was so miserable
(25:22):
that she would drown herself one day, and she did.
In I believe it was she drowned herself as as
as she herself predicted. Let's take a quick break here.
When we get back, we'll discuss how Vincent's mental illness
may have contributed to the incredible output of art. In
his final years, after Vincent's failed attempt at the ministry
(25:52):
and a stint in the family business, he decides he
truly wants to be an artist. One symptom of his
temporal lobe epilepsy, his tennasy, he channels towards painting. Despite
there being no outside interest nor ability to sell his paintings.
He becomes obsessed with and driven to develop his painting.
You're wonderful book, you talk about the spark, his spark,
(26:15):
and he came to it partly because it was art
was the family business. So and he worked in a
gallery even though he failed at it. He were in
the Hague office, the London office, and the Paris office
of what was eventually called the Peel when his uncle
sold his Dutch business to the big French emporium. So
he was constantly in contact with art, and independently of that,
(26:40):
he was constantly going to exhibitions, and he had something
like a photographic memory. At a time when people didn't
have art books with color plates, and they certainly didn't
have the internet what we can call up all these images.
Van God could look at a painting and remember subtle
color combinations and passages of brushwork. Years later, and he
(27:03):
didn't choose to choose really to become an artist. In
something that's very touching, THEO, looking for an activity that
could keep his brother busy and help him deal with
his loneliness and his misery, recommended that he start drawing.
So this not only did feel fund his life as
an artist, he is the one who who suggested he
(27:25):
become an artist. That is the one thing he stayed
with for the last ten years of his life. One
of the things I found fascinating is the question of,
you know, what would medication have done for Vincent? Would
it have changed him so completely that it would have
impaired at least the form of art, that the kind
of art he would have made, or his the the
hypomania that allowed him to work as obsessively as he worked.
(27:50):
What you say, if I don't want to characterize it,
is that there perhaps is some some midway point between
sort of average sensibilities and extreme psychological conditions where there's
sort of a sweet spot where the sort of the
benefits of some of the things that we think of
(28:11):
as negative, like depression, can still be harnessed to an
artistic career without being constrained by excessive psychiatric problems. Was
he in that sweet spot just naturally? What are your
thoughts as to what those medications would have done for
(28:32):
both his level of productivity and for the life experiences
that might have led to to the kind of art
that he made. Such an interesting question to ponder. First,
let me say when we think of I mean, certainly
temporal epilepsy should be treated. Leaving unchecked epileptic symptoms alone
(28:54):
causes them to worsen over time, something called the kinetic effect.
And you know, the more more seizure activity you have,
the more seizure activity you have. And certainly it caused
him terrible suffering. However, when you look at what made
Vincent vincent, you know, in terms of his painting and
something we all just marvel at to this day, this
(29:18):
obsessiveness certainly was a feature. I mean, he most of
his painting was done in the last two years of
his life, the last four to two years of his life,
but particularly in the last two years of his life
he painted almost every day. We need to fight this
notion that he was this madman who poured himself out
on his canvases in a kind of delirium. There is
(29:39):
this sort of cliche that I think needs to be
dealt with because because he was too brilliant, he was
too intentional. The paintings were extremely thought right. He spent
hours and hours every single lie. Yes, and I think
you you mentioned two things that are absolutely crucial. Is
(30:00):
this year productivity. You know, the fact that he could
lay down on a campus thousands and thousands of complex
lines and in complex color combinations. Uh. That level of
energy that mania or hypomania I think um uh is
is not unrelated to the fact that he could paint
(30:20):
a complex painting in an entire painting in a single day.
And as you brilliantly say, uh, you know, we think
of him as this revolutionary painter because at a time
when Serat had a whole group of planelists who were
working around him and learning from him, and Monet and
red Noir were painting paintings of the same scene and
very similar styles. Later, we look towards Picasso and Brock
(30:45):
developing analytical Cubism together, so much so that it's a
little bit hard for outsiders to sometimes distinguish a Brock
from a Picasso from that period. Van go is out
there creating his own thing. And I actually thought long
and hard about what you said, and it does seem
(31:05):
to me quite possible. The late landscapes from the last
seventy days of his life become increasingly abstract. One wonders
if he hadn't died at age thirty seven as a
young Youngish man. Um, you know, if he'd only had
two more years of this very short career, or let
alone ten more years or twenty, what what would the
(31:27):
art of become? It was becoming abstracts so quickly. And
I intrigued by the notion not not that he painted painted,
what that that when he was looking at this landscape,
he saw it as he put it on the canvas.
I think there was a thoughtful form of of abstraction
that was going on, a calculated abstraction that was going
(31:50):
on in the transposition from the nature that he saw
at that moment to the canvas. Maybe that process of
seeing in a distorted fashion during the near psychotic episodes
might have liberated him to be more audacious, to be
looser and freer with the imagery he was creating when
(32:12):
he was completely lucid. Absolutely entirely possible that he could
be looking and seeing you know, reality what he is seeing,
but that he would be impacted by the memory of
of visual hallucinations. It is important to know that during
his most ill periods, when he was you know, in
the beginning of hospitalizations or certain you know times, what
(32:33):
he clearly was not doing well, he did not paint.
So he was not able to be productive at his
his most ill moments. But other than that, he was
incredibly productive. And we do know that patients do have
memories for you know, it's recorded as as a memory,
that is, one may have access to that during ill periods. Hallucinations,
(32:57):
auditory or visual psychotic thoughts, delusions can be remembered and
and can be let's say used, you know, whether that's
in the painting format or written format. So it does
seem plausible. Obviously we were conjecturing we can't know, we
can't ask him, so we we don't know. But these
(33:20):
things collectively, I think about, as you know, the hardwired
let's say strength that can be a part and parcel
of a psychiatric illness like temporal ob epilepsy, where it's
possible that these things are part of what made vincent,
(33:40):
you know, the the incredible, original, yeah, creative, productive, you
know artists that you know, we revere. Towards the premature
end of Vincent's life, his continued mood and relationship struggles,
(34:02):
he produced many paintings and there was just the hint
of some recognition of their promise. He sold one painting
while still alive. But these later paintings, amongst them Starry Night,
are his most incredible work. While there is some debate
about the specifics, we do know that on July, at
the age of only thirty seven, Vincent van Gogh died
(34:24):
of a gunshot wound. Of course, the tragic thing, right
for for Vincent is that he was not recognized that
way in his life and the lords. It was really
not until his death that others began to note. You know,
(34:45):
sometimes genius isn't recognized in the moment, right well, especially
if it's if it's as original as it was. That
was the problem is even his own brother Theo, not
until after Vincent died. There it was just beginning to
be seen. Even Claude Monet and Tayo van Reislberg saw
some paintings by Vincent at an exhibition in Brussels months
(35:07):
before he died and and thought and said to others, boy,
this is very interesting. There's something very interesting going on there.
So they were beginning to see it. But because it
didn't look like the art that we knew, people couldn't
and and including his brother THEO, until the very end,
uh didn't see it there. Now the revolution has happened,
(35:27):
and we all, you know, we can look at these
things and see them for what they are. What's astonishing
to me is that when you look at the at
the great late paintings, it is one massively brilliant color
combination after another, and one perfect brilliant, epic brushstroke after another.
(35:48):
And and this comes from somewhere, of course, you know,
the brain at the center of it all. It's part
of why I do wonder if some of what was
happening in his brain I either visual hallucinations. You know,
you know, we know that creativity UM has everything to
do with imagination. And we know that imagination occurs in
(36:12):
an area of the brain called the default network what
we were calling it now UM. And we know that
it's the free flowing of thoughts, unencumbered, disinhibited, frequent thoughts,
many many, many thoughts means some of them. Some of
those divergent thoughts will turn out to be amazing ones.
Let's say you're genious ones if you are disinhibited enough
(36:37):
but still organized enough to function. What informed his the
thoughts and his default network where their visual hallucinations and
other portions of the brain that he could harness and
utilize to come up with these out of the box
ideas that, as you say, are these putting together of
colors and brushstrokes and ways that no one was doing
(36:59):
had not been seen before. It's it's fascinating to ponder.
That's the other thing that we we we haven't really
discussed fully, and that is the fact that he triumphed
over his own misery. And these paintings are so joyful.
There's some of the most joyful paintings ever done. And
I think there's something truly magical about the fact that
(37:20):
he pulled out of this life of misery, not a brooding, difficult, somber,
gloomy even art form um as other artists did, but
instead these joyful images of flowers and rolling hills and
bright colors and this charming drawing and painting style, so
(37:44):
much charm, so much beauty, so much joy out of
so much misery. What we see in that right, which
I think is part of what resonates so much for
all of us viewing, is this demonstration of incredible resilience
which all of us would like some of right to
be able to manage no matter what is going on,
(38:07):
and as you said, triumph and overcome, and he sort
of displays that through his paintings and his ability also
to paint in such a way to make us so
emotionally touched. Right, They're so evocative, whether it be joy
or sadness sometimes or just sort of existential wonder at
(38:30):
nature in the world, and his ability to do that
to us, to you know, he in his life he
couldn't connect and stay connected to others, but he connects
to us. And he talked about wanting to console people
through his art, and he did it. It's truly one
(38:50):
of the great triumphs I think of the human spirit.
And I think it's one reason why so many people
love his art so much. It isn't just the beauty
and the brilliant colors and the charming drawing. It's it
is this sense of triumph over adversity, the sense of resilience,
and this sense of connection with us all. And the
(39:11):
fact that these connections have been created by a man
who couldn't connect with people in his own lifetime is
something that we take in even unconsciously, is something that
we can hope for in our own lives, that we
can make connections with people even when those connections seem difficult,
That we two can triumph over adversity and be productive
(39:34):
even in our difficult moments. I think you know it
sends a subliminal message to us all that adds to
the incredible artistic experience that we have in front of
one of his paintings. Well, that wraps things up for
(39:56):
this episode. Thanks for joining me today and a special
thanks just even knife. You can get his book Ben
Go The Life wherever books are sold. If you're interested
in more information about the people we discussed today, you
can check out my book The Power of Different The
Link between Disorder and Genius. Also make sure to follow
me on Twitter at doctor Gayl Saltz or at Personalogy
(40:17):
m D until next time. Personology is a production of
I Heart Radio. The executive producers are doctor Gayl Saltz
and Tyler Klang. The supervising producer is Dylan Fagan. The
associate producer is Lowell Berlanti, Editing music and mixing by
(40:39):
Lowell Berlante. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit
the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts.
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