Van Gogh: The Asylum Year, by Edwin Mullins
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Van Gogh: The Asylum Year, by Edwin Mullins
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On May 8, 1889, Vincent van Gogh committed himself to the Saint Paul Asylum in Saint-Rémy, an isolated estate where he remained as a voluntary patient for a full year. Throughout this time, Van Gogh kept up a continuous correspondence with his brother Theo about his art, mental condition, hopes, and ambitions, along with his despair and sense of failure. His asylum year was Van Gogh’s most raw and desperate period, yet also his most creative, producing nearly a masterpiece a day. He painted many of his most famous works at the asylum, such as The Round of the Prisoners, Sorrowing Old Man, and Starry Night. In Van Gogh: The Asylum Year, Edwin Mullins offers a month-by-month account of that crucial penultimate chapter in Van Gogh’s life. Mullins examines this period as a self-contained episode, unique within the history of Van Gogh's artistic genius. Containing an excellent variety of paintings and sketches from that year, correspondence with his brother, and extensive biographical and historical material, this book is a magnificent study of this most impassioned and prolific year.
Van Gogh: The Asylum Year, by Edwin Mullins - Amazon Sales Rank: #1108919 in Books
- Published on: 2015-05-15
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.50" h x .70" w x 6.75" l, .58 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 144 pages
Van Gogh: The Asylum Year, by Edwin Mullins About the Author Edwin Mullins is an author and broadcaster who has served as the art critic for the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph.
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9 of 11 people found the following review helpful. Van Gogh at St.-Rémy By Kenneth Hughes Edwin Mullins is a prolific English novelist and writer on culturally related themes, especially on art and art history, about which he has scripted and presented more than a hundred documentary films for British television. His writings are very eclectic, ranging from Roman Provence to the Cornish painter Alfred Wallace, and has included books on Braque and “The Painted Witch,” a somewhat controversial—and now dated— study of the way Western artists have depicted women’s sexuality (see the reviews on this website). He is clearly a popularizer, but very much in the positive sense of that word, meaning that although his writing is informed by wide reading and scholarship, he is not confined by the strictures of professional art historical presentation. He is more in the company of those knowledgeable but non-academic interpreters who seek a wide and general public and who seem to thrive in the UK, in the venerable tradition of Kenneth Clark or, more recently, of Jonathan Jones (“The Lost Battles”) and Martin Gayford (“The Yellow House”). In fact, Mr. Mullins’s latest book, his examination of the period between May 1889 and May 1890, which van Gogh spent in voluntary confinement in the psychiatric asylum of Dr. Théophile Peyron near St.-Rémy-de-Provence, follows neatly on Mr. Gayford’s book on the “nine turbulent weeks” in late 1888, during which he and Gauguin tried to live together in Arles and which ended in such spectacular failure and in van Gogh’s first mental breakdown. In a postscript, the author writes that he has intended his book “to explore the relationship between his illness, his isolation [in the asylum] and his art” (188). Nevertheless, it is a difficult book to classify. It takes no cognizance of previous writing on van Gogh except in the most general way (“some scholars have said that . . .”); in fact, there is not a single footnote in the whole volume. Its interpretations of the asylum year paintings are largely dependent (as the author acknowledges) on Ronald Pickvance’s catalogue for the 1986-87 exhibition “Van Gogh in St-Rémy and Auvers” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and although he mentions the most recent van Gogh biography by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, he unquestioningly holds to the theory that the artist died by his own hand and does not even mention the alternative possibility they have put forth. So his book is not intended to enter into any dialogue with other writers or to advance any new interpretations of Vincent’s painting during that year. On the other hand, it is also not a meditation or personal reckoning; the narration is in the third person, and Mr. Mullins is nowhere in sight, although his predilections are apparent in the artwork he singles out for particular attention. I believe it is most useful to think of it as a resumé or synthesis of information pertaining to that year, and in subjecting that one narrow time span to particular scrutiny, the author is able to make more specific observations than those that emerge when the period is treated, as is common, “in rather general terms as a single episode along a dramatic path to self-destruction” (186).In order to examine that year in close-up, the author makes the obvious division into twelve monthly chapters, from the May of Vincent’s admission to the May of his discharge a year later. His procedure is to look closely at van Gogh’s correspondence to his brother, mother, sister, and friends and at the asylum records to ascertain his mental state at any given time and to correlate that state with the style of the paintings he was doing. In the enclosed confines of the asylum, Mr. Mullins contends, what were once “paintings of the eye” became increasingly “paintings of the mind” (49). And so the correlation is established: when an “attack” of whatever it was that periodically assailed him is immanent, his painting takes on the turbulence of a “Starry Night”; but once recovered, his painting is less violent; on Dec. 19, 1899, for example, he can explain his decision to give up “exaggerations” and heavy impasto because he feels calmer, and the author points to this as a “direct connection between his style of painting and his state of mind” (125). But what is the cause of the breakdowns? In both July and December, they “had occurred immediately after he had been working on a landscape in the midst of a roaring gale, the strain of which reveals itself in the turbulent style of both the paintings he was working on, as well as precipitating the breakdown that followed” (132). That sentence is syntactically a bit slippery, but I think what it says is that painting a landscape in high wind twice led van Gogh to a mental breakdown, and if that is indeed what it says, then we are deep in the land of amateur psychology as well as committed to the fallacy of a “post hoc ergo propter hoc” explanation. What about the two “attacks” he suffered after going back to Arles? “If revisiting his old haunts in Arles precipitated these attacks, it was the demands of actually painting the landscape which most often tipped him over” (148). So the visits “precipitate” the attacks, but it is the actual painting that brings them on? Somehow this all seems too pat. And we are in naive psychological territory also: the author quotes a statement van Gogh made to an inquirer: “The emotions that take hold of me when I am confronted by nature can sometimes lead me to a state of total collapse, resulting in a period of several weeks in which I am incapable of doing any work,” and he calls this “the clearest summary we have of what brought about the attacks” that assailed him (148). But, as it emerges from his letters, van Gogh as often as not had no idea what had happened to him; on his second visit to Arles, he was found wandering about the streets with no knowledge of who or where he was, and it would be extremely naive of us to accept his own explanations at face value. Of course we can understand van Gogh’s desperate desire to find an explanation for what was happening to his mind, because he was terrified of what that might be, and we can excuse his clutching at straws to find one. But the same excuse can not apply to those who are attempting to interpret him. Mr. Mullins is certainly right that there is some correlation between van Gogh’s painting and his mental state, and he has done well to point to the alignment of the tranquil style with the periods of rationality and the turbulent style with the accesses of derangement. A case in point is December 23, 1889, the anniversary of his first breakdown, when he writes separately to his mother and sister Wil. He had recently finished the tranquil scene of “Women Picking Olives,” which he intended as a gift for them, and briefly describes it to Wil. To his mother he describes the canvas he is currently working on, “The Ravine,” an example of the turbulent style, with rushing torrent and dramatic rocks, painted in heavy black outlines and swirling brushstrokes meant to evoke the violence and instability of nature. And on the next day, he suffered the third of his attacks, the second in St.-Rémy. But was the attack “caused” by the painting, or by describing the painting, or by the recollection of the first attack the year before? I don’t think we can ever know. Some kind of correlation between his painting and his mental state surely exists, but to try to be more specific than that is, I believe, necessarily to flounder in speculation. Mr. Mullins’s close examination of this year is not conclusive, of course, as probably no exploration of the relationship between illness and art can be, but it does illuminate what an extraordinary period that was in the artist’s short life. Just reading the letters, obviously written during his more rational periods, one can forget how very seriously deranged van Gogh was at times. But, as the author emphasizes, there were weeks when he was banned from working in his asylum studio for fear that he would poison himself by ingesting his paints and drinking the turpentine, lamp-oil and ink, as he had already attempted, and days when he simply lay semi-catatonic on his bed howling at visions or nightmares. In total, there were about four months of that year when he was either not permitted or mentally unable to work, and he nevertheless produced around 150 paintings, including the great series of cypresses and olive groves and the many interpretations of Millet. A number of these are reproduced; in general, the book is nicely illustrated with representative paintings, most of which are cropped and bled but very vividly presented, and some drawings and photographs. As mentioned, there are no notes; nor is there any bibliography or other apparatus besides an index of names and paintings. This is not a volume intended for scholars or students of art history, but for the many devotees of van Gogh’s painting, it can be a welcome compendium of information about the penultimate period of his life.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. Very interesting read, a new view By Cynthia Schaefer Insightful and sensitive towards often harsh subject matter; allowed for empathetic look at the time period in which Van Gogh was so prolific despite his limitations
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. A must have for Van Gogh aficionados By mourning dove This book was so much more than I hoped. It was beautifully designed and so well written. I'm not a fan of the expression "a must have", but in this case it really fits!
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