All language subtitles for Art on the BBC S02E02 Van Gogh - Life and Art

Ever since the earliest programmes
flickered onto our screens,

film-makers, presenters and experts
have all turned to television

to bring art out of museums
and galleries

and into our living rooms.

Now, this may seem rather vulgar.

Quite right, it is.

As the great masters became
available to millions

instead of hundreds,
programme-makers found

new ways for us
to appreciate them,

from the utterly daft...

GLASS SHATTERS

FummsbowotaazaaUu po.

..to the downright astonishing.

That's extraordinary!

With over 60 years of glorious
BBC archive to explore, I'm going

to examine the life and legacy
of a man who has become the very

embodiment of the tortured artist -
Vincent van Gogh.

Van Gogh was 37
when he shot himself,

but in the last four years
of his life,

he'd change the history of art.

Whether painting
some of the world's

most beloved works...

It was as if he was looking
at the sun itself

when he looked at the sunflowers.

..or using colour in ways
that changed art forever...

A great ejaculation of emotional
energy, not to mention paint.

..programme-makers have tried
to pinpoint where

he found his inspiration...

Excuse me. Yes? Is this Paris?

It is, yes. Would you explain the
principles of impressionism to me?

..and cast some of our greatest
actors to help us

understand his complex psyche,

helping create the myth
of the tortured artist

and giving us a unique window

into the mind of one of the world's
most famous painters.

I wouldn't exactly
have chosen madness,

but once one has something like
that, one can't catch it any more.

I've selected what I think
are the best moments to tell

the television history
of a man completely overlooked

in his lifetime.

He's my favourite artist
and he is someone who has touched

the lives of millions of people
around the globe.

It's easy to be attracted
to the story of Vincent van Gogh.

He only started painting at 27,

sold virtually nothing
during his lifetime,

then tragically took his own life
just ten years later.

But in that one decade,
van Gogh produced a lifetime's work.

What also sets Vincent apart are the
hundreds of letters he left behind.

They have allowed us to fall in love
with van Gogh, the man,

as well as the artist.

I'm obsessive about studying

the life and work
of Vincent van Gogh,

and I'm really interested to explore
how programme-makers have treated

his story over the decades -

particularly how they've dealt
with the idea of his mental health.

Before I get stuck in
exploring Vincent's psyche,

let's just clear one thing up -
how to pronounce his name.

I am Vincent van Goch.

You are Vincent van Goff.

Vincent van Go.

Goch. I like Goch. I know.

I always say van Goff.

The Americans say van Go.

And the Dutch say van Goch,

which I can't say.

He signed it Vincent.

I'm going with van Goff.

The first sighting of Vincent's work
on the BBC was back in 1955.

These are his paintings arriving
for an exhibition in Manchester.

Despite the terrifyingly
casual handling,

the paintings survived intact,
and the public flocked to see them.

Although the magic is a little bit
lost in black-and-white.

Vincent's paintings really came
alive on TV with

the arrival of colour.

But what's striking is how even
the earliest films are already

preoccupied with his tortured life.

So, when we read of the great price
that is paid for a van Gogh,

or hear how much they mean
to people to go to see them

in the big exhibitions
and galleries,

or perhaps a reproduction
of the Sunflowers,

because it means much to them,

we should remember
that the real price

of these paintings is the price
of a life -

the life of a man who suffered much

and who, in his lifetime,
sold only one painting.

He had so many things to say,
and that we have those things.

It's the biography with the work.

The two go together,

and we can't separate
the biography from the work.

Vincent was born in Holland in 1853,
the son of a cleric,

and spent most of his career
in France,

but he has become so famous
that, over the decades,

BBC film-makers have wanted
to remind us

of Britain's own claim to Vincent,

as a result of his time in London
as a trainee art dealer.

Did you have a happy childhood?

No, I was a lonely child
with bouts of melancholia

which nobody could fathom.

What a marvellous hat. Yes.

One really cannot be
in London without one.

This 1975 documentary retraced
the artist's first steps in England.

"It will be quite a different life
for me in London,

"as I shall probably have to live
alone in rooms.

"I shall have to take care
of many things

"I don't have to worry about now.

"I am looking forward very much
to seeing London."

The young man - not quite 20 -

who wrote those words
to his brother in 1873

was Vincent van Gogh.

And this is where he lived -
87 Hackford Road, Brixton.

Though Vincent hadn't begun
to paint,

I agree with the film's argument
that his short stay in London

awakened a new creative
and social conscience.

Each week, van Gogh would make
an expedition to the offices

of The Illustrated London News

and The Graphic
to admire the latest issue.

The outstanding social realist
among the artists van Gogh admired

was Luke Fildes.

This engraving,
Houseless And Hungry,

won Fildes a commission

to illustrate Dickens's
last and unfinished novel,

Edwin Drood.

Fildes had visited Dickens
at his home, Gads Hill,

on the day of his death in 1870.

And the outcome of that visit
was a famous drawing -

The Empty Chair.

Van Gogh found it deeply moving.

"Empty chairs.

"There are many of them.

"There will be even more."

It's extraordinary how much
of the future van Gogh is

rooted in this early love of English
literature and English illustration.

He wrote of Dickens,

"There is no writer
who is more of a painter

"and a black-and-white artist.

"His figures are resurrections."

I mean, it's only natural that
we would want to take Vincent to

be our own artist.

Was Vincent van Gogh, the artist,
born in Britain? No,

but there were definitely
some early stirrings here.

By 2006, programme-making
could be grittier and darker.

Simon Schama explored the realities

of Vincent's life
in London's underbelly.

It was in the Victorian gaslight
that the real Vincent

started to emerge.

Amidst the grime and grit
of Disraeli's London,

the starchy young Dutchman
rediscovered Jesus.

It is an old faith, and it is
a good faith that our life...

He appointed himself
as a missionary to the destitute,

and as he wore out shoe leather
tramping past the dispossessed,

the drunks and the whores,

Vincent grew to despise
the pygmy world of the galleries.

What he wanted to be was a preacher.

So, St Vincent The Good
abandon the plush red carpets

and set off in search of captives
starved for light.

And who is Jesus?

He is the great man of sorrows
who knows our ills.

Vincent headed to Belgium, getting
a job preaching to coal miners.

And God wills that,
in imitation of Christ,

man should live humbly and go
on the journey of his life -

not reaching for the sky, but...

..but adapting himself
to them Earth below.

HE COUGHS

The 1990s were a boom decade
for BBC docudrama,

and Omniverse used Vincent's
missionary days as a way to

dramatise the early signs
of a troubled mind.

For... For He shall cover thee
with his feathers.

Perhaps they were little
too dramatic.

I'm sorry.

It was the one period
in van Gogh's life when

he really appeared an obsessive
to outsiders,

and he found it
very difficult to

communicate with the miners, but I
suspect he didn't behave like that.

He does talk in the letters
about having visited a coal mine,

but it wasn't to preach,

so in fact I think that clip is
good drama but not necessarily true.

Vincent's missionary work
came to an end after

he was sacked in Belgium.

He moved back to Holland,
where something monumental began -

Vincent started to paint.

As Andrew Graham Dixon discovered,
the empathy towards the poor

and destitute that Vincent
had found in England

was now translated into his art.

In Holland, he chose again
to settle among the rural poor,

but this time not to preach
to his subjects but to paint them.

It's a strange paradox
that Vincent van Gogh,

who painted some of
the most radiant,

light-filled paintings in the whole
history of art, should have

begun - this is his first major
ambitious figure painting -

with a work that is so...

..dark, so murky,
so copper-coloured.

It's called The Potato Eaters,
and what you first notice about it

is this pervasive drabness.

The picture was greatly criticised.

The hands were
said to be too gnarled,

the arms too long,

the faces too caricatured,

the eyes too bulging,

the noses too much like potatoes.

But it was all intentional.
Van Gogh wanted us

to feel that those hands,
reaching into that plate of cubed

potatoes, had dug those potatoes up
from the earth, those hands

had been shaped, misshapen,
by all that manual labour.

This was really
the culmination of his early

years as a painter of peasants
and people who were suffering.

It was a work that
couldn't easily be sold.

I mean, who wanted
a picture of those peasants

in their miserable home,
eating ghastly potatoes

and too much strong coffee?

Theo, Vincent's brother, knew this,
and kept asking him in letters,

"Will you please lighten,
lighten your palette?"

In Power Of Art,

Simon Schama focuses more intently
on Vincent's artistic philosophy,

the narrowing gap between
the painter and his subject matter.

The dark, thick colour was chosen
not just for pictorial effect

but, you might say,
philosophically to say something.

And that something isn't meant
to be charmingly rustic.

I mean, how brown can you get?

This is manure brown,
the grey-brown, as he explained,

of dusty spuds
before they've been rinsed.

Lost in total identification,
van Gogh paints like a clod,

the heavy, loaded brush
doing its own manual labour.

The picture seems trowelled and dug
rather than painted.

There's total union
between painter and subject.

It's all in the hands.

I've tried to bring out the idea
that these people eating

potatoes by the light of their lamp
have dug the earth with

the self-same hands
that they're putting into the dish.

Manual labour!
A meal honestly earned.

Anyone who wants to paint peasants
looking namby-pamby

had best suit himself.

Vincent had found
his philosophy of art.

In the two years he spent
in rural Holland,

he completed nearly 200 paintings.
But, let's be honest,

they're not what we think of
as vintage van Gogh.

Van Gogh is renowned for
his thick, generous use of colour.

Think of those bright wheatfields,
the heady sunflowers,

the blazing sunshine
that emanates from his landscapes.

But just where he found the source
of inspiration for his use

of colour has been debated
for decades.

In 1886, Vincent moved to Paris,

hoping to learn more about his craft
from other artists.

The most important
Parisian painters of the day were

the Impressionists,
famously obsessed with colour.

And their influence on Vincent
has certainly not been

overlooked on screen.

Yes? Excuse me... Yes?
Is this Paris? It is, yes.

Would you explain the principles
of Impressionism to me?

Impressionism is essentially
the capturing of light -

the ephemeral colours
in the sky, for example,

a flash of sunlight on a river
at dusk. Thank you.

And, erm, complementary colours?
When mixed,

we discover that the most opposite
of colours in the spectrum are in

fact the most complementary -
red and green, for example,

blue and orange - and when placed
side by side, both colours will

seem strengthened and intensified
and even convey feelings.

So...the feelings of the painter can
be expressed through the colours?

Perhaps one day...

..artists will only paint...

..colours!

Nothing but colour!

Thank you very much.

As well as featuring
some pretty bad teeth,

the 1990 Omnibus was having
some serious fun with dramatic form.

But it's still a pretty conventional
take on the influence

of the Impressionists.

By 2006, Simon Schama was
challenging that influence.

The usual story is the Dutch frog
kissed by Impressionism

and turned into
the prince of colour painting.

Vincent and his art
at last lightened up.

Away with the northern murk,
bring on the tubes of carmine,

cobalt and chrome yellow.

It's not all wrong. Vincent does
get colour, becomes addicted to it,

consuming its brilliance,
disgorging it onto the canvas.

And for a while, he does

what you're supposed to do
as a trainee Impressionist.

Down by the river at Asnieres, trap
the light and you've got the point.

So everything is speckled
and freckled, dappled and mottled.

Right, then.
It's Pissarro on Monday.

Look at the colour-coded dots
in this restaurant

and you'll see him doing
his pointillist homework.

Seurat on Tuesday.

Old Vincent could do it, all right,

but there was something
altogether too decorative

about the Impressionists, marinading
the meat of human existence

in the rinse of their luminescence.

There's a very slight,
perhaps not pejorative,

look at Impressionist subject matter
that they were just a bit pretty,

a bit decorative,
they were not serious.

And in Vincent's case, he was
trying not to do simply decorative

works, he was trying to do
something more grand, more serious,

something with more gravitas.

The other thing about van Gogh's
colour is that it provides

vibrant visual material.

In February 1888, he relocated
to Arles in the South of France.

Not only is Provence great to visit
for painters -

and, of course, programme makers -

but the artworks Vincent created
there have become fan favourites.

POSH ACCENT: Now let us look
at the "sunflahrs".

How often do we see
a bunch of "flahrs"?

And do they seem just that -
a bunch of "flahrs"?

Yellow is a cheerful colour,
and to van Gogh it was

the colour of light
and therefore of life and of love.

I think he means "flowers".

But to me,
he's also missing something.

30 years later, Andrew Graham-Dixon
takes Vincent's use of colour

beyond petals
to the divine nature of light.

Van Gogh had left Holland
simply because it was too gloomy

for an artist trying to find God,

trying to find some sense of
transcendence in the natural world.

Too much rain, too much shadow,
too much darkness.

That's why he went
to the South of France.

In the South of France,
he felt illuminated by the sun.

He said, "Suddenly,
nature's colours sing to me."

He felt that he'd never seen
the colours of nature before.

He felt that he'd found
what he was looking for,

and I think the sunflower was so
important to him because it was

a plant that seemed to him to have
somehow taken into itself,

kept, preserved all that radiance,
all that colour.

It was as if he was looking
at the sun itself

when he looked at these blooms.

And he painted these pictures
in a kind of storm of enthusiasm.

Simon Schama continues the study

of light in another of
Vincent's paintings, The Sower,

and compares it with an earlier
artist's version of the same subject

to reveal just how far he was
pushing the boundaries of colour.

It's his take on an older painting
by Jean-Francois Millet.

Vincent's version echoes Millet's
lyrical anthem to noble toil.

But Millet's sower is rooted
to the soil, while van Gogh's

floats on a carpet of brilliance,

like Jesus walking on water.

A scene of drudgery is dissolved
into the fertility miracle

that's being enacted
beneath a high-wattage sun.

Van Gogh described the paintings
that really worked for him

as a "jouissance" -
the French for "orgasm".

And he really did mean that -

a great ejaculation of emotional
energy, not to mention paint.

It was actually in Provence,
not Paris, that he

really made his breakthrough, when
he was isolated from other artists.

Perhaps if he'd been in Paris,
surrounded by everyone else,

he just would have been copying.

But he went off to Provence, and he
was working by himself, and that's

the period when he really developed
to be the van Gogh that we love.

The light in the South of France
was at least as strong an influence

on Vincent's colour
as the Impressionists.

But in 2013, Waldemar Januszczak
flipped that thought on its head.

Actually, night has turned out to be

one of art's most productive
times of day.

Yes, you can't see as much
in the dark, but what you can see

has extra drama to it,
mystery, poetry and even madness.

# Here comes the night... #

Taking us to the painting
of the Yellow House, where Vincent

lived in Arles, he reveals
something rather surprising.

Vincent also painted
the outside of it.

But if you look carefully
at the road in front of the house,

you can see a big mound
going down the middle.

Roadworks. Van Gogh
is painting roadworks. Why?

Because these roadworks are special.

They're putting in the gas.

Just after he arrived in Arles,
the town was connected to gas,

and gas lighting was put in
for the first time.

# Catch a falling star
and put it in your pocket... #

Suddenly, Arles was lit up at night.
This twinkling cafe exterior shows

the new gas lighting in action,
conquering the night.

# Save it for a rainy day... #

In 1980, the series One Hundred
Great Paintings took a different

tack on the night-time masterpiece,

giving free rein
to the dapper David Hockney,

an energetic look at an old master.

He began to be fascinated

by artificial light
of a little town at night.

This particular picture, it's based
on the idea of contrasting

two colours - yellow and blue.

And I don't know whether
the colour-TV camera can pick up

all the yellows that are there,
but there's quite a number.

I'll tell you, there must be
certainly four or five

different yellows and then three
or four different green-yellows.

If you begin to half-close
your eyes, even from myself here,

he would, when he's painting
the picture...

People tend to screw up their face
like that to sometimes see clearly.

The effect is, I think,
stunning, it is real.

And yet, when you step back
and you look at all that paint,

it's luscious, delightful,
marvellous, fresh.

Wonderful. It's fabulous, actually.

Here is an artist
talking about an artist,

and it's different
from what a critic might say.

An artist is looking at an artist's
work in terms of his own practice

or her own practice, so is thinking
in that kind of critical way.

And the way he talked about
the painting was the way

that, certainly,
van Gogh would understand.

He knew what he'd done
with those paints, which,

normally speaking,
you might not recognise.

But an artist understood that,
and of course

he therefore understood
the success of the painting.

Living in Arles, over the course
of just eight months

Vincent completed
over 100 paintings.

It was this period
that would later make

the man, as well as his art,
a television star.

Yes! Exactly like that.

Good evening! Does the name
Vincent van Gogh ring a bell?

Don't mention that man to me!
Excuse me!

But by October 1888,
change was in the air.

Vincent was getting a flatmate
in the Yellow House -

a fellow painter
that he hugely admired...

Where's the Dutchman?

I'm here.

..the not-exactly-modest
Paul Gauguin.

Paul Gauguin.

The collaboration, if we can even
call it that, between van Gogh

and the French artist Paul Gauguin
has become the stuff of legend.

Their encounter, which lasted
for barely two months,

has given us some
really dramatic TV moments.

Vincent first met
Paul Gauguin in Paris.

Now he convinced the painter
he so admired to come to the

South of France
on his brother Theo's dime.

The BBC has spent decades portraying

this period
from every possible angle.

And, as you might expect,
1990's Omnibus pumps up the drama.

As I see it,
there's too much modelling.

Too much modelling?
Too much facial modelling!

When Gauguin arrives in Arles,
being five years senior

and having the experience
that he's had, van Gogh

will be very slightly deferential
towards him, as one might.

Look at this. Hm? Look at it!

How can you paint in this? Hm?

But then Gauguin says things to van
Gogh like, "Look at your paintbox.

"What a mess! You haven't put
the tops back on the tubes.

"You've squeezed from the middle,
not from the bottom."

I think Paul Gauguin is
immensely egotistical, but he's

not of the same sort of fragile
mental state that Vincent is.

He's quite a strong character.

Ohhh! My God!

You cook like you paint. You bung
it all in and hope for the best!

Well, I suppose on film
people either have to be good guys

or bad guys, so it's quite tempting
for film-makers to portray

those two men
in those different ways.

And if one's trying to convey
what happened in the Yellow House

in that confined space
over that two-month period,

it's very tempting
to make Gauguin into an ogre.

25 years later,

Jeremy Paxman travelled to Arles
to revisit the relationship,

taking the time to set up Vincent's
grand vision for the Yellow House.

The underdog painter
becomes less of a victim.

They lived there in a sort of
commune or a medieval guild -

or, as he put it, like a band
of Japanese Buddhist monks.

And his art-dealer brother, Theo,

would feed them and clothe them

and give them canvases and paint,

and the artists would just create.

Vincent spent weeks
writing to Gauguin, persuading him

to join him in his utopian idea.

The sunflowers were painted
to decorate Gauguin's bedroom.

He bought 12 wicker chairs
for the brother artists

and one ornate chair
for Gauguin himself, whose age

and success meant he would be the
Father Superior in their community.

But the real Gauguin
couldn't have been more different to

Vincent's monkish ideal -
a canny ex-banker,

self-publicist and serial adulterer.

Paxman still sees the relationship
as fundamentally unequal,

with Gauguin in the dominant role.

Simon Schama changes the angle,

seeing both men as artists first
and housemates second.

And he's more concerned with
how Gauguin's arrival

affected Vincent's painting.

Then Gauguin arrived,
and the summer of visions was over.

TRAIN WHISTLE BLOWS

At first, Gauguin found
the friendly competition amusing

and even creatively challenging.

But the result was just to point out
the differences between them.

Here's what Vincent does
with an excursion to

a vineyard at the time
of the grape harvest -

a rush of energy
through the painting,

lots of bending and picking
under that great sun god,

the brush jiggling in what he called
his "best spermatic manner".

And here's Paul's take on
rural labour, called In The Heat -

a drowsy, heavy moment
with two figures,

one of which is a pig, a half-naked
woman,

her arms stained to the elbows
with red grape juice,

the shadow of her big breasts
outlined,

as though wanting
the laziest of massages,

which the painter duly supplies
with his brushes.

It wasn't just a matter of
technique or subject matter.

Their philosophies of art
were diametrically opposed.

For Gauguin, art was just
a swim in pure sensation.

"Don't sweat it," he once crushingly
said. "It's just a dream."

But for Vincent van Gogh,
there was no joy without sweat.

The ride his art gave you was
into the world, not away from it.

In the last decade,
film-makers have increasingly

turned to personal primary sources.

In Painted With Words, Alan Yentob
used the letters of both

van Gogh and Gauguin
to conjure their voices...

..and, in an early TV role, cast
Benedict Cumberbatch as Vincent.

In his steady hands,

the relationship looks very
different, and not so one-sided.

Gauguin, in spite of himself...

HE CHUCKLES

..and in spite of me...

..has proved to me a little it was
time to change things a bit.

I'm now working from memory.

And all my earlier studies will
still be useful for that work,

as they will remind me of
former things that I have seen.

And one of these was a subject
he painted again and again -

the sower. Now the influence
of Gauguin can clearly be seen.

An immense lemon-yellow disc
for the sun.

Green-yellow sky with pink clouds.

The field is violet, the sower
and the tree Prussian blue.

But it wasn't long before tensions
developed between the two artists.

Gauguin's work was
selling well in Paris.

Vincent still couldn't find buyers.

He started to drink heavily again.

His behaviour was becoming
odder and odder.

And after just eight weeks, Gauguin
became increasingly exasperated.

In general, Vincent and myself
do not see eye to eye,

particularly on painting.

Ah, he likes my pictures very much,
but when I'm painting them,

he criticises me for this and that.

Vincent and I can absolutely not
live side by side without trouble.

A few days later, the two artists
got into a heated argument.

It was so bizarre
I couldn't take it.

He even asked me,
"Are you going to leave?"

When I heard behind me a familiar
step - short, quick, irregular -

I turned around in that instant,
as Vincent rushed towards me,

an open razor in hand.

Of course, there's one episode
that's become more famous

than any other in van Gogh's life.

A few days before Christmas, he took
his razor and he sliced off his ear.

This has come to overshadow
the rest of his life story,

and sometimes even his paintings.

And to a large extent, the blame for
this lies with the 1956 Hollywood

classic Lust For Life,

with Kirk Douglas
in the throes of impassioned rage.

DRAMATIC MUSIC

Well, Lust For Life,
with all its terrific music,

really portrays van Gogh
with full-blown Hollywood drama.

As for the ear-cutting scene,
you couldn't get more melodramatic.

MUSIC CONTINUES

SILENCE

VAN GOGH SCREAMS

We don't actually see
the ear being cut off,

but there's a sort of
moment of silence.

And I think for subsequent
film-makers it's always been

a challenge on how to portray
that terrible moment.

Because Hollywood wanted
to make this full-blown drama

and melodrama, I think
it's responsible for an awful

lot of the myth
of the tortured artist.

For decades, film-makers followed
Lust For Life in obsessing

over the incident, a moment of drama
directors could go wild with

and let loose their creative vision.

But in 2010, Painted With Words
skipped the blood and gore

and went straight to
the padded cell...

DOOR SLAMS SHUT

..finding drama in
Vincent's reaction instead.

I wouldn't exactly have chosen
madness, had there been a choice.

But once one has something like
that, one can't catch it any more.

But while some programmes had a
field day with the self-mutilation,

others weren't so sure.

SIMON SCHAMA: Ask anyone, "Who's
your idea of the tortured artist,

"the mad genius?", chances are
you'll get one answer and just one

answer - "Vincent van Gogh.
Sliced his ear off, didn't he?"

Well, no, actually, he didn't.

What he did do was cut off
a fleshy chunk of ear lobe.

Oh, I know, I know, that's enough
to suggest he is barmy, isn't it?

And when he eventually did
shoot himself,

there was bound to be a chorus of,
"Well, yes, he would, wouldn't he?"

And so films began trying
to separate fact from fiction.

In 2016, the aptly named
Mystery Of Van Gogh's Ear continued

the trend towards seeking out
primary sources,

with Jeremy Paxman looking to
set the record straight.

The mystery all turns on events
two nights before Christmas 1888.

The bare facts are reported
in local press accounts.

At 11:30, a man named
Monsieur Vincent

appeared at the door of a brothel
on Rue du Bout d'Arles.

He asked there for
a girl named Rachel.

When she arrived, he handed her
his own severed ear.

But can the reports
really be trusted?

More than one account gives
his nationality not as Dutch,

but as Polish.

Three versions say
the ear was in a package.

Another says he was holding it
in place on his head.

Most say this girl Rachel
was a prostitute.

But one says she was just a girl
who worked at a cafe.

The film then follows
lead investigator Bernadette Murphy,

who brings the whole story back
to Kirk Douglas and Lust For Life.

"When Irving Stone, the author
of Lust For Life, was in Arles,

"he visited Dr Felix Rey. Dr Rey
was the only man still alive

"who had seen Vincent van Gogh
without his ear.

"Dr Rey drew a medical diagram
for Irving Stone which he later

"signed and which Mr Stone
now has in his possession."

It's dated 1955.
So what I need to know is,

is Felix Rey's medical diagram
still somewhere?

Felix Rey was the doctor
who treated Vincent's injury

throughout his time in the hospital.

More than that, the two became
friends, and Vincent painted him.

There could be no better witness

to what happened
to Vincent van Gogh's ear.

And somewhere there's a document
he gave to Hollywood writer

Irving Stone answering
exactly that question.

To find that document,
Bernadette Murphy travelled to

San Francisco to dig around in
Irving Stone's personal archive.

One of the things
I've finally found was a little

document in the first folder
which demonstrates what you've been

looking for, I think, which is
what happened with the ear.

And if you go through here,

eventually you find
this tiny little document here.

Oh, my godfathers!
And it's from Dr Rey - Felix.

It's just a thin, little,
tiny piece of paper here,

and so much is so eloquent
in its own way.

This is from Dr Felix Rey. I can
definitely say that's his signature.

It's dated the 18th of August 1930.

And it's unbelievable.
It's a before-and-after drawing,

and basically it's a drawing of
an ear, and there's a dotted line,

and it says, "The ear was cut with
a razor following the dotted line,"

and the aspect that is left
of the lobe of the ear.

That's what it looked like
afterwards.

So it really documents
that he removed his whole ear.

It must have been
an incredibly painful thing to do.

And what was going through his mind
at that time must be remarkable.

Well, I've been working, I think,
as you know, on this for some time,

and when you finally get to...

SHE SOBS

..see something...

..you realise what...

what a really gruesome
thing happened.

It brings home
the violence of the act.

In this case, television's helping
to lead the research,

but does this discovery
really matter in the grand

scheme of the study
of Vincent's life?

It's quite interesting.

In fact, it's not really
terribly interesting about how

much of the ear came off.
I wonder if anyone does think so.

The more of the ear
that was cut off,

the more determined he was
to really injure himself.

So if it is correct that he cut off
nearly all his ear,

I think it IS significant and it
shows, if you like, the depths,

the despair which he'd fallen
into at that particular moment.

Van Gogh's mind fascinates us.
For decades, we've considered him

an artist that walks
the fine line between executing

your passion to the fullest

and crossing over into that
dangerous area of self-destruction.

I think he's been considered
a bit of a madman, but I think now

we understand him in the much more
nuanced terms of mental illness.

After recovering
from self-mutilation,

Vincent voluntarily entered
psychiatric treatment.

It's a period programme-makers have
often sought to portray on screen.

Good afternoon.
My name is Vincent van Gogh.

I just wanted to let you know
that I've recently been

released from the Saint-Paul
mental institute.

It's just possible that I could

have an attack on the journey
to Paris, but I'd like...

But it goes beyond
just telling the story.

Vincent's been diagnosed with dozens
of disorders over the decades,

and it seems television
has become THE place

to explore each new theory.

He suffered, as they say,
from manic depression, which is

an opaque way of skirting an issue
that we still don't understand.

From the letters, it's clear that he
was suffering from bipolar disorder.

"Patient has had several attacks
during his stay

"in the establishment,
lasting two weeks to one month.

"During these attacks, patient's
subjected to frightful terrors

"and tried several times
to poison himself

"with kerosene or oil paints."

Whatever it was, Vincent's
mental illness has become central

to our efforts to understand
his tortured life as an artist.

And it's the reason why, in 1980,
Robert Hughes travelled to

France for his landmark series
The Shock Of The New.

This is the lunatic asylum
at Saint-Remy de Provence

in the South of France, near Arles.

For a year and eight days -
from May 1889 to May 1890 -

Vincent van Gogh
was under treatment here.

He suffered from
agonising fits of paranoia

and a kind of paralysis of the will
accompanied by hallucinations,

during which
he couldn't work at all.

And these were separated
by long, clear months

during which he could and did,

which were in turn punctuated
by the most extraordinary

moments of visionary insight.

At such moments, everything he saw
was swept up in a current of energy.

Everything he sees
is made from the same plasma.

The moon comes out of eclipse,
the stars blaze,

the sky heaves like the ocean
and the cypresses move with it.

Today, the doctors would give him
lithium and tranquillisers,

and we wouldn't have the paintings,
perhaps. We don't know.

By 1980, naturally, Hughes was
critical of how Vincent was treated.

But what I find interesting
is the link

he makes between Vincent's
state of mind and his painting.

Hughes believes the illness
is inspiring his art.

Six years later, Sir David Piper
strengthened that link

by examining Vincent's
self-portraits...

If you didn't know van Gogh,
you might wonder why

he didn't choose a subject
he liked, rather than this.

..using psychology
and some pretty dodgy lighting.

And yet this is not
an isolated phenomenon.

It's the climax, rather, of a whole
series of self-portraits,

and it's a series which
in its richness, its vividness,

has hardly any parallels
in the history of art.

Obviously, these portraits
are experimental in style,

building up a vibrant
colour structure

and strokes of pure colour
laid side by side.

But also, I think,
most people agree, cumulatively,

they convey the impression
of a man haunted -

a man hunted, even.

Years ago, when I was first
considering the self-portraits as a

sequence, they called to my mind
forcibly the feeling that police

photographs give.

The self-portraits, above all,

had charted his attempt
to live with himself.

He failed.

Actually, I think Piper's
too caught up in Vincent's life

to see his work clearly.

It's extraordinary, like, the
narrative that people put on these

paintings when they really want to
make their point about kind of doom

and gloom and death and tragedy.

For me, they're about honesty, about
what it feels like to be alive.

I just don't read them
like that at all.

But interpreting Vincent's mind
through his work has become

a TV pastime.

In 1994, Sister Wendy examined
one of Vincent's most famous

paintings, dramatically projecting
onto it what she believed

she knew of his mental state.

Now, this is his picture
of his bedroom,

the centre of
the little house he so loved -

his own heart, as it were.

And it's such a frightening picture.
It's so claustrophobic.

The walls all seem to be
closing in on us.

There are two doors,
but notice they're both shut.

We can't get through them.
We can't see through the window.

There's such loneliness here - the
double bed with the two pillows...

..and over the bed, that weird,
tumultuous landscape that seems to

be a kind of picture
of what van Gogh's mind

might have been like
when he was disturbed.

Van Gogh here is expressing
intense anxiety and frustration,

held in a vigorous,
trembling tension.

It need not have such criticism,
I don't think,

but I think she's bringing
to it the biography

and all she knows
about poor van Gogh

in the Yellow House, and so
she sees it as being frightening.

Separating Vincent's biography
and state of mind from his work

is almost impossible. What is
fascinating is how the portrayal of

his illness has changed
over the decades.

One of the more famous moments
from Vincent's life is of him

eating his paints - a scene included
in nearly every programme.

In 1990, Linus Roache plays Vincent
caught up in a frenzied state,

externalising his rage.

Get off me! Get off me!

They're murdering me!
They're murdering me!

They're murdering me!
Leave me alone!

Leave me alone! Leave me alone!

16 years later, Andy Serkis's
Vincent has internalised this

emotion, which, to me,
is more haunting.

In 2010, Benedict Cumberbatch's
performance incorporates

van Gogh's letters, giving
the artist a stronger voice -

an addition that brings out
the complexity of a man

suffering from mental illness.

I'm losing the vague dread,
the fear, the thing that...

..little by little,
can come to consider madness

as being an illness like any other.

As far as I know, the doctor here
is inclined to consider what

I've had as an attack
of an epileptic nature.

It's quite odd, perhaps, that the
result of this terrible attack is

that in my mind there's hardly any
really clear desire or hope left.

I'm thinking of squarely accepting
my profession as a madman.

This particular clip does show him
being quiet and being pensive,

and I think that's
the great thing about it.

It shows him as
a thoughtful human being,

and certainly that comes through
in the letters.

He's somebody who's very sensitive,

and it's worth seeing
a kind of portrayal of him

that's going to be more fair, that's
going to be more understanding

of what it's like to have
that particular mental disorder.

It's interesting to see the way
that the portrayal of, say,

mental illnesses have been
portrayed at different times,

which obviously reflects
changing attitudes.

Tragically, Vincent's mental illness
would lead to his death

on the 29th of July 1890.

In Lust For Life, Kirk Douglas
portrays him on that very day.

The scene captures Vincent furiously
working on what would become

one of his most famous paintings -
Wheatfield With Crows.

They have a lot
to be responsible for

with the crows over the wheatfield,

with those Hitchcock-like
crows attacking

Kirk Douglas at the end. I wish
they hadn't done that ending.

That film was a seminal film
for our understanding of what

Vincent was all about.
When that film was made,

when you think about
what was happening in New York -

the deaths by their own hand of Mark
Rothko, of Jackson Pollock - I think

it fed into an imagination of what
people wanted of their artists.

They wanted them to be driven,
they wanted them to be troubled.

Lust For Life comes out of
that kind of wish

of what people want an artist to be.

SHOT

Lust For Life infused
Vincent's artistic endeavour

with his mental illness,

establishing the paintings as crazed
expressions of a suicidal madman.

Decades later, Simon Schama
took a far more nuanced route

to explore how his illness
related to his art.

His sickness was both the destroyer
and the midwife of his masterpieces,

for it was precisely between
the spasms of craziness that Vincent

saw the world most intensely, was
suddenly possessed of his vision

that Heaven could exist
here on Earth.

His mission had never been clearer.

I am absorbed in this immense plain

with wheatfields
against the hills...

..boundless as the sea.

Schama then continues his quest

to cut through
the tortured-artist stereotype,

reinterpreting
Wheatfield With Crows.

Schama believes - and I agree with
him - that while Vincent did have

episodes of madness, that while he
was painting, the artist was sane.

So, while the landscapes
ARE mindscapes...

..they're anything but deranged.

They're unflinching,

tumultuous,

heroic...

..and completely new.

And here's the most startling of
them all, Wheatfield With Crows.

Not for what it's supposed to
say about van Gogh's frailty -

because I don't think the artist
who painted this was frail at all -

but for what it says
about the conventions of art.

It shows Vincent in total command,
never fiercer in his contempt for

the rules, in his headlong rush
to junk the entire

history of landscape painting.

I don't think there's the slightest
possibility that accomplishing

this revolution could have been
a moment of suicidal despair

for Vincent van Gogh.

In his art, he'd never been more
visionary, never more brilliant.

But not in his life.

In the years since van Gogh's death,

the story of his life
has become entwined with his art.

We really feel for
the troubled Vincent.

I think somehow that
that vitality, that energy,

that exquisite colour
in the painting

redeems the tragedy of his life.

He lives on powerfully in his art.

Vincent's legacy has been recognised
on television for decades.

Van Gogh was 37 when he shot
himself, but in the last four years

of his life, he'd changed
the history of art.

The freedom of Modernist colour,
the way that emotions are

worked upon directly by optical
means was one of his legacies -

as it was Gauguin's, too.

But van Gogh had taken this even
further than Gauguin, because he had

opened up the Modernist syntax
to pity and terror

as well as to formal research
and pleasure.

He was the hinge upon which
19th-century romanticism

turned into
20th-century expressionism.

25 years later,
Simon Schama preferred to focus

on the emotional impact
of van Gogh's work.

But there's something about
van Gogh's legacy which is

much more important
than his fathering this or that

ism of modern art.

Vincent's passionate belief
was that people wouldn't just

see his pictures,
but feel the rush of life in them -

that by the force of his brush
and the dazzlement of his colour

they'd experience those fields,
those faces, those flowers in ways

nothing more polite or literal
could ever possibly convey.

His art would reclaim what
had once belonged to religion -

consolation for our mortality

through the relish
of the gift of life.

It wasn't the art crowd
he was after.

What he wanted was to open the eyes

and the hearts of everyone
who saw his paintings.

Well, he got what he wanted.

This was an artist who wasn't
taught in any academy,

who is painting from the heart,

which I think in our age we feel
is something that we admire

and something that
we ourselves want to do

and follow in some ways
through his footsteps.

With a cheerier end, of course.

This was a disturbed man

who created something extraordinary
throughout his life.

His legacy, then, is the fact that

an unstable mind can produce
something marvellous.

While we may say
he was tortured in life,

he took that experience
and expressed it through colour...

Nothing but colour!

..and through his written words.

Yours truly...

..Vincent.

He may have sold just one painting
in his lifetime,

but over a century later his work
has touched countless lives.

Vincent van Gogh is so much more
than the tortured artist.

He wasn't a failure.
His paintings are so successful

at telling us what he felt
when he was alive.

He's a wonder, and his painting
lives on for us all today.

So, who better to have the last
word on the wonder of van Gogh

than television's time traveller
Doctor Who?

We're so lucky we're still alive
to see this beautiful world.

Look at the sky. It's not dark
and black and without character.

The black is, in fact, deep blue.
And over there, lighter blue.

And blowing through the blueness
and the blackness, the wind's

swirling through the air and then
shining, burning, bursting through.

The stars. Can you see
how they roar their light?

Everywhere we look,
the complex magic of nature

blazes before our eyes.

I've seen many things, my friend

but, you're right...

..nothing quite as wonderful
as the things you see.