Original subtitles

We last left Vincent when Theo was telling him about the exciting things happening in Paris.

Vincent begs many times but fails to get an invite from Theo.

So after a while, he decides he can't wait any longer and goes to Paris anyway,

hoping Theo will take him in.

Which of course he does. Theo is a great brother.

Once Vincent finally arrives in Paris, he quickly begins to devour all the new art buzzing around him.

Impressionism, divisionism, symbolism, and of course, Japanese prints.

His mind is blown and within just a few weeks, he's studying with Toulouse-Lautrec and Pissarro

and also hangs around at the Académie Julianne with the likes of Bernard, Bonnard, Vuillard, and others.

He's plugged in to an exciting new network of artists

and he's taking it in like he's drinking from a fire hose.

And within less than a year in Paris, his work is completely transformed and unrecognizable

from the dark, moody, gray, and awkward paintings he had been making in the Netherlands for the past five years.

His new paintings were exploding and radiating with color, light, and movement.

The strong emotional content is still there, but it's geared toward a brighter, more colorful,

and a broader range of emotions.

They were also more nuanced and sophisticated.

One could read multiple emotions and concepts playing out simultaneously.

It's really astonishing to me that in a very short amount of time,

Vincent went from painting works like The Potato Eaters, where the mood is very dark and depressing,

to works like The Portrait of Père Tanguy just two years later.

Not only is the color and style radically different,

and you can see how he's taken to the ideas of the Impressionist like a natural,

but the subject and composition are totally different too.

In this painting, the subject is Julian Tanguy,

who ran a popular art supply store in Montmartre

and would also sell some of the local artist's work in his store.

He was one of the first to put Van Gogh's work up for sale.

And all around his portrait, we have these Japanese prints.

Far from potatoes and peasants,

now this country boy from small-town Netherlands is dreaming of Mount Fuji and geishas.

This has to be one of the most dramatic transformations of any artist I've seen or studied.

How did this happen, and how did it happen so quickly?

While his new paintings retain many similar qualities,

they were now engaging the color-processing part of his brain

that, for the most part, had been laying dormant up to now.

Learning a bit of pointillism or divisionism,

and the color theory behind it,

was all he needed to integrate new, beautiful, and shimmering color combinations.

He always had a strong line quality in his work.

Since he was a child,

he would create these textures from individual lines to build up surfaces.

He preferred to break up his surfaces into smaller series of marks,

rather than traditional blending or mixing.

So when he saw Seurat's divisionist or pointillist paintings,

he was already halfway there.

It was the color theory that was new to him.

He had only been using these marks in black and white.

Also, now he had access to these new,

saturated, artificial paint colors that Julian Tanguy carried in his store.

He quickly read all the books Seurat had been reading and incorporating into his work,

and he starts working directly with Camille Pissarro,

who was at this time in the much longer and more gradual process

of giving up his use of neutral earth tones and soft blending

in exchange for vibrant colors and energetic strokes.

Pissarro was a kind and encouraging teacher to many young painters.

It's important to remember,

Vincent had a brilliant mind.

If he wasn't painting or writing a letter,

he was always reading, studying, and thinking.

He craved new information and new ideas, new techniques,

and had the type of mind that is able to take in these vast amounts of information,

synthesize it, and then create brand new ideas from this.

And Vincent was interested in everything.

He loved plein air landscapes, still lives, portraits, interiors,

night scenes, day scenes, cityscapes, symbolism, divisionism,

cloisonism, Japanese printmaking.

There was no subject matter he wouldn't paint.

There was no technique he wouldn't experiment with.

And he did it all without any formal art training.

While Seurat or Cézanne were brilliant in their own right,

they had a more laser-like focus on very particular ideas and subjects.

Vincent, on the other hand, had become an expert at all of them.

Perhaps this is why, amongst all the incredibly talented post-impressionists,

it's really only Van Gogh who gets called a genius.

It's a myth that genius wasn't recognized in his lifetime.

As far as sales go, it's true he only sold one painting in his life.

Commercially, the dealers and public didn't warm to him at first

like they did Cézanne's paintings.

But the other artists in Paris, the young post-impressionists,

they were instantly enamored with his work

and could definitely see that Vincent was in a league of his own.

And their work would be influenced by him as well.

Pissarro, who knew just about everyone in the art scene,

said of Vincent he would either go mad or leave the impressionists far behind.

He would ultimately prove right on both counts.

This is just a small example of Vincent's self-portraits.

He was very inspired by his fellow Dutchman, Rembrandt van Rien,

who died 200 years earlier

and had famously painted gorgeous self-portraits throughout his entire career.

Vincent said that he thought about Rembrandt all the time

and that he could sit in front of his painting for two weeks with only a crust of bread.

A little dramatic, but you get the idea.

In many ways, the self-portrait is the perfect proving ground to test out ideas.

For one, it's the cheapest and easiest model to find.

You're free and always there.

You could also work out psychological issues while painting a self-portrait.

If you've never painted a self-portrait, you absolutely should try it someday.

It will reveal surprising things about how you see yourself.

How we look is always changing throughout our lives,

and how we perceive ourselves is constantly changing too.

And these two often intersect in fascinating ways.

It's almost like a therapy session.

Don't worry about feeling too vain about painting your own portrait.

Once you get going, you'll soon realize it's ultimately an act of humility

and just how vulnerable it can make you feel.

Van Gogh wasn't just inspired by Rembrandt.

He was inspired by a lot of painters from a variety of movements.

He really gets into Delacroix, for example.

And there's a ceiling mural in the Louvre of his

that was a great inspiration of bright, contrasting color.

He loved looking at Franz Halls, Goya, Velázquez, and Delacroix

because they all had something in common with Vincent.

They painted fast.

And that was the only way Vincent knew how to paint.

Perhaps most of all, though,

Vincent falls head over heels in love with Japanese art.

He begins copying prints straight by literally tracing them at first.

Then he starts painting them into the background of many of his portraits,

like we saw in Peritanguiz.

And he begins adopting the compositional techniques he's seeing.

Strong diagonals, sudden cropping, and bright, flat colors.

We see in a work like this one that his compositional skills become much more dynamic.

And Japanese prints are teaching him about the effect of using stronger angles

and the effect unexpected cropping can have on an image.

This was a slice cut from life,

implying the rest of the world was continuing beyond the frame.

By letting some strong and important lines go right off the canvas with no resolution,

may have left Vincent feeling like he was teetering off the edge of that lookout about to fall.

It's precisely that feeling that makes this a more dynamic image

than if he had neatly framed the whole thing into view

and buffered the scene to be calmer and more relaxing.

When you combine these compositional dynamics with his newfound use of color,

his whole style and approach start coming together very quickly.

And once he's settled into this new format, he really takes off,

producing literally thousands of paintings and drawings over the next five years.

His brain is firing on all cylinders.

It's like those parts of his mind were already there, they just had to be sparked.

Because of how quickly he learns these complicated and difficult painting ideas.

Many of the artists we've seen and will see in the post-impressionist era

took several decades to find their mature style.

It's amazing that Vincent had the shortest career of any major post-impressionist.

Barely eight years between his first oil painting and his last.

And yet, he seemed to go faster and farther than any of his contemporaries.

Unfortunately, artistic inspiration is not the only thing he finds in Paris.

He's also introduced to absinthe,

which is the last thing Vincent with his fragile mental health needed.

He was still dealing with terrible bouts of depression, anxiety, and paranoia.

Despite his excitement and growth,

Vincent is still dealing with a lifetime of feeling like a failure.

Though we can see the amazing things he's doing,

it had been one failed career after another.

Art dealer, preacher, lover.

And now he's mooching off his brother because his works aren't selling.

He knew he was good, though.

And he believed in his work.

And he was proud of it.

But the rejection from the art world and a lack of any commercial success

caused him a significant amount of doubt, stress, and depression.

It wasn't the money he wanted.

He was completely fine living below the poverty line.

That didn't seem to bother him.

It was validation he wanted.

It was confirmation that he wasn't crazy and that his paintings were good.

It was approval and love he was after.

It always seemed just out of reach.

It doesn't take long until Vincent becomes sick of Paris.

He's arguing with Theo all the time.

He's not getting along with the other artists.

And in just two short years, he feels he's soaked up all he can there.

Of course, from the moment he was introduced to Japanese prints,

he became obsessed and wanted to move to Japan.

He has this fantasy of the artists in Japan living as monks

in peaceful communes making art together.

Japan is not an easy place to move to in 1887, though.

Yet he hears that down south in Provence, the light is beautiful like Japan.

He also hears that the town of Arlis was famous for beautiful women.

Surely, it's just a coincidence then when he decides to move down to Arlis,

where the light is actually stunningly beautiful.

For a brief time, Vincent was in heaven.

He had no idea what Japan actually looked like,

but this is just like the Japan in his imagination.

After daydreaming about all the woodblock prints he's been drooling over,

he takes up residence in Arlis in what is today known as the Yellow House

and paints a now-famous scene of his bedroom there.

Most likely, some of these colors have faded over time.

He painted his room to be much brighter and more colorful

than it would have been in real life.

He was always thinking about different color palettes and combinations.

Vincent had a box of yarn of different colors he would carry around with him

so he could intertwine different colors to study them and plan his next paintings.

But he was also amazingly talented, even when using just a limited palette.

I loved the seemingly simple painting of his shoes from around the same time,

from the sophisticated color layering of the bricks

to the lively tones and variety of browns in the boots themselves.

Not too much of his typical tiny brushstrokes,

but they do show up in the shadow there for a cameo.

And while less vibrant than many of his paintings,

this view of Arlis is one of my favorites.

It's reminiscent of drawings he was making in The Hague,

a familiar composition, but unleashed in paint and color.

He perfectly captures the cool blue and green tones of early morning,

while still injecting the painting with rich moments of red, orange, and purples.

And it shows us just how far he's come in a short time.

But despite the inspiring beauty and comfortable setup around him,

he still had little money, and ate very little, and felt very isolated.

This started to take a toll on his now-declining mental health.

He would often go days without speaking to anyone,

except to order coffee or a meal.

His letters reveal what most psychiatrists have since diagnosed

as likely bipolar disorder, with occasional schizophrenic delusions.

He might also have suffered from epilepsy, syphilis,

and or borderline personality disorder.

He would often eat his own paint.

Whether he did this intentionally to poison himself,

or whether he just enjoyed it, is hard to tell.

He'd often put the brush in his mouth after each stroke.

Modern oil paint isn't exactly recommended for consumption,

but in the 19th century it was far worse,

as oil paints contained much more lead and other heavy metals like cadmium and mercury.

So this would have only compounded his health problems.

The beautiful women of Arliss were not interested in him.

Unable to strike up a relationship, or even a date for that matter,

he frequented the local brothel.

Obviously there wasn't much in the way of protection or STD education in those days,

and so it's hard to see this combination of factors working well for Vincent.

He paints the famous Night Café during this time,

a fascinating painting that vacillates between bright and cheerful to dark and depressing.

One of his most iconic paintings.

In a letter to Theo in which he describes the paintings as,

I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green.

And he compares the work to the potato eaters.

And you do see some pretty sad figures hunched around the room,

likely alcoholics,

while the owner, Jeanneau, stands in the middle in white.

Van Gogh maybe implies he's one of the sad figures in the scene too,

because he later gave this painting to Jeanneau to help settle the bill he ran up there.

Vincent clearly longed for connection.

One of the artists he really likes at this time is Paul Gauguin,

and so he invited him to come to Arliss and move in.

It will be just like a mini art commune.

Gauguin, knowing what Vincent is like, talks to Theo.

Theo thinks it could be really good for his brother, and Paul could keep an eye on him.

So they work out a deal, where Gauguin would send a painting to Theo each month,

and Theo would pay Paul's expenses.

Vincent is stoked.

He gets a room for his new buddy, set up all nice.

He paints the walls bright yellow.

In defiance of his declining mental state,

he's making bright, bold, and hopeful gestures.

This could be the opening of a whole new chapter in his life,

with friends and family and love.

He even paints a bunch of sunflower paintings to decorate the room.

Sound familiar?

This is when he starts painting his iconic yellow-on-yellow sunflowers.

Never one to be overly optimistic, he doesn't paint fresh, vibrant flowers.

He paints dead and dying flowers.

For one, they're more interesting visually,

more variety of lines and angles as the plant shrivels and dries.

This strikes me as a hopeful, but realistic gesture.

While we seek beauty and love, we can't escape our own mortality.

There's a balance in this world.

As the painting is dominated by various shades of yellow,

there are still brief moments of green and even red punching through the composition,

another subtle element of balance and harmony, using contrast and opposition.

He would often paint every subject many times, each time slightly different,

each time with a different focus or goal.

This is one way he mastered his subjects.

He fully explored each of them.

Here's another one he did a few years later,

this one with a blue background, and a little more painterly and expressive,

but still investigating similar themes.

How does a teal background change the emotional content of the painting?

Paul and Vincent give their mini commune a go,

and they paint together in plein air in the studio,

and they even paint each other's portraits.

But very quickly, they start getting on each other's nerves.

They start fighting and arguing.

It becomes apparent that this is not going to work out.

After about two months, Gauguin can't take it,

and decides as soon as he sells a few paintings, he's out.

I can't blame him.

As the fights had escalated to a point where Vincent pulls a blade on Gauguin,

and Vincent ends up cutting off part of his own ear

and delivering it to a maid working at the brothel down the street.

At least that's the most common version.

There are other theories that Gauguin, an expert fencer,

might have lopped off the ear himself.

Whatever the case, though, Gauguin leaves and will not return.

It's a story most of us are familiar with,

and definitely not his best moment.

It's quite revealing about Vincent's mental state,

but it doesn't define him.

Although he did paint his portrait with the bandage,

immortalizing this moment,

so it's not something he was shy about.

It's this wild act of self-mutilation

and gifting the ear to an unsuspecting victim

that will land him in jail

and eventually committed to the hospital,

where he's diagnosed with mania and delirium.

He was actually sanest when he was painting.

There's kind of a romantic myth of the artist channeling the madness

and painting through fits of hallucination.

Painting is a mentally demanding activity,

especially the way Van Gogh painted.

He couldn't paint when he was having seizures

or paranoid schizophrenic episodes,

which could last for up to two weeks.

People can't paint in times of physical and emotional crisis,

at least not like Vincent did.

Vincent once said,

This is a man who intimately knew the physicality of mental illness.

These were awful and miserable spells that Vincent suffered through

until he could paint again.

Painting was actually the healthiest thing he could do

to keep him grounded in reality and his emotions in check.

Vincent is in and out of the hospital at Arliss for the next five months.

He's at his lowest,

and he's sure he'll never succeed as an artist.

And when he does return home for good in early 1889,

the people of Arliss are so sick of the red-headed madmen

that they've signed a petition to throw him out of town.

Not everyone hated him, though.

There were some in town who stuck with Vincent,

even at these low moments.

One was the postman, Joseph Roulan,

who supported Vincent during his hospital stay

and kept in touch with Theo in Paris,

so he knew what was going on.

Vincent was very appreciative,

and Roulan's gift for his friendship is his portrait,

now one of the most famous in art history.

And he would go on to paint the whole family's individual portraits many times,

usually with beautiful patterned tapestries behind them.

He didn't care too much about making his subject beautiful or nice.

He said he was trying to paint the soul of the person,

complete with all its contradictions and messiness.

But it's soon pretty clear things are unsustainable for him and Arliss.

And with the help of Theo,

he volunteers to go to a smaller and far nicer monastery,

St. Paul de Masol in St. Remy, near Arliss.

This place was better set up to deal with mental illness

and believed in the healing power of nature, art, and music.

Theo gets his brother special permission for him to go out and paint

and to make sure he got wine with his meals.

Again, Theo is a great brother.

And the arrangement at St. Remy seems to be exactly what Vincent needs.

He was one of the most stable people in the asylum.

He wasn't drinking absent, he had no complicated relationships,

and he was eating regular meals.

He paints some of his best and most famous works here,

including The Starry Night and dozens of other similar landscapes looking out his window.

Although his window had bars, he had a beautiful view from behind them.

Gauguin was pushing Vincent to work more from his imagination while they were in Arliss,

which he resisted.

But, locked up in the monastery, it became a necessity.

He didn't want bars in every landscape,

so he learned to create scenes that weren't strictly from observation.

He finished 150 paintings while in St. Remy.

Many of these depict a view from the asylum towards Alpilles Mountains

and feature beautiful swirling cypress trees, golden wheat fields, and billowy skies.

Vincent continued painting the disenfranchised, the laborers, the peasants, and the prisoners, though.

This painting, called Prisoners Exercising, is particularly haunting.

In this odd scene of incarceration and humiliation,

as is his nature, Vincent gives them an angelic glowing light

in an attempt to elevate them from their lowly status.

It's also in this time he paints The Irises,

another one of his extremely famous paintings.

Although he didn't initially consider it one of his more important works,

instead it is something peaceful to calm his illness.

His brother Theo loves this one,

and he submits it to be shown at the Salon des Independents.

By early 1890, things are starting to break for Vincent.

More people are seeing his work and are amazed by it.

A reviewer in a top French cultural journal calls Van Gogh a genius.

He's invited to exhibit an influential avant-garde exhibition in Brussels.

At the Salon of Independent Artists that year,

Monet says Van Gogh's work is the best in show.

Things are looking up,

and with 150 new paintings in his portfolio,

Vincent checks out of the monastery,

and Theo organizes him to go to Aux-Vers-sur-Oise,

a village on the outskirts of Paris.

It's much closer to Theo,

but he's also lined up a doctor there to look after him named Paul Ferdinand Gachet,

with whom Vincent became friends.

Dr. Gachet was an art lover,

an aspiring artist himself.

He would copy Vincent's paintings to learn.

And things are continuing to look hopeful.

Vincent learns that after 700 paintings,

he's finally sold one.

Artist Anna Bock buys the Red Vineyard for 400 francs in Brussels,

about 2,000 U.S. dollars today.

And he's incredibly prolific.

In June of 1890 alone,

he completes over 40 paintings,

more than one a day.

The very definition of manic genius.

But it's not enough.

In January of that year,

Theo and his wife had welcomed their first son,

who they named Vincent.

And soon it's clear that Theo is struggling to look after two Vincents.

Many believe that this revelation may have been the final straw for Vincent.

The last thing he wanted to be was a burden.

On July 27, 1890,

Vincent went out to paint as always.

When he didn't come home after dinner,

they went out to look for him.

That morning, Vincent was tired,

ill, and afraid for his future.

He had brought a revolver with him to paint.

He shot himself in the chest instead,

but did not die.

He made it back to his room where he was found.

And when doctors couldn't remove the bullet,

they called Theo,

who arrived and found Vincent sitting up in bed,

smoking a pipe.

They talked through the evening.

And the next day, on July 29,

Vincent dies in the arms of his brother at 37 years old.

This is the painting he was working on at the time of his death.

It's a wheat field where he shot himself.

The crows look even more ominous

after learning the background of this painting.

Theo had been in decline as well,

thought to be suffering from progressive paralysis

due to syphilis.

Vincent's death weakened him beyond recovery,

and he died six months later.

They would eventually be buried side by side

in Overserhoys.

Vincent was on the verge of success

and probably would have become huge in his lifetime

if he had lived a little longer.

Post-impressionist painting was coming into vogue,

and all of the new painters were inspired by

and emulating what Vincent was doing.

Instead, it fell to Theo's wife,

Johanna van Gogh Bunger,

a young Dutch woman in her 20s,

who had only met Vincent a couple times,

to take on the monumental task

of cataloging his hundreds of paintings,

as well as taking care of her infant son alone.

If anyone is to credit for Vincent's posthumous success,

it is Jo.

She dedicated her whole life

to make sure the world knew who Vincent and Theo were.

When she died in 1925,

she was in the process of translating

all 526 of the letters

between Vincent and Theo into English.

Emile Bernard speaks at Vincent's funeral.

A few friends and family show up.

They put his paintings all around the casket.

They brought lots of actual sunflowers

and other yellow flowers

to put on and around the casket.

They also set up his easel

with his stool and palette and brushes

as the small crowd paid their last respects

to Vincent van Gogh.

I want to end this lecture on a personal note.

When preparing this lecture,

I was stunned at the similarities

between the life of Vincent

and my late brother Christopher Allman.

My younger brother was also a brilliant artist,

and he had very similar mental health issues to Vincent's,

specifically bipolar depression

and paranoid schizophrenia.

Christopher lived a simple

and at times impoverished life.

He had poor hygiene

and struggled through major bouts of depression

and hospitalization.

He was unable to hold down a job

and relied on the kindness of family

and friends for support.

He was a voracious reader,

extremely intelligent,

astonishingly prolific,

and his creativity was limitless.

He even tried his hand at preaching

before becoming disillusioned with his faith.

He was primarily untrained

until earning his MFA

at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Tragically, Christopher and Vincent

both died of suicide at the age of 37,

just as they were hitting their prime.

Christopher, like Vincent,

was on the verge of success

with several major profiles

from major media outlets.

I can't help but feel like

this has given me a little more insight

into Vincent and his condition.

One major difference is that

Christopher was an outgoing, friendly,

and hilarious friend to many.

He could be difficult and unpredictable.

He had his enemies,

but most people loved him dearly,

especially me.