Van Gogh and Gauguin: Electric Arguments and Utopian Dreams [Hardcover]

Bradley Collins (Author)

Book Description

Series: Icon Edition: Art, Art History | Publication Date: August 31, 2001

Although Vincent van Gogh's and Paul Gauguin's artistic collaboration in the South of France lasted no more than two months, their stormy relationship has continued to fascinate art historians, biographers and psychoanalysts as well as film makers and the general public. Two great 19th century figures with powerful and often clashing sensibilities, they shared a house, worked side by side, drank, caroused and argued passionately about art. Their brief venture together, richly documented in the artists' letters and paintings, would be compelling enough even if it had not culminated in the catastrophe of van Gogh's life - his ear cutting. This traumatic climax to van Gogh’s and Gauguin’s weeks spent in the "Yellow House" in Arles has raised profound questions about the nature of their relationship and about their behavior before and after van Gogh's self-mutilation.Van Gogh and Gauguin will explore the artists' intertwined lives from a psychoanalytic perspective in order to draw a nuanced and sophisticated picture of the artists' dealings with each other. The book will also examine crucial art historical issues such as the aesthetic convictions that both united and divided the two men, and the extent to which they influenced each other's art.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Bradley Collins's Van Gogh and Gauguin is a psychoanalyst's interpretation of the relationship between the two artists, especially during the months in 1888 they spent living in the same house in Arles, southern France. The intensity of their time together is indicated by the way it ended, with van Gogh cutting off his ear after a violent argument with Gauguin, presenting it to a prostitute, and returning home to sleep in his own blood. Gauguin fled to Paris, and they never met again, though they exchanged several letters before van Gogh's suicide 18 months later. Both men's descriptions of their experience are vague and self-serving, and what really happened in Arles has eluded researchers. Collins takes paintings by the artists and the known facts of their relationship and offers psychological insights into their temperaments and motivations. He begins with narratives of their careers to 1888, then describes what drew them together and van Gogh's desire to establish an idealized art community. Collins tells his story well, analyzing the artists' different expectations and frustrations and the effect they had on each other's art. His explanations are persuasive, and they help us understand two brilliant but willful and ultimately tragic characters. --John Stevenson

From Publishers Weekly

The oft-trod personal and artistic interactions of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin are given fresh dirt by journalist Collins, a Parsons School of Design professor, whose goal is to "introduce nuance and complexity into [the] polarized conception" of the artists as diametrical opposites taken by many previous writers. Debunking the notion of van Gogh as a primitive peasant, Collins points out that he read literature voraciously in three languages. Finding some truth in the myths of van Gogh and Gauguin as respectively "the innocent versus the rogue, the masochist versus the willful manipulator," the book's six brief chapters include examples of Vincent being unsympathetic (as in anti-Semitic letters) and Gauguin being noble, writing about his deranged friend, "I can't hold a grudge against an excellent heart that is ill, that is suffering, and that needs me." Admitting when we cannot know what was going on between the two men, such as when Vincent would approach the bed of the sleeping Gauguin, only to stand there silently until his friend awoke and shooed him away, Collins only briefly dips into psychoanalysis of van Gogh paintings like Gauguin's Chair: "By endowing the feminine chair with a phallus, Vincent turned it into a phallic mother." Collins's close, concise study succeeds, largely because of a restrained, commonsense approach whose general rationality contrasts strongly with the hysterical adulation that the two artists, especially van Gogh, still inspire in their fans. (Nov.)Forecast: The Art Institute of Chicago launches a major van Gogh/Gauguin exhibition on September 22. This book is one of six being published in conjunction with it, and should attract the more thoughtful of the painters' fans, while the Westview imprint will attract scholarly library interest.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 280 pages
• Publisher: Westview Press; 1st edition (August 31, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0813335957
• ISBN-13: 978-0813335957
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,651,429 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant Exploration in Psychoanalysis of Culture, November 28, 2001

By 

baird jones (New York, New York United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Van Gogh and Gauguin: Electric Arguments and Utopian Dreams (Hardcover)

Bradley Collins first suggested in his book on Leonardo da Vinci that psychoanalysis had great untapped potential in its application to the art history and the analysis of individual artworks. In his second book, Van Gogh and Gauguin, Electric Arguments and Utopian Dreams, Collins certainly makes good on his promise. Virtually every sentence in this book is a bullet. Exceptionally readable and zestful, Bradley Collins never fails to move the reader along merrily during this delightful tour de force. The section on Van Gogh leads off and with a wealth of primary material, letters, early sketches, notes and even recollections by contemporaries and other artists, Collins nails his powerful points with clarity and conviction. Van Gogh's conflicts are clearly linked to earlier infantile repressed syndromes which are then in turn brought into connection with his artworks. Collins is never dogmatic. He gives the reader freedom to doubt and hold back. The Gauguin section has less of an overwhelming primary material avalanche because we lack the enormous correspondence. Collins disarmingly admits this problem and comfortably proceeds within the limitations of the evidence. At all times, Collins wide ranging erudition in art history shines. His polished prose never has the feel of jargon yet he sent me to the dictionary a number of times and he will stretch the reader frequently. The choice of illustrations is superb and extremely helpful in supporting not only Collins' closely reasoned Freudian position but in enveloping the reader in this wonderful aesthetic journey. Collins use of footnotes is judicious and illuminating. One example: In one footnote Collins notes that at the time of Van Gogh's ear mutilation there was a concurrent rage among Japanese prostitutes for amputation and gift of a fingertip to keep the wandering hearts of a wavering client, and since Van Gogh like many of the avant garde artists of his day was a fanatic admirer of Japanese culture it is quite possible that he knew of this bizarre masochist practice when he cut his ear. Collins has mastered the art of putting more in his footnotes than many of his contemporary authors manage to put in their entire books.
This is a must read for anyone interested in art history, psychoanalysis or general cultural debate. One can only hope that Collins will continue to write on the topic of psychoanalysis and art history, which although it is not an especially popular topic, it is a field in which Bradley Collins may now be justly considered perhaps America's leading specialist. In my opinion, there were signs of genius on every page of Van Gogh and Gauguin, Electric Arguments and Utopian Dreams. Bravo to Collins. A book of such quality is only encountered perhaps once a decade. It is a real gem.