“Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!” howled Allen Ginsberg in 1957 at a time when the severed aural appendage of the painter who invented expressionism was becoming synonymous with soulful suffering. Today the ear is ’ere again, with another explanation for Van Gogh’s brutal act of self-mutilation all over the media.
The year before the Ginsberg poem, Kirk Douglas had put on a brilliantly intense performance as the ginger artist in Vincente Minnelli’s film Lust for Life (1956), taking out his cut-throat razor and raising it to his ear after a row with Paul Gauguin, played by Anthony Quinn. Lust for Life came out just after the death of the American painter Jackson Pollock in a drunken car crash. Art, it seemed, was a suicide rap. Great artists were visionary martyrs, doomed to anguish – even to cut off bits of themselves.
Ginsberg’s poem Howl (1955-6) sees creativity as an ordeal akin to madness and dereliction: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked …” But in the title of his poem Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!, he seems to reject that cult of the “mad” artist, to mock Van Gogh’s ear as an icon of creative suffering.
However, more than half a century later, Van Gogh’s ear is the most famous body part of any artist, more celebrated than Rembrandt’s eyes, Michelangelo’s chisel hand or Picasso’s penis. Van Gogh’s ear has taken on a life of its own, independent from Van Gogh, and void of the meaning that once made it a saintly relic of modern art.
Van Gogh’s ear was sacralised as a cult object in the age of Ginsberg, Pollock and Kirk Douglas, when art really was a pursuit of expression, truth and revelation. In the 1950s artists truly saw themselves as following in Van Gogh’s dangerous footsteps. Mark Rothko pursued his inner demons in vibrating colours of anxiety. He would later, like Van Gogh, take his own life. Francis Bacon too sought out the visceral place where paint meets pain, and portrayed Van Gogh as his hero in his Study for a Portrait of Van Gogh IV (1957).
Today art is about money, not self-expression. When people talk about art it’s the glamour of art fairs and celebrity artists and the eye-watering prices of art – including the art of Van Gogh – that seem to fascinate us.
What can Van Gogh’s ear mean in our age that mocks expressionism and sincerity in art, and celebrates artists as commercial and social successes rather than inward-looking martyrs to creativity?
It surely means something, for it is rarely out of the news. Earlier this year Van Gogh’s ear made global headlines after a researcher found proof that – contrary to some suggestions – he cut off his entire left ear in Arles on 23 December 1888, not just the lobe. Further headlines followed when it was claimed he gave the severed ear not to a prostitute (as often said) but a maid.
And now the art historian Martin Bailey is arguing that Van Gogh had just got the news that his brother Theo, who financially supported him, was to marry: in despair that he might lose Theo’s help and no longer be able to work, he hacked off his ear.
It is a plausible suggestion that does not really disprove any other interpretation – such as his worsening relationship with his friend Gauguin – or indeed explain why Van Gogh thought this was the right thing to do under the circumstances. Rather it adds to the psychological pressures that led to his emotional collapse and self-harm. One could even argue that he just didn’t like Christmas.
It does not matter, for Van Gogh’s ear has become an empty talking point of contemporary culture. It generates endless headlines and jokes without meaning anything to anyone. This is not the 1950s. Artists are not existential heroes and poets no longer howl. Instead, Van Gogh’s ear has become Warholian. It is famous for being famous. We don’t feel moved when we hear another theory about it. We just feel briefly curious. What started as a symbol of the suffering of the artist is now just a bit of art historical clickbait.
Throw ‘em Van Gogh’s ear and see them swarm … And yet the poem in which Ginsberg foresees our kitsch cult of a painter’s ear is in reality a dream of the artist and the poet as a legislator of the world. Ginsberg imagines a republic of artistic vision, with Edgar Allan Poe as secretary of imagination, Ezra Pound as secretary of economics and “Van Gogh’s ear on the currency”.
Everyone needs to believe in something. In the middle ages people revered the bones of saints. Van Gogh’s ear has become devalued just as saints’ fingers and toes were by the trade in relics. Yet it is still a grisly reminder that art should be more than the calculated pursuit of money and success. Today art is money and Damien Hirst sits in his luxury basement with both his ears. One day, though, our values may change. One day art may once again be a quest for truth and beauty, not wealth, and Van Gogh’s ear will be honoured as currency.
