Rachel's gift

Rachael's Gift, o/c, 30" x 60", Steven Rhude, private collection

Van Gogh proffered his severed ear to a prostitute called "Rachel" in a maison de tolerance (a semi legal bordello) on Christmas eve, Eighteen Eighty Eight. It was a gift Rachel was not likely to forget, nor was she amused. Sketchy records tell us she fainted after viewing the now historic offering. There is evidence Gauguin gave a report to the police  believing the artist must have cut his own ear off. He then paged Van Gogh's brother Theo and told him to "get here pronto". Gauguin, pursuing the primitive instinct with passion, then purchased a ticket for the fastest train out of Dodge. On July 3rd, 1895, he left France. Never to return, he opted for a Tahitian paradise only to encounter legal trouble and eventually Syphilis, a disease of which he eventually died from.


Gauguin's Utopian Trap, o/c, 30" x 60", Steven Rhude



Of course, Van Gogh's next stop was an insane asylum in Saint-Remy; his dream of a modern artists colony was crushed by Gauguin's departure. Who really knows what the two artists were really fighting about on that fateful night. Perhaps it could have been over Rachel or just the unbearable circumstances in the "Yellow House". But ears do not really haunt the ages without reasons; especially this one. The Van Gogh "ear incident" has not readily gone away. It continues to be part of the mythology of the avante garde.

"Did he really cut his own ear off?", I heard a person say next to me while I was visiting the Van Gogh Museum years ago. The seeming innocence of the question caught me off guard. Is there a parable of modern art here in this grotesque story? Revisionist biographies challenge history in our unchecked age of tales; some seem always in play.

The value of Van Gogh's ear today is a reminder of modernism's madness at the edge of art in a state of convulsion. At times it seemed like a Utopian modernism was reduced to meaness and then courage, suspicion and then estrangement, as many of it's progeny met with tragic ends. This grisly tale is a discourse central to the modernist tradition. Another reminder of the fine line between art and emotion gone awry.

Steven Rhude, Wolfville, NS

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