Thinking about the Yellow House

Abstract

For nine weeks in the fall and winter of 1888, Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh lived and worked side by side in the French Provençal town of Arles. The culmination of this episode has become a central event in the mythic history of the modern artist: van Gogh's violent confrontation with Gauguin, and his subsequent self-mutilation and voluntary internment in a local asylum. Of all the world's events in the winter of 1888, perhaps none is better known. What is less well known is how this heady and mutually exhausting artistic cohabitation affected the output of both painters during and after their time together. Two recent and substantial studies address just this question: Debora Silverman's Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art, and Douglas Druick, Peter Kort Zegers, and Britt Salvesen's Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South, published in conjunction with an exhibit of the same name at the Art Institute of Chicago. Both texts presume the importance of the collaboration, but understand it in quite different ways. The former sets out to question modernism as a secular movement in the arts, while the latter makes a more conventional case for mutual influence, assuming the participation of the artists in a general movement of late nineteenth-century European painting towards greater subjective expression.