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DIFFERENT STROKES.

Article Excerpt
Vincent van Gogh's favorite color was yellow; Paul Gauguin's was red. It was not a trivial difference. It pertains to the clashing, deeply complementary temperaments of two painters whose idiosyncrasies, inseparable from their talents and ideas, became keynotes of modern art and templates of artistic personality. Little about either man fails to fascinate. Both came late to art: Gauguin, the elder by five years, after fitful success as a sailor, financial trader, and family man--he met Impressionist painters first as a collector of their work, then as a protege--and van Gogh after failures as an art dealer's assistant and a Protestant preacher. Gauguin was short but carried himself with a swagger. Van Gogh was termed by an observer "a rather weedy little man." Van Gogh admired Gauguin. That made two of them. While he liked van Gogh's work well enough, Gauguin's self-centered ambition made any appreciation of colleagues somewhat perfunctory. Van Gogh was an enthusiast for many kinds of art, including Barbizon landscape and a good deal of saloniste academic painting. He disliked, as "almost timid," the tight little brushstrokes of the era's most advanced painter, Paul Cezanne. Gauguin's taste was trendy, with penchants for the medieval and the exotic. He swore by Cezanne. Both van Gogh and Gauguin revered Edgar Degas and--van Gogh, especially--Japanese art. Van Gogh painted almost exclusively from life; Gauguin favored imagination. Van Gogh was innocent and disturbed, Gauguin savvy and louche. In October of 1888, Gauguin left the art colony of Pont-Aven, in Brittany, where he was the leading light, to stay in isolation with van Gogh in the humdrum town of Arles, in Provence. It was a dramatic sojourn.

"The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles" (Little, Brown; $24.99), by Martin Gayford, the chief art critic of Bloomberg Europe, is a skillfully ordered collection of informative and entertaining nuggets of intellectual and personal biography. The book's subtitle, however, is over the top. I count just two really turbulent nights in the story, and a few sticky days. Weeks passed in uneventful amity, or at least forbearance. The climax is sensational, of course: van Gogh razors off all or part of his left ear (the forensic detail is lost to history) and ceremoniously presents it to a prostitute named Rachel. She faints. He is hospitalized. Gauguin flees. The peculiar horror of the episode, in tension with the majesty of van Gogh's art at the time, has made it irresistibly mythological. As a symbol of a supposed kinship of genius and madness, it resonates backward in time to the Greeks and forward to the thoughts of anyone who has wondered at the vagaries of creativity. In an extended anticlimax, Gayford hazards ingenious speculations about van Gogh's febrile thought process (why an ear?) and proposes, for what it's worth, a likely clinical diagnosis: bipolar affective disorder. But, in the way of myth, the event's operative meanings exceed analysis and spurn explanation. They have a life of their own, like art.

"A time will come when people will think I am a myth, or rather something the newspapers have made up," Gauguin wrote in 1897, in a letter from Tahiti. He was a driven self-inventor, ever conscious of his theatrical effect. Born in Paris, he spent his childhood in Lima, Peru, where his mother had family, and in Orleans, France. He went to sea in 1865, at the age of seventeen, and spent six years in the French merchant marine and Navy. Alighting in Paris, he took undemanding, lucrative jobs in...

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