The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is an immersive argument for the immeasurable value of human connection, and the necessity of empathy for mental illness. It also explores the rejection and isolation felt by those living with mental illness. Like the art itself, the experience of an exhibition is personal. This is the story of a solo visit that was profound, brought me to tears, and left me shaken the rest of the day. If you find yourself in Amsterdam, you simply must go.
You have to book a time slot for the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, because it is so popular that allowing random visits would overwhelm it with crowds and make visiting unbearable. I say that with a certainty borne of the experience of visiting the Van Gogh museum even with the crowd controls. I have never been to a museum that was so bustling with people filling up what is usually a sparsely occupied, contemplative space. The man who said that “I’ve never felt a desire (and I don’t believe I ever shall) to bring the public to my work… a certain popularity seems to me the least desirable of things” would be astonished to know that people come from all over the world to inspect his painter’s palette, or consider a series of his self portraits. The first gallery felt almost, not quite but getting there, too full of tourists to enjoy.
I am realising that I started this off all wrong, though, because the reality is that the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is exceptional, in spite of the realities of clumps of mildly annoyed children and slow moving clusters of tour groups. I didn’t realise the way in which it was exceptional until the end, however, because the museum presented, at first, what seemed to be the standard fare and format of art museums the world over. This is why the final stroke it deals you, after a slow, imperceptible buildup, is so heartbreaking.
I will preempt that spoiler of an ending by saying that thankfully it also gives you some redemptive balm for that heartbreak, but not quite enough- it leaves you slightly unfixed, and seeing what is unfixed around you, and hopefully wanting to change.
Each floor was dedicated to a different period of Van Gogh’s life, and included some additions of work by his contemporaries and inspirations. This was much elevated with the addition of his personal letters, pictures of family, the backstory of his relationship to his brother, and personal touches such as his painter’s palette, or little known quotes that revealed vulnerable reflections. With each flight of stairs, the crowds calmed considerably, as the mood of the exhibit dove deeper into the inevitable difficulties of the artist’s life. By the third floor, a generally reserved silence had fallen over all of us.
The exhibition slowly builds to a visceral experience that takes a turn from what is expected; it happened so imperceptibly that it caught me by surprise when I began to choke on body wracking sobs. A reach was made beyond the paintings into an intimately humane examination of mental illness and human connection, with no release of closure. It left me dizzy with empathy and sadness for the rest of the day.
Van Gogh is known to most in simple, broad terms, blunt chunks of personality archetypes generally (unfairly) attached to creatives. His memory in cultural consciousness is a constellation of stereotypes: a mad, artistic man, controlled by his craft, who cut off his own ear (maybe? even this is disputed) because art and genius and things, and in between that he painted Starry Night and some other stuff that is swirly and looks nice on mass produced posters because it’s so colorful.
Everywhere on the internet there exist graphics with his face helplessly juxtaposed with words he never said, but people do it because they like to attribute quotes to this spokesperson of talented mental instability. He has a reputation as a man driven by passion and painting willy nilly, as though possessed, because that’s what most people believe about mentally ill artistic geniuses when they are simplified and romanticised. In practice, this robs artistic geniuses of the control they had over their gifts, and removes the truth of the few quiet moments of peace they had in the careful pursuit, the methodical creation, of their work.
At one point, I stood in front of a framing device he used that told the story of a man who was patient, nothing erratic in this process: carefully drawing the perspective lines, considering the paint, going layer by careful layer and building up his work in a way that was imperceptibly precise. His Sunflowers series is deceptively simple in all the frank joy of yellow, but he knew the sunflower was his and he knew it as soon as he committed it to the canvas. His letters to his brother during that time are laser focused, confident in what he prophetically knew would be a defining moment of his career. That yellow was meant for his exploration; he created layers of detail and depth, a complex process that presents something so simple and happily accessible to the viewer. The surface ease of the experience doesn’t tell the detail and precision that went into each layer so that it could contribute that which only it could contribute.
This is an obvious metaphor for so much of how we build our own lives, and the way others experience only the surface of who we are, with no knowledge of the complexity beneath. It was here that the exhibit started to work its purpose into me, even before I realised it.
This colour theme continued into the gallery that explored his descent into life altering mental illness, an unwelcome journey that began in the small yellow house where he lived. To watch the brightness of the sunflowers become the bleakness of the house through the same funnel of yellow felt like melting and morphing through an awful funhouse mirror.
What struck me about the way this was shown was how stark it was- wholly stripped of platitudes, no hyper emotional renderings that pre-empted or prompted the personal responses of visitors. There was no pop culture voyeuristic obsession with the ear, there wasn’t an oversimplification of a man driven to insanity by artistic caprice. Instead, the story of the unraveling focused on the intersection of Van Gogh and Gaugin. The yellow house was the setting, and was also the symbol of hopes that would never happen, in spite of the early promises of Sunflower dreams.
Van Gogh wanted to create an artists’ commune where people could come to gather and talk and inspire one another. The very first person to come into this potential space was Gaugin, whom he had sought to entice with the Sunflowers series. The guest room was painted with those very same flowers, bait for the companion he desired. Gaugin came, captivated by the sunflower, but the man behind it would be a different experience altogether.
I wove through the crowds, reading the captions and imagining how happy Van Gogh must have been, knowing Gaugin was coming. Did he anticipate late night talks, early morning discussions, painting all day, giving one another insights and feedback? Dreamy moments of silent communion, sun streaming through the windows, no conversation but the whispers of brush on canvas? I created a detailed emotional scene wherein Van Gogh greeted Gaugin like a long departed family member finally returning after a difficult absence.
That it all went so wrong so quickly, and with the first visitor, was the kind of embarrassing little tragedy that befalls others and makes you want to quickly look away to assure the other person that you respect their misfortune at getting precisely, painfully-exactly, just what they did not want. It makes you squirm because it happened; you choke on a small awkward laugh and don’t know why it came when really you could just cry for them.
Considering the sad fragility of Van Gogh in his yellow house of potential connection that never came was aching. It felt like someone naked standing in the room, shivering, forever.
And so it went- the captions and the placards and the descriptions all told the story they had to tell, the one that happened, the one I already knew. They laid it all out, solemnly, as though reading a list of names of the dead. Yes, Gaugin came to the yellow house. No, it wasn’t anything like what Van Gogh was hoping for. They had little in common. They fought. There was no peace, not from the beginning, definitely not in the end. It wasn’t the community or interaction intended at all. And, finally, inevitably it seems looking back, came the mental break. Van Gogh allegedly slipped from reality and chased Gaugin from the house into the streets with a razor. Chased him through the streets! Can you imagine? His much anticipated guest, the guest with the sunflowers in his room, the one he had waited for. Everything lost, including Gaugin, he turned around, and went home, and, according to many accounts, cut off his own ear that night.
Not knowing what else to do, perhaps still desperate for the connection he wanted, or wanting to make things right, or needing to show it to someone and be reassured “Oh, that? It’s fine, don’t worry”, the story goes that he wrapped up the ear and took it to a young woman, a maid working in a brothel. How scared, how alone, how utterly lost- I imagined that moment and I cried right there in the exhibit. I hoped, pointlessly, that she was kind to him, but honestly, who would be, confronted with a man and his ear in his hand? The police were called, he was taken away, and thus began a cascading cycle of relentless psychotic breaks that beat him like so many waves until he went under. Even now, though, these details are hazy, and it’s hard to sift rumour from fact. During the episode and his final months Van Gogh himself most likely didn’t have the details right, and couldn’t sort reality from awful fantasy. Even after it all we can’t either.
What is certainly true is that society did, as it still does, turn you away when your own brain fails you in such a socially inconvenient way. He ended up evicted from his home, when the neighbours complained of his roaming the streets, raving- they wanted him gone. All hope of a community of artists was finished. He couldn’t even live in his own house, much less welcome others into it.
The eviction was not just a revocation of an address. It was a banishment from the future he wanted. Processing this loss created a painful dissonance, considering the context of where I was. I thought of all the people clamouring at computers to get that precious time slot to visit the museum. I felt people drifting around me, so close they brushed my arms, as I read of his isolation. The place where his memory is most- the biggest collection of his work- was an endless stream of those pressing to get in, to see, satisfied with just a few hours to be in just the second hand presence of the colours and canvas he had once touched.
This was a man who in life couldn’t even get his first single visitor to stay. Now he had thousands every week, once he was long, long dead.
In life, he wanted a community of artists to share creative space with, and the first time it happened he chased away a man with a razor and then turned it on himself. Metaphorically, I think most people can also, in varying degrees, empathise. How many times have things gone skitteringly off kilter wrongwrongwrong when you are just a bit too desperate for that connection? The stakes are too high, you are almost there… instead, you devastate yourself. You want the closeness, the peace, the realisation of your hopes, and right when it comes and is about to give itself over you are astonished to find yourself chasing it with a razor in your hand as it escapes you. It’s never the right way. It never ends well.
The thought of Van Gogh, in the aftermath, taking his bloody ear, carefully wrapped, and trying to give it to someone, anyone, who would assure him it was okay- that was real. That raw gaping knowledge that what you are offering is wrong and messy and way too much of everything to give to anyone, but oh my God you ache to give it, and you just want someone to pick it up and say “Thank you”, because it’s all you have to give, and although it’s small, it is unbearable to hold alone.
In that penultimate gallery, knowing the ending waiting for me on the final floor, I said a silent thank you to the people in my life who have had to sit, wide eyed and confused, as I unceremoniously and without a prologue gave them my bloody ear wrapped in cloth. No one knows how to respond to that. I am grateful for those who did so with grace and saw me for who I was as a whole person, not just the person holding the self inflicted damage. For Van Gogh, it wasn’t the last self inflicted wound. It’s easy to call it suicide, some think it was murder, but here again, chaos pursues him in the details, uncertainty dogging him until the end. As I wound my way up to the final floor, the captions and final paintings recreated a ragged framework of his last days. A field, a bullet wound, a slow death, his brother by his bedside. And then he was gone.
At the end of the exhibit, when you wind your way back down the stairs, you find a multimedia exhibit on the first floor, which at first seems like an out of place, awkward contrast. This exhibit also leads you through several rooms, but here it’s all sensory experience of light and sound. At one point, you pass through a room filled with plastic flowers, their faces pulsing in bursts of cascading colors and shifting light. Speakers flood the room with the sound of Van Gogh’s words about the beauty of nature, in spite of the difficulty of human life. It’s a small box of a space and the atmosphere overwhelms the senses after the story arc you have endured in the museum.
It’s surreal and honestly painful to hear such uplifting platitudes from a man who spent his last days in such struggles, and overstimulating to let the sound and color pelt you as the images of his deathbed are still fresh on your mind.
In the middle of those plastic faced flower fields, drenched in color filled sound, I was pulled back, inexplicably, to a memory of a starkly different experience- an image from the Undergrowth series. These were paintings of the untended ground cover in the garden of the asylum where Van Gogh was forced to stay. That unremarkable garden was the only place he could go, so that’s what he painted. In speaking of it to his brother, he said pragmatically that anything could be beautiful, even weeds and twigs and patchy places, if you just put effort into seeing what it was as opposed to seeing what it wasn’t. Focusing on absence shows you what is lacking, when you should be looking at what is present- so bring it up to the light, brush it with color, and let it be what it is. Let it be ugly, and messy, and dark.
Coming from a man enduring the rejection of a society seeing only what he lacked, this compassion towards abandoned spaces and disregarded places was profoundly personal. Artistically and mentally he started with Sunflowers and ended in the Undergrowth, and even now, what is he remembered for between the two? Is this a fair legacy? Does it do him justice? Does it require us to consider what we love, and why we love it, and what we discard, and why we abandon it?
A sunflower, after all, is so easy to love, isn’t it? Soaked in light and open faced, petals furling like laughter to greet you, everything wrapped in blue sky- there is no challenge in admiring it. You enjoy it without even deciding to, inherently and simply. You understand that proud confidence immediately. But the chaotic bramble of the Undergrowth, this takes work to love. The dark and ugly places seem easy to understand, but that’s usually just a wrong first glance before you look away, before you evict someone from the neighborhood for being inconvenient.
The hemmed in garden whose boundaries you have to accept, the guest room your guest rejects, the places that have known the razor, the parts wrapped in cloth and carried in shame- none of that is what most would consider beautiful. But all of it is just as desperate to be seen. And all of it is worthy to be seen. And if we are to know ourselves and others, it must be seen.
This story was written in fragments December 2018 to June 2019, edited many times over since then, finally finished thanks to the reminder provided by the street mural in my neighborhood in Almaty, Kazakhstan (pictured below).
How to Visit the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam
To visit the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, you must use the museum website and book in advance. This will include choosing a start time for arrival- this isn’t negotiable, so do take care to be on time. People under 18 are admitted for free; all other tickets are 19 Euro. Visit the website of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam for booking and further details.
I love everything about this and can’t wait to visit this museum.
“anything could be beautiful, even weeds and twigs and patchy places, if you just put effort into seeing what it was as opposed to seeing what it wasn’t. Focusing on absence shows you what is lacking, when you should be looking at what is present- so bring it up to the light, brush it with color, and let it be what it is. Let it be ugly, and messy, and dark.”
We are worthy, all of us.