Product Description

The mesmerizing true story of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin in the most celebrated cohabitation in art history.

From October to December of 1888, Paul Gauguin shared a yellow house in the south of France with Vincent Van Gogh. Never before or since have two such towering artists occupied so small a space. They were the Odd Couple of art history--one calm, the other volatile--and the denouement of their living arrangement was explosive. Two months after Gauguin arrived in Provence, Van Gogh suffered a psychological crisis that culminated in his cutting off part of an ear. He was institutionalized for most of the rest of his short life and never saw Gauguin again.

During the brief, exhilarating period they worked together in Arles, these not-yet-famous artists created a stream of masterpieces within the shared studio--including Van Gogh's Sunflowers, which decorated Gauguin's bedroom wall. Making use of Van Gogh's voluminous correspondence and new evidence, Martin Gayford describes not only how these two hallowed artists painted and exchanged ideas, but also the texture of their everyday lives. He tells us what they cooked and how they budgeted their meager finances and entertained themselves, and he movingly relays their inner fears and dreams. Gayford also makes a persuasive analysis of Van Gogh's mental illness--the probable bipolar affliction that led him to commit suicide at the age of 37. THE YELLOW HOUSE is a singular biographical work as dramatic and vibrant as the artists' pictures.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #110361 in Books
• Published on: 2006-11-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 352 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Van Gogh's reputation in the public imagination has been made as much by his descent into madness as by his art. Detailing the final year of his life and the "Studio of the South" in which Gauguin and Van Gogh painted side by side, Gayford brings the art back into focus. Explications of the works illuminate the collaboration—similar subjects find very different treatment by two entirely different temperaments. Yet their influence on each other is everywhere—a story that Van Gogh recommends to Gauguin finds its way into a painting; Van Gogh uses the jute canvas that is Gauguin's material of choice. While some of this is well-trodden territory, Gayford's narrative is genuinely dramatic as it moves toward Van Gogh's fateful end. Gayford makes exciting new connections between the tone of Van Gogh's correspondence and known scholarship about his probable bipolar disorder. The influences of literature, the news media and so-called "hygienic excursions" (visits to the local brothels) percolate in these letters and under the surfaces of the artists' canvases. So, argues Gayford, were they invading Van Gogh's mind. Though it is impossible to entirely understand what motivated these two great artists during their weeks together in Arles, these pages deliver as close and vivid an image as may be possible. 60 b&w illus. (Nov. 14)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School–In an accessible and even affectionate work of art history, Gayford tells of the two artists who lived and worked in the South of France in the fall of 1888. Their story is told in short episodes, reconstructed through the formal analysis and comparison of the paintings they created during this period, and through letters and newspapers that place the work in the context of the contemporary art world, popular literature, and current events. Their time together culminated in Van Gogh's famous ear-cutting incident (which is revealed on the jacket copy), teens with an interest in the artist's colorful yet short life may take to Gayford's somewhat breathless approach leading up to the big event. The author delights in the quotidian details of his story: the joint visits to local brothels, how the weather may have affected work habits, Gauguin's cooking skills. The biggest drawback is the use of small black-and-white photos of paintings. Suggest that teens read this alongside larger monographs with color reproductions to appreciate the art fully.–Jenny Gasset, Orange County Public Library, CA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
In this intelligent and engrossing book, Gayford offers an unusually vivid retelling of the famous events of late 1888, when Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin shared a studio in a small town in southern France. Relying heavily on their voluminous correspondence (written mostly to Theo van Gogh, Vincent's brother and Gauguin's art dealer), Gayford follows their trajectory from harmony to discord and, finally, van Gogh's madness. The book reveals the complicated dynamics of the relationship: desperately lonely, van Gogh wanted Gauguin to remain in Arles as long as possible, yet his increasingly vehement arguing repelled his friend. And better than most others who have attempted it, Gayford illuminates how the two artists influenced each other's work. Van Gogh, for instance, might never have completed one of his masterpieces, his final version of The Sower, without the lessons provided by Gauguin's diagonal compositions and foregrounded figures. Gayford persuasively diagnoses van Gogh's illness (bipolar disorder) and even provides a plausible rationale for the notorious incident of the artist's lopping off of his own ear. Kevin Nance
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Van Gogh and Gauguin Culturally De-Gunkified (from Ahadada Books)
Unfortunately the story of "Starry Starry Night" Van Gogh has grown into one of the biggest cultural cliches this side of Walt Disney and Hummel collectibles. Who hasn't walked into someone's grandmother's retirement flat and found a "sunflower" reproduction hung somewhere? (Last "sunflower" sighting I recall was in a bathroom in Cleveland above a catbox.) It's one of the givens of our time that "Lust for Life" Van Gogh was a tormented yadda yadda, misunderstood yadda yadda, visionary yadda yadda and we should all be glad he once walked upon the face of the earth. Yet those same people who use "sunflower" notecards to invite each other to Starbucks would probably have run screaming from the bad-smelling, bad-mannered, brothel-hopping, drunk, chain-smoking, loudly opinionated, mood-swinging, and just plain weird, dirt-under the nails-artist. (Reminds me a bit of what's currently happening with the even more extreme case of the apotheosis of Henry Darger and his armies of little girls. Has some enterprising museum administrator begun to market Henry Darger "thank you" notes yet?) So given all of this cultural baggage, anything that helps me to dig through the gunk and actually catch a glimpse of the reality lurking behind the production of such extraordinary paintings, and to see the pictures anew, is welcome indeed. Martin Gayford succeeds in doing this by going back to one of the most creche-like moments in the life of Saint Vincent (the slicing off of the Great Misunderstood Genius' ear), and infusing it with the reality of daily weather reports, of letters, of the memories of one of the oldest persons ever to have lived. He attempts to tease out hints from the pictures themselves. We learn the name of the prostitute to whom the grisly gift was offered up. We learn that the authorities kept the ear in a vial of alcohol, and that perhaps the newspaper reports of the surgical antics of Jack the Ripper as well as "La Horla" by Guy de Maupassant (himself well on the way to madness) might have colored this bit of desperate performance art that Van Gogh's mental illness led him to carry out. Still, all of Gayford's digging around and speculating cannot really explain the worm in this artist's brain and how the twists and turns of mental illness undermined his incredible talent. The author succeeds somewhat better with Gauguin, whose real gift seems to have been a massive ego and a rat-like ability to survive anywhere and to use anyone. He comes across as totally understandable in his coolly calculating attempts to create a career for himself in the art world. Gayford also shows us that Gauguin harbored a real fondness for Van Gogh, though it's hard to believe that such an affection would have been deep or lasting. Both of these gentlemen were kept under the scrutiny of the local police in their unusual comings and goings to and from the Yellow House, and most of you good people reading this review would have agreed with the authorities, even perhaps requested their surveillance, had you been living in that town at that time. The final detail that impressed me was that the architecture of the Yellow House placed Van Gogh and Gauguin's studio antics on street level, clearly observable by passers-by, who often stopped, stared--and in the case of Van Gogh and the local children--jeered. What worlds of pain existed for these two strange beings! Van Gogh--whose one attempt at "normal" life with a "fallen" woman and her child was condemned by his mother, father and siblings, so that he felt forced to give it up, and Gauguin, who turned his back on a good job and a loving wife and children to paint. The reality of their lifestyles must have been grim indeed. No wonder we construct "safe" and sugary versions of their story and hang their pictures in our bathrooms.

Two Giants Make House Together
One of the most famous episodes of disastrous behavior by an artist is the tormented Vincent van Gogh's cutting off his ear. People who don't know anything else about the artist, or anything about art, know about the spectacular self-mutilation. There is more to the story, of course, and the excision of the ear is certainly not the most important part of van Gogh's life, but it did provide a climax to an important episode in that life, the collaboration between van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. In _The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles_ (Little, Brown), art critic Martin Gayford has recreated almost a day-by-day account of the time the two painters lived together, painted together, stimulated one another, and got on each other's nerves. It is a period that art historians have probed ever since van Gogh's postmortem fame, and while there have been recent discoveries made about details of the collaboration, Gayford's book in its chronological account gets close inside the minds of the two giants as they muddled their way through their period as housemates. Though Gayford tells in abbreviated form about what went on in their lives before and after their sharing of the Yellow House, the concentration on this particular period is wonderfully illuminating.

Van Gogh arrived in Arles in February 1888, and on his walks spied the Yellow House, which he leased for five months. He was well known as a loner, but he had long dreamed of making a colony for artists who would collaborate together; it wasn't that they would work jointly on their canvases, but they would "live and paint together - different in individual style but sharing a common aim, exchanging ideas, commenting on each other's work." Vincent's brother Theo, an art dealer in Paris who lent support in multiple ways to his brother, hoped that it would be good for Vincent to have a companion, and offered Gauguin, whose paintings Theo brokered, a stipend to move in. Shortly after Gauguin's arrival, they proceeded out to paint the autumn foliage of Arles. They would carry out their gear, set up a few yards from each other, and work simultaneously on parallel subjects. There are thus fascinating pairs of paintings to show what the two artists made of the same subject. They talked about their work, they criticized and praised, and for the first weeks all was well. Gradually, however, van Gogh began to behave in ways that Gauguin could not accept or change. The exact reason for van Gogh's peculiar behavior has been retrospectively diagnosed with a dozen maladies, but Gayford makes the case (already made by others) that van Gogh had bipolar disorder (also known as manic-depression). In the particular case of the Yellow House there were other strains. "The claustrophobic pattern of life," writes Gayford, "would have put a strain on the most phlegmatic pair of friends."

Toward the end of the collaboration, van Gogh was strained by the chromatic complexities of his portrait _La Berceuse_. He was drinking, and alcohol always made him more erratic, and he was worried about Gauguin's departure; Gauguin had written to Theo, "Vincent and I are absolutely unable to live side by side without trouble caused by incompatibility of temperament and he like I needs tranquility for his work. He is a man of remarkable intelligence whom I esteem greatly, and I leave with regret, but it is necessary." Van Gogh had taken to wandering at night and winding up near Gauguin's bed, disconcerting his companion. At one point, after consuming an absinthe, van Gogh hurled the glass at Gauguin. On 23 December, van Gogh rushed menacingly in the dark upon Gauguin, and (if the report of the latter is to be believed) did so with a straight razor. Gauguin escaped to a hotel, van Gogh returned home, took the razor, and sliced off his ear. Gayford analyzes possible sources for the self-mutilation, from the Gethsemane story to a newspaper report about Jack the Ripper cutting off the ears of one of his victims. The police were called to the Yellow House to pack van Gogh off the to hospital, where in his delirium he called repeatedly for Gauguin. Gauguin, however, claimed that a visit would make things worse, and left for Paris; they never saw each other again. Gauguin indeed was off to the tropics, and van Gogh was off for a year and a half of hospitalizations and remissions and astonishing productivity, ending in his suicide. Gayford's account measures each day and week in the collaboration with fitting detail, and always concentrates on the paintings that the two men produced during the time. It is the paintings, of course, that matter, not the incivility, neuroses, or madness of the painters. Van Gogh himself declared, "Old Gauguin and I understand each other basically, and if we are a bit mad, what of it?"

Vincent and Paul
A greatly enjoyable book. While focussed on just nine weeks in Arles, the narriative darts back and forth over the past lives of Van Gogh and Gauguin in the attempt to explain their specific actions that took place in and around the famous Yellow House.

Martin Gayford does not claim to have written an academic history, but one attempting to shed clarifying light on the actual motivations, thoughts and techniques that resulted in some of the Western world's greatest art. I think the author succeeded in his objective.