"Love Van Gogh" reviews Van Gogh's artistic life by deciphering "Van Gogh's death" as a clue. A young man, Lulan, was entrusted by his father, a postman, to deliver a letter that Van Gogh wrote to his brother Rao during his lifetime. Unexpectedly, Rao was affected by Van Gogh's death and suffered a nervous breakdown, and died soon after. So this is an undeliverable letter. But Lulan was very curious about "Van Gogh's death" in the process of delivering the letter, and planned to approach the truth of the rumored "Van Gogh shot himself in the stomach in the wheat field and then walked back". As a result, the images of the three people who were most closely related to Van Gogh before his death—brother Rao, Doctor Gachet, and Miss Margaret, the daughter of Doctor Gachet, are presented one by one. Their story with Van Gogh seems to reveal the cause of Van Gogh's death.
In 1890, the 37-year-old Van Gogh was tired of the hustle and bustle of Paris. He came to the small town of Auvers in the northern suburbs and stayed here for the last 70 days of his life. It was a period of suffering from illness and poverty, and it was also the peak of Van Gogh's creation. He created more than 80 works here, among which there are many representative works such as "Wheat Field with Crows". After Van Gogh arrived in Auvers, he maintained correspondence with his brother Rao. Rao continued to support his life with a deep affection for him. As Van Gogh's attending doctor in Orwell and a "friend of the year" (Van Gogh once painted "Portrait of Doctor Gachet" for him), Dr. Gachet was one of the witnesses who confessed to suicide when Van Gogh was dying. Miss Margarita went to the tomb to deliver flowers every day after Van Gogh's death, and could see that they were supposed to be lovers - although she denies this to Lulan. Her image in the film is extracted from Van Gogh's painting Woman Playing the Piano.
As the search deepened, Lulan discovered that there was a group of gangsters in the town who were probably directly related to Van Gogh's death. One of the guys with a pistol, Rene, is even more suspicious - he had put a snake in Van Gogh's painting box and nearly stunned him. At the end of the film, a detail is added in the form of press materials: Rene disclosed to the media in his later years that Van Gogh stole his pistol. This fits into the well-known ending of "Van Gogh's suicide," as described in Owen Stone's best-selling book, Longing for Life: A Biography of Vincent van Gogh. After all, it sounds "artistic" enough for a destitute artist to die by suicide.
But that's not necessarily the case. In recent years, The Biography of Van Gogh, co-authored by Steven Neffi and Gregory White, offers an alternative interpretation of Van Gogh's death: Van Gogh's accidental death by Rene. In fact, this view is not new. Some people suspected that Van Gogh died of "suicide" back then. After all, the two points of shooting himself in the abdomen and then walking back did deviate from the original intention of "suicide"; and Van Gogh, who likes to write letters, No suicide note was left. Only, if so, Van Gogh's ending would be less "artistic" and an ordinary accident.
In any case, Van Gogh's death left the world with regret after all. Someone in the film said to Lu Lan, who was trying to understand the truth, "You always want to know how he died, but do you know how he lived?" The famous Van Gogh, how he lived and how his artistic nutrients came from, is probably more worthy of future generations' attention. (Here we should thank one person, Theo's wife, Johanna Bong, for arranging Van Gogh's paintings and letters after her husband's death, and running for Van Gogh's reputation throughout her life.)
The Beloved Van Gogh, painted on more than 60,000 hand-painted oil paintings, is undoubtedly a "suffocating visual feast", with a heavy sigh behind the beauty. Van Gogh, who combines talent, loneliness, poverty, and illness, seems to be born of art. This irreproducible resume is easy to give birth to the feeling of "art is lonely". The boatman who once carried Van Gogh told Lurain about Van Gogh—“What a lonely man he was, so that a crow who stole (his lunch) could light up his day.” (“What a lonely man” person is he that a thieving crow could make his day bright.”) This attitude towards life of “friendship with nature” may be the so-called “artist’s loneliness”.
Nowadays, when we see the starry sky, sunflowers, wheat fields, crows and other images that often appear in Van Gogh's paintings, we no longer feel that they are just starry sky, sunflowers, wheat fields, and crows. They already have some kind of imagery, and I'm afraid that's the great thing about art (and artists) - they (they) redefine the world.
(Originally published on WeChat public account "Daily Aesthetics")
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