To escape hell
“No one has ever written or painted, sculpted, modelled, built or invented except to get out of hell.” Artaud wrote the sentence in Van Gogh, The Man Suicided by Society, his 1947 refusal to reduce the painter to a psychiatric label.
Artaud’s hell is the pressure of existence and of institutions that decide which vision is acceptable. Creation becomes an act of resistance and transformation.
Van Gogh beyond the myth
The Musée d’Orsay self-portrait shows a painter observing himself with extreme precision. Curving marks and colour contrasts are formal decisions, not a painted medical file.
To tell Van Gogh only through crisis makes the painter disappear. Artaud reverses the question: what did the artist see that his society could not, or would not, see?
Sources & links
Musée d’Orsay · immagine di pubblico dominio via Wikimedia Commons