The Tragic Life of Vincent Van Gogh

6:00Chuck Bryant:Yeah. And since he was a pioneer, same for me too, by the way. I really came to like him even more. I think we both came from the same exact spot and ended up in about the same exact spot, too.

6:10Josh Clark:Look at us.

6:12Chuck Bryant:One thing I saw that kind of explained him to me, at least, was that he wanted to share the things he saw, the beauty he saw everywhere with the world. Because it was so beautiful. He wanted to provide that to the world. Not in any kind of egotistical way or anything like that, but just like, this is so pretty. I'm going to try my best to express how this makes me feel and show the world. And then very sadly, the world was like, that's not very good. We don't want that. Thanks for sharing, but keep it to yourself.

6:44Josh Clark:Yeah, that's tough. I mean, in fact, in one letter to his brother, Theo, he said his only anxiety was, how can I be of use in the world? And what he came to was to be an artist. and that he really thought that had, and he was right, had a lot of value and that's how he would serve in a way.

7:01Chuck Bryant:Right, right.

7:02Josh Clark:Kind of cool.

7:03Chuck Bryant:But before he became an artist, he pinged around here or there. He was a little aimless for a little while. And he was born in 1853 in the Netherlands or Der Netherlands.

7:17Josh Clark:Say Holland.

7:18Chuck Bryant:Sure. His father was Theodorus, or I guess it'd be Theodorus van Gogh. That's the correct way to say it. And I went back and I didn't listen to it, but I read the transcript from our episode 7085 Mysteries of the Art World where we talked about Van Gogh a lot. And you correctly said his name, I think, here or there. I probably was.

7:41Josh Clark:Yeah, I think I was probably making a joke from a Woody Allen movie.

7:45Chuck Bryant:As a matter of fact, you were. That's exactly. You mentioned that. Yeah. Yeah.

7:50Josh Clark:That was a funny part, Van Gogh.

7:51Chuck Bryant:But the transcription, the AI transcribing it kept saying Van Gogh. So I could tell that you were saying Van Gogh.

7:59Josh Clark:Oh, I thought you were going to say the AI transcription canceled what I said about Woody Allen. No. No.

8:06Chuck Bryant:That'd be useful. It's coming. Don't worry.

8:11Josh Clark:So, yeah, born in 1853, like you said, he had a bunch of siblings. He had five younger siblings. Theo, the most notable, because as you'll see, they had a very tight relationship and working relationship, which is why Robert Altman made the movie Vincent and Theo. Theo was younger by four years. Vincent was, you know, apparently a pretty moody, tough kid. And as we'll see, he certainly suffered from mental illness throughout his life. But his parents didn't know what to do with him. So they sent him to boarding school for about four years from 12 to 16, at which point he was like, you know what, I'm going to get involved in the art world in the way of being sort of like an apprentice to a dealer.

8:53Josh Clark:And he learned about the sales side.

8:55Chuck Bryant:Yeah, I get the impression he kind of fell into the art world because it was almost a family business, selling art was.

9:02Josh Clark:The impression?

9:04Chuck Bryant:Yeah. Put that in your pipe and smoke it later, right?

9:08Josh Clark:Yeah, I think you're probably right.

9:10Chuck Bryant:So he worked there for, I think, seven years, yeah, until about age 23. and this was it was during this period that he fell into what um i i think is viewed as his first true um episode of depression his bout of real depression and it followed on the heels of a uh i didn't see exactly what it was livia helps us with this she just describes it as a romantic disappointment but um that seems to be a trend throughout his life where he did not he was not lucky in love. I think the Little River Band would have called them the lonesome loser in that respect. And that would trigger some of his depressive episodes.

9:52Chuck Bryant:But as a result, his uncle or whoever ran his uncle's art dealership was like, sorry, you're fired.

10:00Josh Clark:Yeah. So he lost that job. But he did learn about the world of art and sort of the business of art, even though he didn't, like I say, kind of kowtow to the business side of things. He got interested in religion for a little while after that job and was a, I guess, an unordained or unlicensed preacher for about four years. He never got a theology degree or anything, but he did this work, sort of missionary work in Belgium, in sort of the poorest parts of Belgium and coal country at the time. And he wanted to, you know, very admirably didn't want to put on airs. And he lived as the people around him lived and was very open and shared what he had with his parishioners.

10:42Josh Clark:But the church wasn't wild about that idea. I think they thought it was sort of beneath the parish. So he got fired from that job as a preacher.

10:50Chuck Bryant:Yeah, and I have the impression that he was taking steps to maybe please his father and just trying to throw himself into religion because he wanted something. He wanted some sort of connection to something bigger than him, and I guess that was just the easiest thing to try. But also, his father, remember, he was a Dutch minister, so I could see him doing that. And then he kind of failed at that, so that probably didn't sit all that well.

11:16Josh Clark:I mean, isn't that kind of the story of a lot of people? Like, boys trying to please daddy who didn't approve of them?

11:23Chuck Bryant:Yeah. That's how I became a podcaster. My dad told me when I was like seven, he's like, I will never respect you unless you grow up to be a podcaster. And I was like, I can do that. He said, a good one. And I went, good. Yeah, right.

11:36Josh Clark:I remember my dad at one point suggested I become a mail carrier when I was sort of aimless. Just like Henry Chinaskin. Government job, good benefits. You could do worse. He was absolutely right. There's nothing wrong with that job. No, of course not. I just wasn't so interested in that.

11:52Chuck Bryant:So, yeah, so he failed to please his father, if that's what he was doing, but he kind of... We all did. Exactly, right. Well put. But he was struck by his time in Belgian coal country, and he hopped out of there for a little while, but he would kind of carry with him, as we'll see once he became an artist, you know, this appreciation, or at least kind of this need to shine a spotlight on the toil and the suffering of his fellow humans because he cared about them and he thought other people should care about them. too.

12:23Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. I mean, he definitely carried around socialist ideas. He started to actually study painting because, like I said, he had written that letter to Theo saying that he wanted to become an artist to try and serve the world and bring the beautiful art. So he thought, you know, maybe I should study this stuff. Off and on, he lived with his parents, but that never worked out very well, as that happens sometimes in real life. He found them fairly suffocating. And so he would sort of move around in between the Netherlands and Belgium for a period of years. That's not to say his family as a whole didn't support him because Theo, as we'll see, was always very supportive.

13:03Josh Clark:He was working in the art world. He worked for a big dealer and he was very sort of hip to the art scene, Theo was, and what was moving. And he would end up representing not only his brother, who was not popular, but other artists who were not popular in critical circles like Monet and Gauguin and old Latrec, Henri Toulouse-Latrec.

13:26Chuck Bryant:Yeah. Like his brother had that foresight that was like, these new impressionist guys, I like what they're doing. Yeah. I mean, he knew it was up. But he also very importantly saw like, my brother actually has something here. This is a good decision that he became an artist. It was not at all patronizing, even though Theo was his patron, which is kind of confusing. He genuinely believed in his brother's ability. And he very happily was like, I'm going to give you a monthly allowance that I saw was about equal to a minimum wage, what somebody would earn minimum wage. And it kept him, it kept Vincent in the art supplies.

14:04Chuck Bryant:I think he spent 80 percent of it on art supplies and the other 20 percent on just living. But he was able to live like that and just produce art. And that's what Theo wanted.

14:15Josh Clark:yeah and Vincent said don't patronize me and he said well that's tricky because technically I am exactly uh and that was about 20 percent of Theo's income so it was not you know chicken scratch he wasn't making a ton of money himself um his cousin was also very supportive of him in the way of teaching him his name was Anton Mauve and he literally quite literally taught him like how to paint with oil, how to paint with watercolors. And he had that, I guess it was that same uncle who he worked for, would commission works and pay him occasionally to like, you know, paint stuff for him.

14:51Chuck Bryant:Yeah. It's like in art circles, Van Gogh is like very frequently cited as like only having sold one painting during his lifetime. That's not correct. Not exactly. But if you, you know, if you want to get technical, he sold several paintings, but they were like family and friends and stuff like that. He did sell one painting to one person he wasn't an acquaintance of. That's true.

15:15Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. We're going to be myth-busting a little bit along the way because Van Gogh seems like more so than other artists had a lot of kind of falsehoods bandied about over the years. Is that fair to say?

15:26Chuck Bryant:I get to wear the beret this time. Okay.

15:30Josh Clark:So, like you said, he never had a whole lot of luck with the ladies, had a sort of a series of disappointments there. But eventually he would have about a year and a half relationship with a woman named Sien Hornick. This was in 1882. She was pregnant at the time and also had a five-year-old daughter and was a former sex worker, which his family didn't like any of this. And his father tried to get him, I guess, committed to an asylum. him. But, you know, Van Gogh was having none of it. He was in love.

16:04Chuck Bryant:No, but it would get easier and easier to have him committed as time went on. I guess this is just the first attempt and it didn't take. So, like I said, he was kind of taken with the idea of peasants, people toiling, people growing their own food or making their own living from the land, which he was infatuated with the land and nature in general. He's almost a transcendentalist, I guess, without quite knowing it. And when he moved back with his parents and then was bouncing back and forth between Belgium and the Netherlands for a little while, he was mostly doing studies and paintings of peasants.

16:43Chuck Bryant:And one of his most famous paintings came out at this time, one of his first masterpieces called The Potato Eaters, was a study of, I think, five peasants sitting around a table, eating potatoes, drinking coffee. And it's like in hues of browns, essentially, he said in a letter to Theo that he wanted it to basically be the color of a potato. Unpeeled, of course, is how we put it. And he nailed it. It's also, it's bleak and grim in a way, but at the same time, the people almost appear noble, but they're blocky and cartoonish almost. Yeah. As far as their forms go. And that was all intentional, but everybody was like, this is terrible.

17:29Josh Clark:Yeah, people didn't love it. He was sending these paintings to Theo to like, hey man, sell these and hopefully that can kind of help pay you back. But he couldn't sell any of them at the time. And he took them to the art market in Paris there, but no one was into that, you know, his sort of, I don't want to say dour, but I guess it was fairly gloomy, just his color palette at least. This would all change, though. In 1885, his father died, and he painted, you know, very much in tribute to his father, something called Still Life with Bible, which shows sort of the contrast between himself and his father and their ideals, because obviously the open Bible on the table was representing his father, but there was also another novel, La Joie de Vivre, And it was a socialist book by a socialist writer named Emil, I guess, Zola.

18:19Josh Clark:And it was like, you know, here's a contrast between my father and I. I paint this in tribute, but I got to get out of here now. Like he needed a change in his life, I think, because of his father's passing. He wanted to move.

18:33Chuck Bryant:Yeah, and he definitely did. He moved to Paris and he moved. I don't know if he moved in with Theo, but that would be my great guess. either way Theo was living and working there and he moved to be close to Theo and Theo introduced him to those artists he was repping in his circle like he said Monet and Pizarro and Toulouse-Lautrec like they were like Van Gogh was hanging out with all of these guys and like learning from them but at the same time he was also impressing them too and when he moved to Paris something changed and he dropped those really gloomy colors in favor for like a an increasingly bright colorful palette um that that like paris somehow triggered that in him yeah you know you can never

19:21Josh Clark:um or it's easy i guess rather than to go back after someone has passed and sort of judge their work compared to where they were in their life and think like you can kind of figure out things but But I guess my armchair psychology degree would point me in the direction of like almost being freed up a little bit by his father's passing as well. I know it upset him, but I think it also freed him up. So maybe that and the move to Paris, even though we'll see he wasn't very much a city guy. I don't think it was a it was a coincidence that all of a sudden things kind of brightened in his life a little bit.

19:56Josh Clark:Or it could have just been the ups and downs of his is fragile, you know, mental state.

20:02Chuck Bryant:Yeah, it could be either, but I think you dug up an equally compelling idea. Where did you get your armchair psychology degree? Just right here on my armchair. Oh, okay. Well, you're a credit to your armchair. Yeah, the right arm. Is it a lazy boy? Is it Ethan Allen? Oh, you know it's a lazy boy, buddy. Okay, gotcha. So, yeah, one of the first paintings that people are like, look, he came out of this gloom and doom stuff and now he likes color, The Hill of Montmartre with Stone Quarry. Love it. Uh is not part of the title. That was just me. But that was painted in 1886. And here's the thing that you should know about Van Gogh.

20:45Chuck Bryant:He started painting at age 27. He died at 37. In between that time, he painted almost 900 paintings, many, many, many of them masterpieces. So in a 10-year period, everything you know about Van Gogh happened. And really, you can kind of narrow it down to essentially the last three years of his life that were the most productive where he really came into his own.

21:13Josh Clark:Yeah, that website you sent kind of broke down his productivity by location. And his five years in the Netherlands, he painted about four paintings a month, so 245. A couple of years in Paris, painted 227, so 10 paintings per month. His 14 months, as we'll see in, what would that be? Arles? Is that how you pronounce that? Arles. Arles? Okay.

21:35Chuck Bryant:It just sounds like you're choking on a hard-boiled egg.

21:40Josh Clark:About 14 paintings a month, over 14 months, and then Saint-Rémy, is that right?

21:45Chuck Bryant:Mm-hmm.

21:46Josh Clark:18 per month, and then finally, man, he was up to a painting per day by the time he ended up in that last place in France.

21:53Chuck Bryant:Yeah, like just a stunning number of painting and complete oil paintings. Not like he half started one or something like that. These were completed paintings. Like that usually takes a day and a half, not a day.

22:07Josh Clark:Yeah, I can't paint anything. I can paint a wall.

22:11Chuck Bryant:Yeah, I could probably paint a wall in a day.

22:14Josh Clark:Yeah, you don't have artistic talent like that either, do you?

22:17Chuck Bryant:No, and it's always bothered me. I wanted to draw for so long and I just can't do it.

22:23Josh Clark:Yeah, I can't. But we can both write, so.

22:25Chuck Bryant:Sure, yeah. And we could both sing. Right. We just need an extra thousand words for each picture. We can't both sing. Wait a minute. No, hold on. Oh, slip it in a compliment. I can't sing. I'm not taking that one.

22:39Josh Clark:All right. Well, we'll get you some singing lessons and we'll be back right after this.

22:42Chuck Bryant:Okay.

22:53Chuck Bryant:You know, it's hard to believe that the first phone call ever happened over 150 years ago. Just think about that, Chuck.

23:00Josh Clark:Yeah, it was a long time ago. And, you know, I'm Gen X, so I grew up talking on the phone with my friends in high school and stuff. And it was a really fond memory.

23:06Chuck Bryant:And, you know, over all these years and all these phone calls, AT &T has been there, connecting people in meaningful ways. And this is more than a story of technological innovation. It's a story of human connection.

23:18Josh Clark:That's right. Over that 150 years, there's been a lot of connection with people, whether it was me in high school or family connecting with one another long distance or those long distance relationships. And AT &T has been there for it all. Connecting changes everything. AT &T.

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25:18Chuck Bryant:So despite moving to Paris, Chuck, we're back, by the way. That's right. He was still very much drawn to rural areas. That's where he found his most inspiration. He liked the light and the color out there. Although he did paint a lot of city stuff, like a cafe terrace at night. That's one of my favorites. There were plenty of city paintings. But far and away, he did like landscapes, some seascapes, that kind of stuff. Yeah. And there was no different when he was in Paris. So he really started to kind of pick up painting the land around that time, too. And then he was also inspired by Japanese art during this time.

25:58Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. Those woodblock prints, which I didn't even know what woodblock was until probably 10 years ago. And I just love this stuff. It's really pretty incredible, especially the process. But he was inspired not to do woodblock, but to kind of recreate that just using, you know, paint. Very, you know, contrasting colors and bold outlines. And he started, and I don't know how common this is. And, you know, I know people are inspired, but he kind of straight up copied some other people at times in his career. And I don't think, like, suffered in posthumously for that, unless I'm wrong.

26:35Chuck Bryant:No. No.

26:37Josh Clark:Okay, that was the case here. He recreated a Japanese woodblock sudden shower over Shin Ohashi Bridge and Atake in 1887, but again, using brushstrokes.

26:48Chuck Bryant:Right, yeah. And I mean, both of them are pretty impressive. But yeah, the idea that the original by Utagawa Hiroshige is like carved out of wood, inked and then stamped is just how, you know?

27:02Josh Clark:Yeah, it's incredible.

27:03Chuck Bryant:So also in Paris, we talked about how he suffered his first real depressive episode in his early 20s. Paris was the point where his full-blown recurring mental illness really started to take hold. It seems like the more he pushed himself, the more exhausted he got, the more his mental illness was triggered. And he could push himself. That guy, I mean, like you said, he was painting a day. um, day after day after day for a while. So he was very capable of working until he was exhausted. So he really started doing that around this time, 1887, 88, that kind of thing. Um, and I guess he lived in, uh, Paris for two years and then moved to Arles, um, which I know is not exactly how you say it, but it's in Provence.

27:57Chuck Bryant:And I mean, dude, if you want to be like inspired by nature, just moved to Provence. Never been there. I haven't either, but just from pictures I've seen on the TV, I'm telling you, it's inspiring.

28:10Josh Clark:Yeah, he wanted a more chill life, for sure. So in 1888, that's when he split. He was painting a little more intensely at this point, and the colors got even more bold, and his brushwork, I think that's one of the things he got inspired by from the impressionist was really kind of showing the brushwork and all of a sudden you're getting those farm fields and the wheat a lot of wheat orchard stuff like that and then eventually he would paint a lot of the yellow house is what he called it where he lived he um he lived there and he would end up renting out rooms as we'll see to different painters um and that's where the sunflowers started too very famous for his sunflower paintings yeah there's one that i saw was um

28:58Chuck Bryant:called the still life version of the Mona Lisa. That's how good it is. Another thing I didn't realize, I've seen much of his work, but from researching this, I kept zooming into paintings that we were talking about. And he was really good. Like when you zoom in and look at the brushwork and see what he's doing with it, it's a whole different painting. I mean, it's impressionism for you, but it looks so much more childish. and I know his work was described like that during his lifetime from like zoomed out like normally how you would look at a painting but when you go into it it's like such genius that it almost seems like it would be difficult to make it look childish it's that good you know what I mean

29:43Josh Clark:yeah I when I go to museums I you know I make sure I'm not obnoxious about it and like block people and stuff but when I get a chance I will I will get in there as close as you know allowable to really kind of look at what's going on on a close level and not for any kind of obviously study for myself because I don't paint, but there's something about it that makes it a little more real. Like you can actually see like what somebody was doing rather than, you know, just looking at the hole from afar.

30:12Chuck Bryant:Yeah, it definitely connects you more to the painter for sure. Because it sinks in. Like somebody was standing in front of this canvas like 150 years ago, putting their brush to it. Like that happened at one point, you know? Yeah, for sure. I love that stuff. Do you get really close and put your finger right over and go, I'm not touching it? I'm not touching it to the security guard?

30:32Josh Clark:Yeah, well, sometimes if they're not looking, I like to chip a little piece of the paint off and just take it as a souvenir.

30:39Chuck Bryant:You like stick it inside your cheek to smuggle it out? Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, sunflowers, that was the one that I first really looked at and was like, oh my God, this is way better than I thought it was. Yeah. Yeah. He started, he's also obviously very well known for Starry Nights. And his first one was Starry Night over the Rhone River in 1888. And his Starry Nights would be kind of like a gift and a curse. Like they became his most beloved works, essentially. but he kind of beat himself up about him because he's like this isn't quite right but I almost get the impression that to him they were right but he just he was kind of adjusting his interpretation of them based on the feedback he was getting from everybody else like he was subsuming his feelings about it to everybody else's dislike of it like yeah you're right it's not very good kind of thing it seemed to be specific to the starry night

31:37Josh Clark:Yeah. And just how tough was that as someone who obviously was extremely talented and producing what would be some of the most beloved works of art after his death to constantly be getting that feedback from art critics. And although he wasn't even on the radar of really art critics, but people who he would show to. And then his own brother, who was such a supporter, but had to constantly break the news of like, nobody wants to buy this stuff.

32:02Chuck Bryant:Right. And Vincent was like, but do you have to tell me like verbatim how much they said they hated it every time? Can you just tell me you didn't sell any this week?

32:11Josh Clark:This guy said it looked like snot on canvas. I don't know what to tell you.

32:15Chuck Bryant:Right. Yeah. And also, again, if you take into account, Chuck, that he's not just like trying to do a still life photo realistically and not quite getting it. So it's like your expertise isn't that good. He's like putting himself on the canvas and people are rejecting it. So they're rejecting him as a human being as far as he's concerned.

32:37Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. So he's in the yellow house. I said he would rent it out to other artists. One of those, thanks to Theo, ended up being Gauguin because Theo was like, hey, listen, can I pay your expenses and you go move in with my brother? Because I really think it will. I think the quote was it'll make a big change in your life. And he, you know, he's hoping that one would inspire the other because obviously he was repping them both. But he wanted good things for Vincent. And that that sort of worked and it didn't like they were both very productive. Uh, they, they painted each other's portraits very famously.

33:13Josh Clark:Um, and, but they also fought a lot. Uh, it was just a very volatile relationship, um, to the point where on Christmas Eve, 1888, um, Gauguin was already planning on leaving. This wasn't the impetus for him to leave, but, uh, Van Gogh threw a glass of absinthe in his face, which I imagine, I mean, no liquor in your face is great. I imagine absinthe is probably one of the worst ones to get thrown in your face.

33:36Chuck Bryant:Yeah, it stings your shirt. Yeah. And probably stings. I would imagine. I don't know. So Gauguin was like, I'm out of here. And he left. And Van Gogh was like, hey, you can't leave. I'm leaving. And he threatened him with a razor. Apparently, as far as the standard story goes, Gauguin kept going and Van Gogh returned to the house, used the razor to cut his ear off, wrapped it up and took it to a sex worker at a local brothel and was rejected by her. This gift was rejected by her. There's some problems with that, but it's probably the correct story. But there's another school of thought that Gauguin actually cut it off and Van Gogh covered for him because Gauguin was apparently a master sword fighter, carried a sword around with him.

34:31Chuck Bryant:And it's quite possible he took Vincent's ear off for being threatened with a razor.

34:36Josh Clark:right uh also another version of the story they believe they found that the woman was actually a maid at the brothel uh and not a sex worker but those are sort of nitpicky details i think um certainly cutting off your own ear wouldn't be nitpicky uh because that's a you know a true sign of a desperate sort of um sort of upset that you can only feel if you're suffering from severe mental illness. So yeah, self-mutilation is super sad. And I think there's also like some interpretations that it might have been influenced by the bullfighting ritual where you cut off a bull's ear to present it to a lady.

35:16Josh Clark:But I don't know. I'm not so sure about that.

35:19Chuck Bryant:Yeah, that seems like something he would have done on like a calm day then, if that was the purpose of it, to present it to a lady. That almost seems like it was just some impulsive thing that was tacked on to the end of something that he wasn't planning, you know?

35:35Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. But the cops found him the next day, I think. He was unconscious. They obviously went to the hospital and he was in a state of psychosis for a few days in the hospital. And a doctor there said, you think you have epilepsy? So and I don't think we mentioned, you know, he's suffering from from bouts of mental illness off and on throughout his life to this point, but also physical manifestations are happening that in retrospect, people are like, yeah, it wasn't just mental illness coming out physically. Like he, it seems like he probably really did have epilepsy. So they gave him potassium bromide, which he said, Vincent said, curled or at least stopped his intolerable hallucinations.

36:18Josh Clark:But he was still fainting a lot. And he apparently didn't have any memory of what happened with Gauguin or the ear. Yeah.

36:28Chuck Bryant:So he was in that hospital for a little while. This wasn't a psychiatric hospital. This was like a hospital hospital. I also saw Chuck in that documentary that as a gift to the doctor who cared for him, he presented him with a painting of one of the wards in the hospital. And the doctor was like, no, thanks. It's not very good.

36:47Josh Clark:So didn't even accept it?

36:48Chuck Bryant:Did not even accept it.

36:50Josh Clark:Oh, boy.

36:51Chuck Bryant:So he was released from the hospital. He pretended he was scratching his temple, but it was with his middle finger as he was saying bye to the doctor.

37:00Josh Clark:That old move.

37:01Chuck Bryant:Yeah. And he started painting again, but the hospital visit helped his epilepsy. It did not help the bouts of mental illness that he just kept suffering over and over and over again. And in between, he would just work at like a breakneck pace and then exhaust himself, have another episode of mental illness and go to the hospital, get out, work until he exhausted himself again and again. And so finally, the hospital is like, look, man, you're in the wrong place now. You need a different kind of care than we could offer. And so he checked himself into a sanitarium at St. Remy, and he was there for a year.

37:44Chuck Bryant:being treated. And it actually helped him quite a bit being there.

37:49Josh Clark:I think that's a good place for a break because something very interesting happened while he was there. Is that a good time?

37:55Chuck Bryant:I think so.

37:55Josh Clark:All right. We'll be right back, everybody.

38:06Chuck Bryant:You know, it's hard to believe that the first phone call ever happened over 150 years ago. Just think about that, Chuck.

38:13Josh Clark:Yeah, it was a long time ago. And, you know, I'm Gen X, so I grew up talking on the phone with my friends in high school and stuff. And it was a really fond memory.

38:20Chuck Bryant:And, you know, over all these years and all these phone calls, AT &T has been there, connecting people in meaningful ways. And this is more than a story of technological innovation. It's a story of human connection.

38:32Josh Clark:That's right. Over that 150 years, there's been a lot of connection with people, whether it was me in high school or family connecting with one another long distance or those long distance relationships. and AT &T has been there for it all. Connecting changes everything. AT &T.

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40:31Josh Clark:All right, everyone, we're back. And I said something very interesting happened while he was in the sanitarium. And one thing I mentioned earlier was he painted about 18 paintings per month. He produced 143 paintings while he was staying in this sanitarium. And one of which was not a Starry Night, but the Starry Night or just Starry Night.

40:54Chuck Bryant:Sure. Pretty impressive, huh?

40:56Josh Clark:Yeah.

40:58Chuck Bryant:He said that he wrote in a letter, I guess, that to his sister, Wilhelmina, about him wanting to make a Starry Night. And then in like the next breath, he recommends she read Walt Whitman's poetry. and people went and read Song to Myself and said, there's like two stanzas in here that basically describe what Starry Night looks like. We think that Walt Whitman essentially inspired this painting, and that seems to be the consensus.

41:27Josh Clark:Yeah, and if you've never seen Starry Night, you should. All you have to do is go to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and walk around until you see crowds of people.

41:37Chuck Bryant:Yeah, they said it's their most visited painting in their whole collection.

41:41Josh Clark:Yeah, it's that one's you can't get close anyway, but it's tough to even to get a great view, period. It's just there's a lot of folks around that.

41:49Chuck Bryant:Wow. Wow. Yeah, I would love to see that one. I don't believe I ever have. Have you not seen that one? I don't believe so. I've been to MoMA, but that seems like weird that I wouldn't have seen it. But then again, why didn't I form a memory of seeing it?

42:04Josh Clark:Well, you also don't like crowds of people. So maybe you're like, I don't know what's going on over there, but no thanks.

42:08Chuck Bryant:That is possible. But yeah, so I have seen it on the internet, at the very least, if not in person. And it's got swirls in it that represent the wind. Like the stars are huge and out of proportion and glowing. The moon is all odd. And it's like a landscape at night. But he just captured all of it so perfectly. And it's all a very, the background is very dark. It's dark blues and stuff like that. But it's a very soothing, like happy painting. And this was what I was talking about earlier, that even Theo was like, I don't like this, man. And I guess Vincent wrote that he was once again allowing myself to do stars too big.

42:52Josh Clark:Yeah, he said the search for style takes away the real sentiment of things, which sounds a little bit like a, not form over fashion, fashion over form or something. I don't know, like, like just trying to make something super stylistic, but it doesn't really mean anything, which I'm sure cut pretty deeply. So while this is going on, he, you know, is continuing to kind of slip up and down on his as far as his mental illness is concerned. At some point, he started to like eat paint. Some people thought it might have been a suicidal thing, but it might have also been pica as part of his mental illness, which is interesting.

43:32Chuck Bryant:There's a legend that it was yellow paint and that he wanted to be happy inside, which doesn't, I don't think, hold up.

43:37Josh Clark:Yeah, okay. Well, partially because of that, he stayed away from paint altogether for a little while because he also had many, many drawings throughout his career, and this is his drawing period.

43:50Chuck Bryant:Yeah, I like way more drawings than paintings, right?

43:53Josh Clark:Oh, I think so, yeah.

43:54Chuck Bryant:So Theo and he got married, I think, in 1889, maybe.

44:02Josh Clark:That sounds right.

44:03Chuck Bryant:To a woman named Joe Bonger, or Bonger, who would eventually play a really pivotal role in Vincent Van Gogh's posthumous life. And they honored him by naming their son, their only child, Vincent, after the kid's uncle. And Van Gogh was very, very touched by this. And he painted one of, I think, one of the most beautiful paintings he ever did, Almond Blossom.

44:28Josh Clark:I agree, buddy.

44:29Chuck Bryant:It's great. Gorgeous. Yeah, just go look it up. It's very much in like the Japanese style.

44:34Josh Clark:For sure.

44:35Chuck Bryant:Yeah, and he painted it for the baby. And like, despite, you know, years and decades of Van Gogh paintings being sold by the family, that one did not go up for sale. And it's even in the Van Gogh Museum still today.

44:48Josh Clark:Yeah, the baby didn't want it either, though.

44:51Chuck Bryant:He said, this is not very good. Give me my baba. You know what I'm going to do?

44:54Josh Clark:Spit up. Spit up on it.

44:56Chuck Bryant:Right. Gross.

44:57Josh Clark:I always hated that term.

44:59Chuck Bryant:It's a pretty bad term, yeah.

45:01Josh Clark:So Theo officially said, you know what? I'm going to start really submitting your paintings. Like, I think you are good and nobody knows it. So he started really submitting at a more sort of serious rapid pace in 1888, specifically at the annual Salon des Independents. Hmm. uh, in 1890, and this is just a few months before Van Gogh would die. Um, he was not, still not getting any, uh, almost any attention, but finally in January that year, he started to get a little bit of not critical like praise, but just people like critics looking at his stuff and writing about his stuff. Uh, the first one I think was an art critic named, uh, Albert Aurier, who published, I think, the very first Van Gogh review.

45:50Josh Clark:And he said they initially appear strange, intense, and feverish, but reflected the continual search for the most essential sign of each thing. So he was kind of getting it, I think.

46:01Chuck Bryant:Yeah, he was digging them. Yes, and then in 18—so I think 1888, 1889, and 1890, his work, thanks to Theo, appeared in the Salon in Paris. He was also featured in a Belgian salon called Les Vintes the 20. And this is where he sold his first, or his one and only painting to somebody he didn't really know, right?

46:28Josh Clark:Yeah, it was a painter, another painter named Anna Bach. And she bought the Red Vineyard. And that, I think, maybe, well, I don't know if that was the impetus, but that's when things started to pick up a little bit. I think later that spring, the salon showed 10 of his paintings, which was a big deal. May of that year, May of 1890, and this was after a year being in the sanitarium, he finally was discharged. And that's where he moved to a pretty quiet place, not too far from Paris, where he had a good doctor on hand who was able to kind of keep up with him. And that doctor was like, hey, man, you know what you need to do is paint.

47:08Josh Clark:like you seem to be doing best when you're really concentrating on the painting so you should do

47:13Chuck Bryant:that and he did yeah he threw himself into it again like you were saying that last that last few months or the last year he was painting about a painting a day and um i've seen it like people say almost as if he knew like his time was running out and he wanted to get as much out as he could he focused a lot on wheat fields which he said earlier was one of his favorite um subjects yeah Apparently that represented like the sowing and the reaping of it was like renewal and death and life and birth and all that to him. And he was, I guess, pretty close to Paris in Auvers. And he went and traveled once to visit Theo.

47:52Chuck Bryant:And he found that Theo was talking about going out, striking out on his own, setting up his own art dealership. And Vincent was like, man, that is to himself. He thought, this is quite a risky gamble. You know, what's going to happen to my monthly stipend? Is that like in jeopardy? But also, that will automatically make me a burden to my brother. Like, even if he becomes successful, it's not going to be overnight. And in that time between him taking this big risk and becoming a success, I'm going to be an even bigger burden than I am. That was something he concluded.

48:26Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. And that was in July of 1890. And later that month, on July 27th, he shot himself in the chest and took his own life. We covered that in more detail in the, what was it? Mysteries of the Art World?

48:40Chuck Bryant:Yeah, seven, no wait, five Mysteries of the Art World from 2021. That's right.

48:45Josh Clark:Yeah. So you can you can go get that full story there. But yeah, it was I think he they he didn't die immediately. And Theo made it from Paris to to be there with him when he died a couple of days later.

48:58Chuck Bryant:Which is so sweet. I mean, they were so tight. They're actually buried next to one another in that town.

49:04Josh Clark:Yeah. Tight, but also fraught. You know, there was a lot of arguing and stuff, too. But that's brother stuff.

49:09Chuck Bryant:But that was mostly from Vincent's side, right?

49:12Josh Clark:Well, I mean, I just, you know, saw it could be a rough relationship. But again, as brothers and also business partners and one had a real tough time with mental illness. So none of it is unexpected.

49:26Chuck Bryant:So, again, it's very much bandied about that Van Gogh was unknown and unappreciated in his time. And generally that's true. But like when he was showing at the salons, other other painters like Monet would say to Theo, like, tell your brother that his was the best work at the salon. Like, he's great. He he had a claim with people who knew what they were talking about. But generally, he didn't. the reason why we know of him today and the reason why his genius is seen and valued is because of Joe Bonger, his sister-in-law, who very shortly, I think six months after Vincent died, Theo died, some say of a broken heart, some say of syphilis, some say of both.

50:11Chuck Bryant:And she inherited, like, all of, essentially all of Vincent van Gogh's paintings.

50:17Josh Clark:Yeah, I mean, this is kind of the... in a way, sort of the hero of the story here, because now with Theo gone and Vincent still having not achieved great fame, you're left with Joe to do something. And, you know, she was like, listen, I don't have a background in this. This was my husband's line. So she taught herself. She devoted herself to studying art. She devoted herself to studying the business of art. And she really worked tirelessly to, after his death, raise his profile. And I get the impression that it wasn't like, oh, I got all these paintings so I can get a lot of money. It was like to honor someone she thought was really talented.

51:02Chuck Bryant:Yes, absolutely. Yeah, she wanted to make sure that he was appreciated finally, even if it wasn't in his lifetime. She had a hard time going at first. Like, she still couldn't quite convince people. I guess she was just being like, look, see, it's good. It's good. And that wasn't taking. So she went through the letters between Theo and Vincent that Theo had kept and realized, like, he talks, Van Gogh talks a lot about, like, his style, his technique, his inspiration, his mental health struggles in these letters. and she was like, this is how you interpret Vincent Van Gogh's work. You understand his background, his biography, his struggles.

51:38Chuck Bryant:And that now is just so commonplace and ubiquitous. That's just part of learning about art. And this is where it came from. It came from Joe Bonger trying to get people to understand Vincent Van Gogh.

51:51Josh Clark:Yeah, which is, I never knew that. It's a super cool kind of cherry on this story that when you go and you read about the artists and that just adds so much more to it that came from her idea, which is pretty amazing. She got up initially a critic named Jan Veth, who did not love the paintings, but then after the letters, that's when Jan came around and was swayed and was like, he really, quote, seeks the raw root of things. And I think, you know, once they knew this story, they were like, oh my gosh, this is this tortured human that put everything into these paintings. And now I'm seeing them in a different light.

52:25Josh Clark:And that was it. I think since her death in 1925, you know, his paintings have sold to the tune of about one hundred and seventeen million dollars. The Van Gogh Museum there in Amsterdam, which I have been to, it's well worth a trip, opened in 1973, gets a couple of million visitors every year. And he's one of the most famous painters of all time now. Yeah.

52:50Chuck Bryant:And one of the reasons why I saw it is because he wore his heart on his sleeve. He did the same thing with his painting and people just connect with that. And I mean, just from listening to this, Chuck, I imagine a lot of people were like, yeah, he really was kind of a neat guy. Yeah, a tortured artist, too. And that's another place where this kind of came from. The idea of somebody suffering for their art and their art being great because of their struggles with mental illness. That also kind of came from the profile of Van Gogh being raised at the same time. And over time, people have been like, well, what did he suffer from specifically?

53:27Chuck Bryant:We don't really know, but there are some clues here or there that kind of point in a couple of directions.

53:36Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. I think everyone agrees, like I said earlier, that he was epileptic. But, you know, probably bipolar disorder is what a lot of people agree on, possibly schizophrenia. You know, he talked about hallucinations and stuff like that. He also drank a lot, which definitely did not help along the way. He did not in his previous family history, at least as far as anyone knows, have a long documented history of mental illness. But one of his sisters was diagnosed with schizophrenia and was in an asylum, I think, a few years after Vincent died. And he had a brother named Cornelius who died in South Africa while serving in the army.

54:20Josh Clark:And it is speculated that he may have taken his own life as well.

54:24Chuck Bryant:Right. You have a 10 percent chance of having schizophrenia if one of your siblings does. And for people in general population, it's just one percent. So that definitely increased the possibility. Before we finish, Chuck, I just want to briefly mention the anecdote that was in that one article I sent you about that cafe being foreclosed on with all of his paintings trapped inside.

54:47Josh Clark:Oh, yeah.

54:47Chuck Bryant:So he was showing, like, I think they said 100 paintings or something in this cafe. It was like an exhibit of Van Gogh, like early Van Gogh stuff when he first moved to Paris. And the cafe owner, like, wasn't making their payments. So the cafe got foreclosed on, locked up, and everything inside, including Van Gogh's paintings, which were not owned by the cafe, were auctioned off. and they were so disliked that they were bundled together in bunches of 10 so that people who bought them could go and scrape the paintings off and sell them at a higher price than they bought the 10 Van Goghs for as blank canvases.

55:24Wow.

55:25Chuck Bryant:And he still was just like, well, I guess I need to just get up and dust myself off. He was like the Joe Dirt of the 19th century French and Dutch art world.

55:36Josh Clark:I never saw that.

55:38Chuck Bryant:Same thing. He was essentially a Van Gogh.

55:40Josh Clark:Okay. All right.

55:42Chuck Bryant:Okay. Thanks for humoring me with that one because that's just too great.

55:45Josh Clark:I love it. Good story.

55:47Chuck Bryant:All right. Well, Chuck said that was a good story. So I think we should end this on a high note and go straight to listener mail.

55:54Josh Clark:This is about the 737 Max. Hey, guys. Love the show. Been listening for a few years. I'm an embedded control software engineer, not for Boeing, but in another industry where mistakes could kill people. For me, Boeing was always an aspirational company, so watching the news on MCAS was like meeting a disappointing drunk hero. At the time, my peers and I were following the news and doing our best to read between the lines. We were frankly disgusted to see that they actually deployed a single point of failure all the way to production. It was baffling to us because we knew our internal processes would have stopped a program dead with that much risk.

56:32Josh Clark:Surely Boeing held even higher standards. It was clear that a complete cultural and ethical breakdown occurred to allow the MCAS to exist without redundancy and censor voting or rationality checks. And voting is in quotes. Even worse, they allowed a helper system enough control authority to destabilize the vehicle. It's antithetical to the controls engineering title. Anyway, certainly didn't expect to reignite professional rage on my commute today, guys. But that was a 10 out of 10 episode. And that is from Travis, last name withheld.

57:07Chuck Bryant:Nice. Travis, somebody who knows what they're talking about gave us a 10 out of 10, Chuck.

57:11Josh Clark:Yeah, that always feels nice.

57:13Chuck Bryant:I assume there's a would recommend after that.

57:16Josh Clark:I hope so.

57:17Chuck Bryant:I'm going to assume that Travis works in the lawn dart industry.

57:22Josh Clark:There you go.

57:24Chuck Bryant:If you want to be like Travis and send us an awesome email because you're an expert in something we talked about, we love that kind of stuff. Even if you're like, you guys kind of got this wrong, that's all right. We want to hear from you. Send us an email to stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com.

57:42Josh Clark:Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

58:18Josh Clark:We'll be right back. step in this summer, you don't need WeatherTech unless you plan on doing summer. Visit WeatherTech.com today. Hey, everybody.

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