ARNOLD

Wilfred Niels Arnold

At the time of his suicide, in 1890, the genius of Vincent van Gogh was acknowledged by only a small cadre of friends and followers. His jagged life was marked by early years of uncertainty, interludes of luckless love affairs, wrenching episodes of self-mutilation, crises of debilitating illness, and periods of painful striving for lofty goals. Today, his art is universally recognized. He is on everybody's list of outstanding artists and in every catalog of creative people. This scholarly yet very readable work addresses all of the features of van Gogh's life and underlying illness, the family history, the environment, and the artist's uniqueness. Dr. Arnold provides an accurate, balanced, and sometimes hard-hitting evaluation of all the hypotheses and suggestions from the past. He keeps people, places, and paintings in perspective. He explains the chemistry, medicine, and biology and offers new proposals that are always elegant, often provocative, and sometimes audaciously simple. A theme that distinguishes the present analyses is that van Gogh not only suffered from an identifiable disease but that his life-style directly influenced the expression and severity of symptoms, exacerbated his condition, and provoked medical crises. The consequences of such well-documented and seemingly disparate factors as overindulgence in alcohol (especially as the romantic but toxic absinthe), smoking too much, malnutrition, fasting (because the artist elected to buy paints and canvas, instead of his daily bread), environmental exposure, and infections, all come together here and support a unifying hypothesis. This book, beautifully complemented with many full color reproductions of paintings, is presented by a scientist who enjoys the art, evaluates the data, produces new models, and advances the field with thought-provoking ideas. The portrait of Vincent van Gogh is not as a mad artist, but rather as an exceptional man who suffered from an inherited metabolic disorder. He was wonderfully creative because of intelligence, talent, and hard work. He was a genius in spite of his illness - not because of it.

Chemicals, Crises and Creativity

Vincent Van Gogh:

Mathematische Methoden der klassischen Mechanik

As a five year old I encountered a picture of a young man in a rakish hat and a yellow coat, on the wall of a large classroom. There was something instantly intriguing about the image, but it was also puzzling because it represented neither politician nor prince, the usual fare for Australian school decorations. I was eventually told that this was a reproduction of a painting, the artist was Vincent van Gogh, and that the subject was some young Frenchman. On special days we assembled in that room and during the next several years I found myself gazing beyond visiting speakers at the fellow in the yellow jacket. It was almost another fifty years before I felt properly conversant with the portrait and realized that van Gogh's subject, Armand Roulin, was seventeen at the time ofthe original painting and had died at seventy-four during my schoolboy contemplations. In the interim my enjoyment of the works of the Impressionists and Post Impressionists had grown and I occasionally ran into the name of Dr. Gachet, Vincent's last attending physician, in books and catalog essays. The doctor was my entree to the overlapping charms of medical and art histories. In 1987 I had the good fortune to participate as a biochemist in the centenary celebration of the Pasteur Institut in Paris.

ARNOLD

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